He might have been quoting from some classical play, it occurred to
Trixie,--perhaps he was an actor, this colossal khaki man.... Though
Katharine had certainly said that he had offices and warehouses in
the city. That was his counting-house, that populous hall, where
rows and rows of Coptic clerks did sums in huge ledgers. And
Katharine was presenting him as "Mr. John Hazel." And he was saying
to Lady Wastwood, the usual civil nothings, in the voice that had the
resonance of a Somali war-gong, the deep vibration of a Dervish
battle-drum--and the clipped accent of the ordinary middle-class
Londoner.
"Frightfully glad to meet you.... Miss Forbis said she'd bring
you.... Won't you come inside? This is my room!"
"What a room!"
The exclamation came from Lady Wastwood, but the room's owner looked
at Katharine. The stamp of her approval was evidently required.
"_You_ like it? ..."
Katharine answered, with a long-drawn breath, in utter sincerity:
"--Much more than like it! It is--perfectly wonderful!"
It had probably once served as the triclinium of this ancient Roman
house. Of spacious width, it might have been some sixty feet in
length, and twenty feet from the mosaic floor to the frescoed
ceiling, representing a sky of intense blue, with stars of rusty
gold. Framed, the blue starry sky, in a square of trellised roses,
their hues faded and dimmed by the passage of centuries, the
yellowish marble showing in patches through the gesso groundwork--as
through that of the deep frieze below the Attic cornice,--painted by
some ancient master in the noon of Alexandria's heyday,--and
representing in hues still fresh and brilliant the Battles of the
Greeks and Amazons.
Below the frieze an ebony shelf supported a collection of Oriental
pottery and porcelain, interspersed with antique vases and statuettes
in ivory and bronze. Down one side of the long room were
glass-doored book-cases, built in recesses,--and cabinets stored with
objects of beauty and rarity. A wide divan strewn with silken
cushions and covered with brocade of Damascus, ran along the opposite
side and under the window at the upper end,--where the floor--raised
some eight inches, made a kind of daïs, upon which Persian carpets of
beauty and evident value were laid....
The window, glassless, and closed at need, with delicately-carved
wooden lattices, ran across the upper end of the room, nearly from
wall to wall. Where the window ended, a door between twisted pillars
of red and green serpentine--such as were set between the frames of
the window-lattices--led to an open loggia, supported by slender
columns. From the window and through the door--across the cool blue
belt of shadow made by the fluted tiled roof of the loggia--were the
green lawns and springing fountains, the groves and alleys and
shrubberies of a well-kept and spacious garden; over whose
fruit-burdened vines and fig-trees hosts of finches and orioles and
fig-birds kept up a perpetual chirping and twittering.
It was restful and cool in the wide, lofty room,--would have been so
had no wooden fans, driven by electric power--kept the air in
continual movement underneath the frescoed ceiling. The heavy door
at the hall-end being shut, the hum of the busy Coptic bees of Hazaël
& Co.'s counting-house could not penetrate, where after months of
keen anticipation John Hazel welcomed his liege lady, with outward
stolidity and grave, rather clumsy politeness--masking the shy
rapture--say, of an Eton Fourth Form boy doing the honours of his
study to the prettiest sister of his chum.
"Now, where'll you perch?" he said to Lady Wastwood, after carefully
installing Miss Forbis in the divan's right-hand window-corner. He
was hospitable in the extreme, Trixie decided, and any thing but
well-bred. How odd that such a man should possess sufficient insight
and discrimination to admire Katharine as profoundly as John Hazel
evidently did....
"By the way, Mr. Hazel," Katharine's fresh voice called to him, as he
found a suitable resting-place for Lady Wastwood--and Trixie's
observant green eyes saw him jump, and flush under his mahogany hide;
"I've seen your name starred in to-day's paper.
'Commander-in-Chief's Despatches retelegraphed from Whitehall.
Recommended for the Military Medal, Acting Company Sergeant John Benn
Hazel--448th City of London (Fenchurch Street) Royal Fusiliers.
Extraordinary valour displayed at Sheria.... Twelve Turks
bayonetted, one after another....' Congratulations with all my
heart!"
Her long arm swept out to John, and he took the hand, reddening, and
promptly returned it, stammering: "Awfully obliged for what you
say!--but as regards the M.M. there's no accounting for the way they
have of ladling out these tin-and-gilt things. Mean well and one's
obliged, but the men who earn 'em never get 'em!" He smote his giant
palms together, evoking a terrific detonation. "Sorry if I made you
jump." Nervous Trixie had done so. "But this is how we do in the
East when we want 'em to bring tea!"
Two blue-shirted, white-gowned Egyptian boys and a bulky middle-aged
negress, black as coal; with a high silk turban of rainbow hues, a
skirted yellow over-robe, full striped trousers of orange and green,
and clashing rows of bangles, responded to the summons, setting heavy
silver trays, laden with good things, many and various, on inlaid
ebony stool-tables before their master's guests.... The arrival of
the trays heralded the entrance of an elderly lady, sad-faced,
olive-skinned, black-eyed and white-haired, attired in an
old-fashioned grey silk gown. As "My Aunt Esther," their big host
referred to this lady, presenting her--against all the rules of
precedence, first to Miss Forbis and inversely introducing Lady
Wastwood.... With whom the sad-faced elderly lady shook hands
cordially, though she had curtseyed ceremoniously and profoundly as
she had taken the hand held out by to her by Katharine....
The tea poured out by the sad little grey lady, was Persian, and far
superior to Groppi's, in Trixie's opinion,--as were the cream-tarts
and pistachio-nut, and date-cakes,--the delicate Egyptian rolls and
creamy curls of butter, the pink-melon ices and sherbet of fresh
limes, and newly-gathered grapes, figs and oranges.... Indifferent
to the possible result of an attack of Gippy Tummy, Trixie enjoyed
herself, listening with amused interest to Mrs. Hazaël's gentle
chatter, as the little lady's thin hands, loaded with magnificent
rubies and emeralds, darted about amongst the cups....
In fluent English, spoken with a strong French accent,--both
languages having been acquired in her girlhood, she explained--at a
Maltese Convent boarding-school, where she had spent eight
years,--she entertained her guest with arid recollections of the
Early Eighties, mingled with more welcome details of the cost of
housekeeping in the East.
It appeared that the negress,--whose name was Fatmeh, and who came
from Upper Nubia,--was responsible for the making of the cream-tarts
and the date-and-pistachio cakes.... But the crowning culinary
achievement of Fatmeh was _kunaféh_, which could not be properly
offered with tea, being a dinner-dish; made of sesame-flour,
clarified butter and honey, with eggs and raisins, and fried in a
pan.... If Miladi would honour the house by coming to dinner, the
hostess added, the _kunaféh_ should be forthcoming, made and fried in
Fatmeh's finest style....
"You are quite too infinitely kind, Madame," Trixie responded, and as
she abominated pancakes, the description of _kunaféh_ left her
chilly. "But though to dine with you would give me the greatest
pleasure,--my acceptance of the invitation must naturally depend on
the engagements of Her Majesty over there...."
And the Commandant's smiling nod indicated Miss Forbis, seated in the
divan's opposite corner, drinking Persian tea out of exquisite
porcelain, and revelling in the beauty of the gardens,--where palms
tasselled with golden fruit, and laden fig-trees on spreading
trellises, and sycamores draped with grapevines heavy with purple
clusters, made islands of shadow and fruitful luxuriance,--while
shrubberies of myrtle and rose and oleander invited the footsteps of
stranger and _habitué_ to explore the winding pathways that threaded
them--under the hot blue sky of the November noon....
"You call her Queen? ..." The lustrous dark eyes of the white-haired
lady studied the fine face, and dwelt on the superb lines of the
gracious womanly figure for an instant before she said: "And you are
right! _C'est une physionomie très noble!_ I have seen Queens and
Empresses in Europe--and here in Asia, who would have looked like
peasants beside her! ... As for the arrangement of the date--that is
not for me to make--or for my nephew. It is she who gives orders--in
this house!"
"But I thought that like myself, Miss Forbis was a stranger! I
understood from her," said Trixie munching her third cream-cake,
"that though Mr. Hazel is a great friend and pal of hers in England,
she has never visited this house before."
The reply was given with Eastern dignity:
"When I, who am fifty-eight, was a child, her father came to
Alexandria. My grandfather, who was then living--entertained him as
a King.... His daughter has never entered the house before,--and the
house is the house of Hazaël. But the stones of it would call to her
'Mistress!' if the lips of Hazaël were dumb...."
The sudden fire that had lightened in the soft dark Eastern eyes died
out of them, and the olive face resumed its sad tranquillity. But
not before Lady Wastwood had realised a piquant, baffling
strangeness, in the relations between Kathy Forbis and these
Alexandrian Jews....
"One has one's own secrets wild horses wouldn't drag from one," was
her quaint mental comment, "and so, of course, have others. But
mysteries and Kathy Forbis don't seem to go together. Why--"
Trixie broke off, for at that particular juncture the huge left hand
of the little Syrian lady's big black nephew was coolly drawn from
its supporting sling, and stretched towards a dish of fruit upon a
tray that stood near. And there came to the Commandant's ears the
full, warm voice of Katharine:
"No, thanks! I learned to distrust green figs the first week I spent
in Egypt. And--I think you were told yesterday at the Hospital not
to use that wounded arm! ..."
"You see, I forget," said the big man, very humbly and
apologetically. "It's only a flesh-cut, and doesn't hurt, as I told
the Assassin-in-charge. And I'm left-handed--like the Hun who
slashed me with his sword as he tried to pot me with his revolver.
Has it been dressed since yesterday? ... Oh, yes, I had to report at
the General Hospital this morning, and they looked to it all right.
And I kiboshed the C.M.O. about my living at home. They're fearfully
crowded for space at the General--and don't want well men blocking
the wards--luckily for me...."
He laughed, and as he stuffed his bandaged arm back into the sling,
the gleam of a ring on the third finger of his left hand,--a great
antique ring in a pale greenish gold setting, attracted Trixie's eye.
The eye gleamed,--for a similar signet was always worn by Katharine.
Could it be,--Oh, really!--it couldn't--Couldn't be possible!--that
Edward Yaill's successor would be this colossal Jew....
"Of course, being a woman myself," Trixie reflected, "I ought to be
used to women having--even before the War came to effect a fusion
between the classes--such astonishing, Extraordinary,
INCOMPREHENSIBLE tastes in men! And naturally, after being engaged
to Yaill all those years--an officer of the old Conservative
type,--thoroughbred to the backbone, conversant with Society,
high-tempered, rather irritable, affectionate, gentle, tinged with
Celtic melancholy; this man--what is he?--must be a complete change.
Dressed as a Territorial Tommy, living as an Alexandrian Jew
merchant, talking in the shibboleth and with the accent of the modern
City Nut,--the young man of the Theatrical Syndicate and the West End
Supper Club--dashed with something out of the Book of Kings! Dear
me! I'd like to shriek with laughter--if I didn't feel nearer
shedding tears of vexation at the idea of my splendid Kathy caring
for the kind of person who says to a woman 'Where'll you perch?' when
he wants her to sit down."
Preoccupied with the absorbing theme, Trixie returned but absent
replies to Mrs. Hazaël's mild observations; and conversation
languished between the pair. Until the Commandant's languid
attention was prodded to wakeful keenness by a chance observation on
the part of her host's aunt....
"I do not know, Miladi...." This in reply to some reference to the
wearer of the ring similar to Katharine's. "My nephew John Hazaël
was educated in England. He has been in business in the City of
London--he never was in Egypt until he came here with the English
soldiers, to fight the Turk who has driven us from our homes in
Palestine!" The sad dark eyes lightened fiercely, the drooping
figure straightened, the toneless voice vibrated with passion as Mrs.
Hazaël went on: "Before then I had not seen my brother's son.
Indeed, knowing him to be _Epikouros_,--I had thought of him but
little! Imagine what for me it meant to find John Ben Hazaël the
image of his grandfather! ... For they are alike, Miladi--as citron
resembles citron,--though the years of one were a hundred, and the
other is but thirty-five. True, he has not learnt to observe our
ancient customs, nor has he been reared according to the Law. He is
blind to the beauty and splendour of the glorious Hebrew religion.
But even as a myrtle in the midst of the Desert remains a
myrtle,--John Hazaël, the eldest son of John, the son of Eli Ben
Hazaël,--will live the life and die the death of a good, believing
Jew!"
"To know that," Trixie returned, conscious of feeling her way amidst
unseen pitfalls, "must be a great pleasure to you, Madame...."
"I do not look for pleasure," came the sad-toned answer. "And
comfort there is none for me, whom the Turk has stripped of all.
When this terrible War broke out in Palestine, Miladi, I had a
husband,--and two sons,--and a daughter!"--A convulsion rippled under
the olive skin of the withered face as the waters of a lonely
forest-pool will stir on a windless day.... "My son Jacob they took
first,--to labour with the road-gangs between Sailed and Tiberias....
My daughter--my Esther, my darling and my treasure--the golden joy of
her father's heart--"
"Pray, pray, do not tell me!" Lady Wastwood whispered entreatingly,
for the speaker's dark eyes were bloodshot and her mouth had twisted
in the involuntary grimace of weeping with difficulty restrained, "I
can guess something terrible.... Please believe that I deeply feel
for you!--I who have lost husband and children too! ..."
"'Husband and children! ...' _Achi nebbich!_ ..."
The little grey woman bowed her lace-draped head, and folded her
jewelled hands in her grey silk lap as she continued:
"But such deaths were those of my loved ones, Miladi, that nothing
that you could imagine could approach the terror of the truth! Yet
it might have been worse--oh, infinitely!--had not Jacob possessed
the courage of a lion. He shot his sister, Miladi, in the room of
her destroyer,--and turned the pistol on himself and died also! ..."
There was a clang of pride in the dull tear-soaked voice. "Then
Reuben Ben Ephraim--who was with Jacob in the den of the hyena--Hamid
Bey Effendi--Commander of the Turkish soldiers at Nazareth"--there
followed some rapid guttural words in a tongue unknown to Trixie,
probably a bitter Hebrew curse upon the hated name.... "then Reuben,
seeing both dead, escaped by the Mercy, and sent word to us, me and
my husband--in our house near Jaffa--of what had befallen the
children of our love! ... And hearing that the vengeance of Hamid was
to be wreaked upon us, my husband Isaac, the uncle of John Hazaël!
... may Peace be upon him! as it is our custom to say--Isaac escaped
to Beirut with our last child, Benjamin. Miladi--the fierce wolves
seized them. They both died in prison at Beirut--under the Turkish
rods! ... The young child first, Miladi--under the eyes of his
father.... Then the father!--Peace be upon them both! ... And the
shock of the news killed Eli Ben Hazaël, for he was close upon a
hundred.... Thus am I widow, and childless, and fatherless in this
house that has sheltered my people for more than sixteen centuries.
Ah, Miladi!--I have made you weep! ... I have no tears--they were all
shed long ago!" She rose, a little tragic figure in her
old-fashioned silk gown, and held out to Trixie a withered, jewelled
hand. "My nephew is looking at me.... He wishes me to show you the
garden, while he speaks of business with Mademoiselle Forbis...." A
slight cry escaped her as her eyes went to the window, and a faint
gleam of pleasure lightened in their hopelessness as she lifted the
wasted, glittering hand: "See! O see! Look, Miladi! ... Look, my
children! ... Once again, the swallows have come! ..."
There had been no swallows a moment previously. Summer in the North,
warmer that year of 1917 than in the three preceding, had delayed
their autumn journey overseas. Now the deep blue sky above the
tamarisk and acacia Nilotica,--the vine-draped sycamore figs, the
tall imperial palm-trees, the orange and lemon groves, and the myrtle
and rose-thickets behind the house in the Rue el Farad, were crossed
and recrossed by innumerable downy black-and-white bodies, borne upon
darting, quivering pinions, and the continuous twitterings of the
fig-birds were drowned by their shrill squeaks....
From the eaves of the round-tiled roof of the loggia, where some old
nests were yet remaining, a rope of swallows swayed and dangled;
clinging one to the tail of another--the weight of the whole rope
sustained by the first usurper of the disputed nest.... A moment
more and the feathered rope resolved into its original atoms. They
rose in a cloud,--squealing, wheeling, hovering and poising, and
launched themselves in joyous chase of the flies and mosquitoes,
whose deadliest enemies they are....
And then one of the darting things--possibly a new-fledged
stranger--keen on the capture of some gauze-winged morsel, flew in at
the window, and hawked about the room....
The blue sky frescoed on the ceiling by the ancient artist, framed in
its trellis of dimmed and faded roses, must have deceived the eager
bird. Its upward flight ended in the tiniest thud possible....
Vitality quitted its infinitesimal being.... It dropped, a mere puff
of black and white feathers, at Katharine Forbis's feet....
"Again.... Each year, the same thing happens! A bird is
killed--just in this way. It is sad, but there's no help for it...."
sighed Mrs. Hazaël. "Throw it away, dear Mademoiselle, it is only a
dead bird! ..."
But Mademoiselle, who had picked up the tiny body to cherish and
croon over, did not follow her hostess's advice. To sense the divine
quality of maternity inherent in Katharine's beauty, you had to see
her petting an invalid, or a child. Or as now, with some helpless,
injured creature,--looking at it under drooped eyelids of soft
solicitude, cherishing it with compassionate touches of deft, womanly
hands....
Those kind hands had touched John Hazel, yesterday, in helping the
Hospital surgeon and Sister with the dressing of his wounded arm....
It was not until their contact had sent shocks of keen, scarce
bearable delight thrilling through nerve and tissue, that John Hazel
had discovered--what you have guessed ere now....
All the night through he had lain awake, living those moments over,
and over!--cursing himself for a fool thrice soaked in folly, a bally
idiot, and a presumptuous cad.... But daylight had found him no whit
more wise, nor one iota less besotted; even more gnawed with
desperate hunger to feel her cool breath fanning his bared shoulder,
and know the rapture of her touch again....
Now the soft, compassionate eyes, the tender touch and the sweet
solicitude were given to a bird, while the man hungered. John Hazel,
one is compelled to own--was keenly jealous of the stunned
swallow--as the thorn-like beak opened and shut, and the sealed
eyelids quivered apart--and Katharine's cry of womanly joy greeted
these signs of life....
"It isn't dead, dear Madame!" she cried gaily to the Syrian lady, as
she dipped a finger-tip in a flower-vase that stood near, dropped
some water in the open beak, and wetted the velvety head.... The
swallow quivered in her palm, gasped convulsively and swallowed the
water; swallowed another drop given in the same way, and regaining
strength, struggled to free itself from the protecting hand....
"Kiss it, Trixie, and give it a message for its little brothers! ...
Now you shall go, my dear," said Katharine, when, Lady Wastwood
having dutifully kissed the top of the bird's head, she touched the
featherless, velvet crown with her own lips. Then, still cherishing
the struggling bird in her cupped palms, she passed through the door
at the head of the divan, stepped out upon the loggia, and with a
sweep of her long arm, sent the captive, squeaking with rapture, to
rejoin its long-winged comrades in the playgrounds of the air.
"How's that, Umpire?" she called to John Hazel, following with
attentive eyes the rocket-like upward rush. "It rather sets one
thinking"--she broke off in the middle of the sentence as John
stooped beneath the lintel of the doorway, and joined her on the
loggia.
"Thinking of what?" he asked, for her face was grave and troubled.
"Of prisoners and captives," Katharine answered, "and what they must
feel when their fetters are broken and their dungeons lie behind
them, and the free sky is over them and the free earth underfoot....
Talking of earth, I rather think you promised to show me your garden,
or if you didn't I should like you to.... Your aunt has spirited
Lady Wastwood away--" She nodded at Trixie's tall, thin retreating
shape, upright and workmanlike in its badged, light-weight smasher
hat and short-skirted khaki cotton-drill uniform; as side by side
with Mrs. Hazaël's black lace mantilla and old-fashioned trailing
grey silk gown, it turned the corner of a myrtle-hedge, and was lost
in the shrubbery. "And I rather want to consult you.... There's a
seat under that moss-cup oak--it is a moss-cup, isn't it?--it's
getting beautifully cool, and the tree looks nice and shady. And you
could smoke--or I could--and talk comfortably there...."
He got her green-lined sun-umbrella and insisted on holding it over
her, as they crossed the verdant, well-watered lawn to the
patriarchal moss-cup oak of Miss Forbis's desire. A curve-backed,
scroll-ended seat of red granite stood under its wide-spreading
branches. Near the seat was a great bed of balsam and heliotrope.
"Oh, sweet, sweet!" He had gathered a huge handful of the
fragrant-flowered, nettle-leaved plant and laid it on Katharine's
knee as she seated herself, and her sentences were broken with
rapturous sniffs. "How I--do--love--the smell of heliotrope! ... I
thought it heavenly in England,--but it was nothing to this! ... And
the view of the house from where I sit! ... Who would have dreamed
that behind the hideous whitewashed wall of your courtyard, so much
of the wonderful lost city of Alexander the Great, and of the
Ptolemies, in whose Museum Euclid and Aristophanes, and Hypatia were
Professors,--lay snugly tucked away!" She went on wistfully:
"Tell me why I feel as though my heartstrings were tangled up in the
foundations of this dear, dear house of yours, and there were
memories and voices in the stones of the walls! ... Why don't you
smoke? ..."
"I will if I may.... It'll keep off the mosquitoes. May I offer you
one?" He produced a case.
"No, thanks! I'll smoke mine. Yours look good, but too large and
solid for feminine creatures to appreciate. Though when I worked at
the Front in France, I've been glad to fall back on Army Gaspers. Or
ten _sou_ packets of the rank Régie beloved by the Poilu."
"You used to smoke before the War?" He asked it as he gave her a
light, and she answered, as the Turkish tobacco kindled, breathing
out a delicate puff of the fragrant bluish vapour:
"After a luncheon or dinner-party, one smoked--just to keep other
people in countenance. But afterwards--in France--and here, to quiet
one's jangled nerves!"
"You don't look like a woman with jangled nerves," he said,
considering her steadily.
"Perhaps not, but still they play up sometimes.... Look at the
swallows--they've already begun to build! In the corner of the
window of that big upper room with three large windows latticed up,
and groups of columns between them--and a dome, rising behind the
pediment--it is a pediment, isn't it? that long triangular stone?
..."
The deep voice said to her:
"No one ever uses that room where you see the swallows building. It
is kept locked all through the year except on one day...." The great
brown hand pointed to the three windows below the pediment, the deep
voice so like and so unlike John Hazel's went on: "There is an altar
in that room with a Christian shrine beneath it.... We strip the
gardens bare each year to make the chapel beautiful,--we who have
been Guardians of the Shrine for more than sixteen hundred years...."
"But--but this is a Jewish house! ..."
"That is quite true." The brown hand waved. "The house belongs to
Jews indeed, but it was not theirs always.... Nor do we break the
Jewish Law in honouring the dead. Should you, who are of his race
and faith, desire to visit the chapel ... here is the key....
Whenever you will, I am ready to take you there."