VII

He was not in the waiting car before the guarded entrance to the

Hospital, as Katharine and Lady Wastwood gave the pass to the sentry,

and stepped forth upon the dusty metalled road.

The car proved a large, white-enamelled Clement-Talbot of some 22

h.p., luxuriously appointed and finished exquisitely as a gun. The

chauffeur was a mahogany-skinned, almond-eyed Egyptian, in a crimson

felt _tarbûsh_ and snow-white silver-braided native livery. The

attendant, a grave, middle-aged man, with long curling side-locks and

olive aquiline features,--who stood by the car door, imperturbably

waiting the arrival of the ladies, wore the plain black _kaftan_ and

high black felt cap distinctive of many middle-class Jews in the East.

The machine ran like oil along the seventeen miles of dusty metalled

roads lying between the green foliage and verdure of Montana and the

great fortified Egyptian seaport,--in its environs of palm-groves and

fig-gardens, tennis-lawns and golf-grounds; its streets (roaring with

motor-lorries; grid-ironed with tram-lines; rattling with

hack-_gharis_ and _arabâyis_ full of English, French or Italians,

their drivers kept from running people over by the red-fezzed

mahogany-hued Military Police)--traversed by swinging processions of

laden camels, strings of tiny overladen donkeys, Arab hawkers,

stately veiled women with clashing silver anklets, Anglo-Egyptian

ladies in last season's Paris fashions; soldiers of the Egyptian

Army, sherbet and sweetmeat and coffee-sellers; gangs of

blue-uniformed Turkish prisoners; working-parties of the

indefatigable little men of the Egyptian Labour Corps; portly native

stockbrokers or merchants in the red _tarbûsh_ and single-breasted

blue frock-coat; _saisis_, vendors of antiques made yesterday, Dagoes

and Bedwân chiefs; verminous and crazy beggars; impish native youths

and urchins pressing copies of the _Alexandrian Post_, and the

_Egyptian Mail_, _John Bull_, _La Bourse_, the _Messagéro_, the

_Sydney Bulletin_ and the _Palestine Gazette_, upon tall Australians

in slouched felt hats, New Zealanders in red-banded smashers, lean,

bearded Indian Lancers, little Ghurka Riflemen, and newly-arrived

Tommies with comparatively pink-and-white faces; respectfully lavish

of drinks and sticky native sweetmeats to veterans bronzed to the

colour of their own khaki by the suns and dust-winds of the Desert

and Palestine....

A huge, endless, living screen-picture, various and polyglot, backed

and reinforced by an infinite variety of smells.... Colours of all

imaginable hues; scents and reeks, stinks and fragrances. The hiss

and purr, the nasal whine of Oriental tongues, mingled with the

Western click and rattle, and the clang and ring of the dominating

North.... Pierced by the all-pervading yell, for backsheesh,

Backsheesh, BACKSHEESH!--the never-ceasing slogan of the dominated

East.

Beyond the crossing where the Road of the Rosetta Gate debouches into

the Rue Sherif Pasha,--whither Trixie's inward being yearned because

of the cream-puffs, pink-melon ices, and Persian tea to be had at

Groppi's Restaurant,--the big white car swirled into the Rue el

Farad, past the beautiful tree-adorned and well-kept grounds of the

Armenian Church and School.

The thoroughfare occupies the ancient site of the Street of the Four

Winds, south of where used to be the quadruple marble gate, the

Tetrapylon, turning off the ancient Street of the Moon. No asphalte

was here, but pavement of huge blocks of ancient flagstone, not all

cemented together, on which the traffic of the city, the

motor-lorries, hack-_gharis_, country-carts and trains of laden

small-hoofed donkeys, made an atrocious sound.... Tall palms,

overtopping the roofs of the houses set at intervals on either side

of the thoroughfare, spoke of garden-grounds behind them.... Here

and there, built into a courtyard-wall, some chipped and broken

column, or capital of Græco-Roman carving, some incised stele of

yellowish limestone-marble, black basalt or the red granite of

Assouan, incised with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the symbols

of the Sun, and Moon Mother, spoke to the remoteness of the city's

antiquity....

Midway of a courtyard-wall, forbiddingly high and thickly

whitewashed, before a high closed portico having a deep square

depression on the right-hand as though a sculptured slab or plaque

had been removed from beside the entrance, the Clement-Talbot

stopped. The heavy, green-painted door bore, in its central

compartment of white, red Hebrew lettering instead of an Arabic

inscription; the Roman numerals VII. were on a small brass plate

above the heavy metal ring surmounting the huge clumsy lock, a lock

straight out of _The Arabian Nights_....

The grave attendant got down and opened the car. Alighting,

Katharine and her companion passed in, over a square of ancient

mosaic, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a

chain attached to a scarlet collar, and displaying a formidable

mouthful of teeth.

The vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was of yellowish Numidian

marble, yet stained a faded red in places, and showing traces of

having been divided into panels by a slender incised ornament, partly

obliterated, but recognisable as a black caduceus wreathed with a

black vine.

And the vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was long rather than

wide, and ventilated by horizontal apertures below the roof, filled

in with metal lattice-work. Through a similar but larger opening

overhead poured the golden sunshine of the November noonday,--making

a thick black strip of shadow beneath the long wooden bench that ran

along the right-hand wall. The air of the place was cool and

sweet,--in spite of an array of native shoes,--of all grades and

descriptions from jaunty red morocco with pointed turned-up toes, and

heels with sharp rims of brass or steel for the killing of snakes and

scorpions,--to venerable footgear of soiled buff or yellow

leather,--and the clumsy hide sandals commonly worn by

peasants,--ranged along the left-hand wall. Even as she observed the

rows of shoes, Katharine's keen ears were greeted by a curious

deep-toned humming--as though innumerable, invisible bees, of

Brobdingnagian proportions--were gathering honey from conjectural

flowers in the near neighbourhood....

The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony

blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply

to the ladies; displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as

dazzling in whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.

Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They

heard the car snort and move away as the metal bolts scrooped in

their ancient grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards

the entrance, the imperturbable attendant in the black _kaftan_ waved

them forward to where another man, exactly like himself in feature,

colouring and costume, waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a

larger hall beyond. On its right-hand doorpost was affixed a

cylinder of metal _repoussée_, with an oval piece of glass

inset--something like a human eye. And the big invisible bees went

on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:

"_Bz'zz'z! .... Bzz'z! ... Bzz m' m'm! ..._"

Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis

feel as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in

which,--though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a

negro who had opened doors,--the rows of shoes along the wall, the

figure of Trixie at her side--the two dark, ultra-respectable men in

black _tarbûshes_ and _kaftans_ had had no place or part. Only John

Hazel had bulked big.... He was there,--beyond the grave Semitic

face of the second Jewish secretary--on the farther side of the

torrent of boiling amber sunshine pouring through a central opening

in the roof of the inner hall that succeeded the vestibule of the

mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet in length, paved with

squares of black and yellow marble, with an oblong pool in the midst

of it--upon whose still, crystal surface pink and crimson petals of

roses had been strewn in patterns,--and in the centre of which a

triple-jetted fountain played....

"_Bzz' zz m'm! ..._"

The humming of the unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway

in the wall upon Katharine's right hand.... A wall of black polished

marble, decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and

red and pale green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not

hide what lay beyond the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched,

whitewashed room, cooled by big wooden electric fans working under

the ceiling, and traversed by avenues of creamy-white Chinese

matting, running between rows of low native desks; before each of

which squatted--on naked or cotton-sock-covered heels, or sat

cross-legged upon a square native chintz cushion, a coffee-coloured,

almond-eyed young Copt, in a black or blue cotton nightgown, topped

with the _tarbûsh_ of black felt or a dingy-white or olive-brown

muslin turban; murmuring softly to himself as he made entries, from

right to left, in a huge limp-covered ledger, or deftly fingered the

balls of coloured clay strung on the wires of the abacus at his side.

"Oh! ... Wonderful! I'm so glad you brought me!"

Lady Wastwood's emphatic exclamation of pleasure in her surroundings

brought cessation in the humming,--caused a swivelling of capped or

turbaned heads all down the length of three avenues,--evoked a

simultaneous flash of black Oriental eyes, and white teeth in dusky

faces lifted or turned.... Then at the upper end of the long

counting-house, where three wide glassless windows looked on a sanded

palm-garden (and the leather-topped knee-hole tables, roll-top desks,

copying ink presses, mahogany revolving-chairs, telephone

installations, willow-paper baskets, pewter inkstands and Post Office

Directories suggested Cornhill and Cheapside rather than the

Orient)--one of the olive-faced Jewish head-clerks in _kaftans_ and

side-curls coughed,--and as though he had pulled a string controlling

all the observant faces,--every tooth was hidden and every eye

discreetly bent on the big limp ledgers again....

All the Coptic bees were humming sonorously in unison as Katharine

went forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to

receive her the master of the hive....

The light being behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but

he seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the

ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed

skull; and his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and

long-chinned,--with a humorous quirk at the corners of the

heavy-lipped mouth that redeemed its sensuousness--was lighted by

eyes of the intensest black, burning under heavy beetle-brows. His

khaki uniform, though of fine material and admirable cut, was that of

a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours over the heart, and

the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung,--intimated to Lady

Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already served with some

degree of distinction,--and had been wounded in the War.

As he advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence

save hers, Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering

head, and sweep his right arm out and down, with slow Oriental

stateliness, bringing back the supple hand to touch breast, lips and

brow. Whether or not he had raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to

his lips and kissed it, Lady Wastwood could not definitely determine.

She was left with the impression that he had done this thing.

And--as he rose up from the deep obeisance, there sounded in her ears

these words of salutation spoken in English by a deep voice, with the

timbre and volume of an Arab war-drum:

"_Hail! Lady of the noble house of Philoremus Fabius. Be welcome to

this dwelling, the cradle of your race. Mine to-day as my

forefathers' through bygone centuries, since your footstep crossed

the threshold, we are stewards, and you are Queen!_"