"DEAREST HELENA,--Dreadfully disappointed I cannot dine with you
to-night, having to go to Alexandria to-morrow, and finding it necessary
to begin preparations immediately.
"You must really be a witch--your prediction proved to be exactly
right--it _was_ about the new Mahdi, the new prophet, my father wished
to speak to me.
"The Governor thinks the man is making mischief, inciting the people to
rebellion by preaching sedition, so with the General's consent I am to
smash him without delay.
"Hafiz is to go with me to Alexandria, and strangely enough, he tells me
over the telephone that the new prophet, as far as he can learn, is not
a firebrand at all; but I am just off to see his uncle, the Chancellor
of the University, and he is to tell me everything about him.
"Therefore think of me to-night as penned up in the thick atmosphere of
El Azhar, _tete-a-tete_, with some sallow-faced fossil with pock-marked
cheeks perhaps, when I hoped to be in the fragrant freshness of the
Citadel, looking into somebody's big black eyes, you know.
"But really, my dear Nell, the way you know things without learning them
is wonderful, and seems to indicate an error of nature in not making you
a diplomatist, which would have given you plenty of scope for your
uncanny gift of second sight.
"On second thoughts, though, I prefer you as you are and am not exactly
dying to see you turned into a man.
"Maa-es-salamah! I kiss your hand!
"GORDON.
"_P.S._--Your father would get a letter from the Consul-General
suggesting my task, but of course I must go up for his formal order, and
you might tell him I expect to be at the Citadel about tea-time
to-morrow, which will enable me to kill two birds with one stone, you
know, and catch the evening train as well.
"Strange if it should turn out that this new Mahdi is a wholesome
influence after all, and not a person one can conscientiously put down!
I have always suspected that the old Mahdi was a good man at the
beginning, an enemy created by our own errors and excesses. Is history
repeating itself? I wonder! And if so, what will the Consul-General
say? I wonder! I wonder!"
Gordon was sealing and addressing his letter when his soldier servant
brought in Hafiz, a bright young Egyptian officer, whose plump face
seemed to be all smiles.
"Helloa! Here you are!" cried Gordon, and then giving his letter to his
servant, he said, "Citadel--General's house, you know.... And now,
Hafiz, my boy, let's be off."
*CHAPTER VII*
El Azhar is a vast edifice that stands in the midst of the Arab quarter
of Cairo like a fortress on an island rock, being surrounded by a
tangled maze of narrow, dirty, unpaved streets, with a swarming
population of Mohammedans of every race; and the Christian who crosses
its rather forbidding portals feels that he has passed in an instant out
of the twentieth century and a city of civilisation into scenes of Bible
lands and the earliest years of recorded time.
It is a thousand years old, and the central seat of Moslem learning, not
for Egypt only but for the whole of the kingdoms and principalities of
the Mohammedan world, sending out from there the water of spiritual life
that has kept the Moslem soul alive through centuries of persecution and
pain.
As you approach its threshold a monotonous cadence comes out to you, the
murmur of the mass of humanity within, and you feel like one who stands
at the mouth of some great subterranean river whose waters have flowed
with just that sound on just that spot since the old world itself was
young.
It was not yet full sunset when the two young soldiers reached El Azhar,
and after yellow slippers had been tied over their boots at the outer
gate they entered the dim, bewildering place of vast courts and long
corridors, with low roofs supported by a forest of columns, and floors
covered by a vast multitude of men and boys, who were squatting on the
ground in knots and circles, all talking together, teachers and pupils,
and many of them swaying rhythmically to and fro to a monotonous
chanting of the Koran whose verses they were learning by heart.
Picking their way through the classes on the floor, the young soldiers
crossed an open quadrangle and ascended many flights of stairs until
they reached the Chancellor's room in the highest roof, where the
droning murmur in the courts below could be only faintly heard and the
clear voice of the muezzin struck level with their faces when he came
out of a minaret near by and sent into the upper air, north, south,
east, and west, his call to evening prayers.
They had hardly entered this silent room, with its thick carpets on
which their slippered feet made no noise, when the Chancellor came to
welcome them. He was a striking figure, with his venerable face, long
white beard, high forehead, refined features, graceful robes, and very
soft voice, a type of the grave and dignified Oriental, such as might
have walked out of the days of the prophet Samuel.
"Peace be on you!" they said.
"And on you too! Welcome!" he said, and motioned them to sit on the
divans that ran round the walls.
Then Hafiz explained the object of their visit--how Gordon was ordered
to Alexandria to suppress the riots there, and, if need be, to arrest
the preacher who was supposed to have provoked them.
"I have already told him," said Hafiz, "that so far as I know Ishmael
Ameer is no firebrand; but, hearing through the mouth of one of our own
people that he is another Mahdi, threatening the rule of England in
Egypt----"
"Oh, peace, my son," said the Chancellor. "Ishmael Ameer is no Mahdi.
He claims no divinity."
"Then tell me, O Sheikh," said Gordon, "tell me what Ishmael Ameer is,
that I may know what to do when it becomes my duty to deal with him."
Leisurely the Chancellor took snuff, leisurely he opened a folded
handkerchief, dusted his nostrils, and then, in his soft voice, said--
"Ishmael Ameer is a Koranist--that is to say, one who takes the Koran as
the basis of belief and keeps an open mind about tradition."
"I know," said Gordon. "We have people like that among
Christians--people who take the Bible as the basis of faith and turn
their backs on dogma."
"Ishmael Ameer reads the Koran by the spirit, not the letter."
"We have people like that too--the letter killeth, you know, the spirit
maketh alive."
"Ishmael Ameer thinks Islam should advance with advancing progress."
"There again we are with you, O Sheikh--we have people of the same kind
in Christianity."
"Ishmael Ameer thinks slavery, the seclusion of women, divorce, and
polygamy are as much opposed to the teaching of Mohammed as to the
progress of society."
"Excellent! My father says the same thing. _Wallahi_! (I assure you!)
Or rather, he holds that Islam can never take its place as the religion
of great progressive nations until it rids itself of these evils."
"Ishmael Ameer thinks the corruptions of Islam are the work of the
partisans of the old barbaric ideas, who are associating the cause of
religion with their own interests and passions."
"Splendid! Do you know the Consul-General is always saying that, sir?"
"Ishmael Ameer believes that if God wills it (praise be to Him, the
Exalted One!) the day is not distant when an appeal to the Prophet's own
words will regenerate Islam, and banish the Caliphs and Sultans whose
selfishness and sensuality keep it in bondage to the powers of
darkness."
"Really," said Gordon, rising impetuously to his feet, "if Ishmael Ameer
says this, he is the man Egypt, India, the whole Mohammedan world, is
waiting for. No wonder men like the Cadi are trying to destroy him,
though that's only an instinct of self-preservation--but my father, the
Consul-General ... What is there in all this to create ... Why should
such teaching set Moslem against Christian?"
"Ishmael Ameer, O my brother," the Chancellor continued with the same
soft voice, "thinks Islam is not the only faith that has departed from
the spirit of its founder."
"True!"
"If Islam for its handmaidens has divorce and polygamy, Christianity has
drunkenness and prostitution."
"No doubt--certainly."
"Coming out of the East, out of the desert, Ishmael Ameer sees in the
Christianity of the West a contradiction of every principle for which
your great Master fought and suffered."
Gordon sat down again.
"His was a religion of peace, but while your Christian Church prays for
unity and concord among the nations your Christian States are daily
increasing the instruments of destruction. His was a religion of
poverty, but while your Christian priests are saying 'Blessed are the
meek,' your Christian communities are struggling for wealth and
trampling upon the poor in their efforts to gain it. Ishmael Ameer
believes that if your great Master came back now He would not recognise
in the civilisation known by His name the true posterity of the little
church He founded on the shores of the Lake of Galilee."
"All this is true, too true," said Gordon, "yet under all that ...
Doesn't Ishmael Ameer see that under all that----"
"Ishmael Ameer sees," said the Chancellor, "that what is known to the
world as Christian civilisation is little better than an organised
hypocrisy, a lust of empire in nations and a greed of gold in men,
destroying liberty, morality, and truth. Therefore he warns his
followers against a civilisation which comes to the East with religion
in one hand and violence and avarice in the other."
"But surely he sees," said Gordon, "what Christian civilisation has done
for the world, what science has done for progress; what England, for
example, has done for Egypt?"
"Ishmael Ameer thinks," replied the Chancellor in the same slow, soft
voice, "that the essential qualities of national greatness are moral,
not material; that man does not live by bread alone; that it is of
little value to Egypt that her barns are full if the hearts of her
children are empty; that Egypt can afford to be patient, for she is old
and eternal; that many are the events which have passed before the eyes
of the crouching Sphinx; that the life of man is threescore and ten
years, but when Egypt reviews her past she looks back on threescore and
ten centuries."
There was silence for a moment, during which the muezzin's voice was
heard again, calling the first hour of night, and then Gordon, visibly
agitated, said--
"You think Ishmael Ameer a regenerator, a reformer, a redeemer of Islam;
and if his preaching prevailed it would send the Grand Cadi back to his
Sultan--isn't that so?" But the Chancellor made no reply.
"It would also send England out of Egypt--wouldn't it?" said Gordon, but
still the Chancellor gave no sign.
"It would go farther than that perhaps--it would drive Western
civilisation out of the East--wouldn't that be the end of it?" said
Gordon, and then the Chancellor replied--
"It would drive a corrupt and ungodly civilisation out of the world, my
son."
"I see!" said Gordon. "You think the mission of Ishmael Ameer
transcends Egypt, transcends even Europe, and says to humanity in
general, 'What you call civilisation is killing religion, because the
nations--Christian and Moslem alike--have sold themselves to the lust of
empire and the greed of gold'--isn't that what you mean?"
The Chancellor bowed his grave head, and in a scarcely audible voice
said, "Yes."
"You think, too," said Gordon, whose breathing was now quick and loud,
"that Ishmael Ameer is an apostle of the soul of Islam--perhaps of the
soul of religion itself without respect of creed--one of the great men
who come once in a hundred years to call the world back from a squalid
and sordid materialism, and are ready to live, aye, and to die for their
faith--the Savonarolas, the Luthers, the Gamal-ed-Deens--perhaps the
Mohammeds and" (dropping his voice) "in a sense the Christs?"
But the Egyptian soul, like the mirage of the Egyptian desert, recedes
as it is approached, and again the Chancellor made no reply.
"Tell me, O Sheikh," said Gordon, rising to go, "if Ishmael Ameer came
to Cairo, would you permit him to preach in El Azhar?"
"He is an Alim" (a doctor of the Koran); "I could not prevent him."
"But would you lodge him in your own house?"
"Yes."
"That is enough for me. Now I must go to Alexandria and see him for
myself."
"May God guide you, O my son," said the Chancellor, and a moment
afterwards his soft voice was saying farewell to the two young soldiers
at the door.
"Let us walk back to barracks, Hafiz," said Gordon. "My head aches a
little, somehow."
*CHAPTER VIII*
It was night by this time; the courts and corridors of El Azhar were
empty, and even the tangled streets outside were less loud than before
with the guttural cries of a swarming population, but a rumbling murmur
came from the mosque of the University, and the young soldiers stood a
moment at the door to look in. There, under a multitude of tiny
lanterns, stood long rows of men in stockinged feet and Eastern costume,
rising and kneeling in unison, at one moment erect and at the next with
foreheads to the floor, while the voice of the Imam echoed in the arches
of the mosque and the voices of the people answered him.
Then through narrow alleys, full of life, lit only by the faint gleam of
uncovered candles, with native women, black-robed and veiled, passing
like shadows through a moving crowd of men, the young soldiers came to
the quarter of Cairo that is nick-named the "Fish Market," where the
streets are brilliantly lighted up, where the names over the shops are
English and French, Greek, and Italian, and where girls with painted
faces wave their hands from barred windows and call to men who sit at
tables in front of the cafes opposite, drinking wine, smoking
cigarettes, and playing dominoes. The sound of music and dancing came
from the open windows behind the girls who glittered with gold brocade
and diamonds; and among the men were young Egyptians in the tarboosh and
British soldiers in khaki, who looked across at the women in the flare
of the coarse light and laughed.
At the gate of the Kasr-el-Nil barracks the young men parted.
"Tell me, Hafiz," said Gordon, "if a soldier is ordered to act in a way
he believes to be wrong, what is he to do?"
"His duty, I suppose," said Hafiz.
"His duty to what--his Commander or his conscience?"
"If a soldier is under orders I suppose he has no conscience?"
"I wonder!" said Gordon, and promising to write to Hafiz in the morning,
he went up to his quarters.
The room was in darkness, save for the moonlight with its gleam of
mellow gold, which seemed to vibrate from the river outside, and Gordon
stood by the window, with a dull sense of headache, looking at the old
Nile that had seen so many acts in the drama of humanity and still
flowed so silently, until he became conscious of a perfume he knew, and
then, switching on the light, he found a letter in a scented envelope
lying on his desk. It was from Helena, and it was written in her bold,
upright hand, with the gay raillery, the passionate tenderness, and the
fierce earnestness which he recognised as her chief characteristics:--
"MISTER, most glorious and respected, the illustrious Colonel Lord,
owner of Serenity and Virtue, otherwise dear old Gordon--
"It was wrong of you not to come to dinner, for though Father
over-excited himself at Ghezirah to-day and I have had to pack him off
to bed, I made every preparation to receive you, and here I am in my
best bib and tucker, wearing the crown of pink blossom which my own
particular Sultan says suits my gipsy hair, and nobody to admire it but
my poor little black boy Mosie--who is falling in love with me, I may
tell you, and is looking at me now with his scrubby face all blubbered
up like a sentimental hippopotamus.
"I am not surprised that the Consul-General talked about the new 'holy
man,' and I do not wonder that he ordered you to arrest him, but I am at
a loss to know why you should take counsel with that old fossil at El
Azhar, and you can tell Master Hafiz I mean to dust his jacket for
suggesting it, knowing your silly old heart is like wax, and they have
only to recite something out of the 'noble Koran' and you'll be as weak
as--well, as a woman.
"As for holy men generally, I agree with the Princess that they are holy
humbugs, which is the title I would give to a good many of the _genus_
at home as well as here, so I say with your namesake of glorious memory
(who wasn't an ogre, goodness knows!), _Smash the Mahdi!_
"A thousand to one he is some ugly, cross-eyed old fanatic, who would
destroy every germ of civilisation in Egypt and carry the country back
to barbarity and ruin, so I say again, _Smash the Mahdi!_
"As for your 'conscience,' I cry 'Marry-come-up!' by what right does it
push its nose where it isn't wanted, seeing it is the conscience of the
Consul-General that will be damned if the work is wrong and wicked and
there won't be so much as a plum of Paradise for yours if it is right
and good, so once again I say, _Smash the Mahdi!_
"Moreover, and furthermore, and by these presents, I rede ye beware of
resisting the will of your father, for if you do, as sure as I'm a
'witch' and 'know things without learning them,' I have a 'mystic sense'
there will be trouble, and nobody can say where it will end or how many
of us may be involved in it, so again and yet again I say, _Smash the
Mahdi!_
"The Consul-General's letter has come, but I shall not read it to Father
until morning, and meantime, if I ever pass through your imagination,
think of me as poor Ruth sitting on the threshing-floor with Boaz, and
dreaming of Zion--that is to say, of stuffy old El Azhar, where somebody
who ought to know better is now talking to an old frump in petticoats
instead of to me.
"_Inshallah_! The slave of your Virtues.--HELENA.
"_P.S._--Dying for to-morrow afternoon, dear.
"_P.P.S._--IMPORTANT--_Smash the Mahdi!_"
*CHAPTER IX*
Helena Graves was everything to her father, for the General's marriage
had been unhappy, and it had come to a tragic end. His wife, the
daughter of a Jewish merchant in Madras, had been a woman of strong
character and great beauty but of little principle, and they had been
married while he was serving as senior Major with a battalion of his
regiment in India, and there, Helena, their only child, had been born.
Things had gone tolerably between them until the Major returned to
England as Lieutenant-Colonel commanding the battalion of his regiment
at home, and then, in their little military town, they had met and
become intimate with the Lord-Lieutenant of the county, a nobleman, a
bachelor, a sportsman, a breeder of racehorses, and a member of the
Government.
The end of that intimacy had been a violent scene, in which the husband,
in his ungovernable rage, had flung the nobleman on the ground and
trampled on him, torn the jewels out of his wife's breast and crushed
them under his heel, and then, realising the bankruptcy his life had
come to, had gone home and had brain fever.
Helena, like her father, was passionate and impetuous, and her mother
had neglected and never really loved her. With the keen eyes of a child
who is supposed to see nothing, she had observed from the first what was
going on at home, and all her soul had risen against her mother and her
mother's lover with a hatred which no presents could appease. Being now
a girl of eighteen, well grown and developed, and seeing with what
treachery and cruelty her father had been stricken down, her heart went
out to him, and she became a woman in one day.
When the brain fever was gone, the General, weak both in body and mind,
was ordered rest and change. Somebody suggested the Lake Country, as his
native air, so Helena, who did everything for him, took him to a
furnished cottage in Grasmere, a sweet place bowered in roses, with its
face to the sedgy lake, and with the beautiful river, the Rotha,
laughing and babbling by the garden at the back.
There he recovered bodily strength, but it was long before his mind
returned to him, and meantime he had strange delusions. Something,
perhaps, in the place of their retreat brought ghosts of the past out of
a world of shadows, for he thought he was a boy again and Helena was his
mother, who was thirty years dead and buried in the little churchyard
lower down the stream, where the Rotha was deep and flowed with a solemn
hush.
Helena played up to his pathetic delusion, took the tender endearments
that were meant for the grandmother she had never known, and as his
young days came to the surface with the beautiful persistence of old
memories ha the human mind, she fell in with them as if they had been
her own. Thus on Sunday morning, when the bells rang, she would walk
with him to church, holding his hand in her hand as if she were the
mother and he the child.
It was very sweet to look upon, for, in the sleep of the General's
brain, he was very happy, and only to those who saw that the brave girl,
with her eyes of light and her lips of dew, was giving away her youth to
her old father, was it charged with feeling too deep for tears.
But at length the stricken man came out of the twilight land, and his
dream faded away. Helena had to play their little American organ every
evening that he might sing a hymn to it, for that was what his mother
had always done, when she was putting her boy to bed and thinking, like
a soldier's wife, of his father who was away at the wars. It was always
the same hymn, and one breathless evening, when the sun had gone down
and the vale was still, they had come to--
"Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,
Till the storms of life be past"--
and then his voice stopped suddenly, and he shaded his eyes as if
something were blinding them.
At that moment the past, which had been dead so long, seemed to rise
from its grave, with all its mournful incidents--his wife and his
shattered home--and Helena was not his mother but his daughter, and he
was not a happy boy but an old soldier, with a broken life behind him.
Seeing by the look in his eyes that he was coming to himself, Helena
tried to comfort him, and when he gasped, "Who is it?" she answered in a
voice she tried to render cheerful, "It is I. It is Helena. Don't you
know me, Father?" And then the years rolled back upon him like a flood,
and he sobbed on her shoulder.
The awakening had been painful, but it was not all pain. If he had lost
a wife he had gained a daughter, and she was the strongest, staunchest
creature in the world. For her sake he must begin again. Having had so
much shadow in her young life, she must now have sunshine. Thus Helena
became her father's idol, the one thing on earth to him, and he was more
to her than a father usually is to a daughter, because she had seen him
in his weakness and mothered him back to strength.
Two years after the breakdown they were in London, and there Helena met
Lord Nuneham on one of his few visits to England. The great Proconsul,
who had heard what she had done, was most favourably impressed by her,
and as she talked to him, he said to himself, "This girl has the blood
of the great women of the Bible, the Deborahs who were mothers in
Israel, aye, and the Jaels who avenged her." At that time the post of
Major-General to the British Army in Egypt was shortly to become vacant,
and by Lord Nuneham's influence it was offered to Graves. Six months
later father and daughter arrived in Cairo.
It had been an exciting time, but Helena had managed everything, and the
General had borne up manfully until they took possession of the house
assigned to them, a renovated old palace on the edge of the Citadel.
Then in a moment he had collapsed, and fallen from his chair to the
floor. Helena had lifted him in her strong arms, laid him on the couch,
and sent his Aide-de-camp for the Medical Officer in charge.
Consciousness came back quickly, and Helena laughed through the tears
that had gathered in her great eyes, but the surgeon continued to look
grave.
"Has the General ever had attacks like this before?" he asked.
"Never that I know of," said Helena.
"He must be kept quiet. I'll see him in the morning."
Next day the Medical Officer had no doubts of his
diagnosis--heart-disease, quite unmistakably. The news had to be broken
to the General, and he bore it bravely, but thinking of Helena he made
one request--that nothing should be said on the subject. If the fact
were known at the War Office he might be retired, and there could be no
necessity for that until the army was put on active service.
"But isn't the army always on active service in Egypt, sir?" said the
surgeon.
"Technically perhaps, not really," said the General. "In any case I'm
not afraid, and I ask you to keep the matter quiet."
"As you please, sir."
"You and I and Helena must be the only ones to know anything about it."
"Very well, but you must promise to take care. Any undue excitement, any
over-exertion, any outburst of anger even----"
"It shall not occur--I give you my word for it," said the General.
But it had occurred, not once but frequently during the twelve months
following. It occurred after Gordon asked for Helena, and again last
night, the moment the General reached his bedroom on his return from the
Khedivial Club.
He was better next morning, and then Helena took up the letter from Lord
Nuneham. "Read it," said the General, and Helena read--
"DEAR GENERAL,--Gordon is here, and I will send him up to tell you what
I think it necessary to do in order to put an end to the riots at
Alexandria and make an example of the ringleaders.
"The chief of them is the Arab preacher, Ishmael Ameer, and I propose
that we bring him up to Cairo immediately, try him by Special Tribunal,
and despatch him without delay to our new penal settlement in the
Soudan.
"For that purpose (as the local police are chiefly native and therefore
scarcely reliable, and your Colonel on the spot might hesitate to act on
his own initiative in the possible event of a rising of the man's Moslem
followers), I propose that you send some one from Cairo to take command,
and therefore suggest Gordon, your first staff officer, and the most
proper person (always excepting yourself) to deal with a situation of
such gravity.--Yours in haste, NUNEHAM."
While Helena was reading the letter the General could hardly restrain
his excitement.
"Just as I thought!" he said. "I knew the Consul-General would put down
that new Mahdi. Wonderful man, Nuneham! And what a chance for Gordon!
By Gad, he'll have all Europe talking about him. He deserves it,
though. Ask the staff. Ask the officers. Ask the men. I see what
Nuneham's aiming at--making Gordon his successor! Well, why not? Why
not Gordon Lord the Consul-General? I ask, why not? Good for Egypt and
good for England too. Am I wrong?"
Then, remembering to whom he was addressing these imperative challenges,
he laughed and said, "Ah, of course! I congratulate you, my child!
I'll live to see you proud and happy yet, Helena. Now go--I'm going to
get up."
And when Helena warned him that he was over-exciting himself again, he
said, "Not a bit of it. I'm all right now. But I must write to
Alexandria immediately and see Gordon at once.... Coming up this
afternoon, you say? That will do. Splendid fellow! Fine as his father!
Father and son--both splendid!"
*CHAPTER X*
When Gordon reached the General's house at five o'clock that day there
was for a while a clash of opposing wills. Thinking of Helena's
peremptory advice, _Smash the Mahdi_, he was determined to tell her what
the Chancellor of El Azhar had said of Ishmael Ameer, and she was
resolved that he should say nothing about him. So while Gordon stood by
the shaded window, looking down on the city below, which still lay hot
under the sun's fierce eye, Helena talked of his mother, her father, and
of the Princess Nazimah, who had invited her, in a funny letter, to join
the ladies' council for the emancipation of Egyptian women and the
abolition of polygamy, saying among other things, "The needle carries
but one thread, my dear, and the heart cannot carry two." But at length
she said--
"When do you leave for Alexandria?"
"To-night at half-past six. My servant is to take my bag to the railway
station, and Hafiz and two other Moslems are to meet me there."
"Good gracious! No time to lose, then. Mosie!" she cried, and a small
black boy with large limpid eyes, wearing a scarlet caftan and blue
waistband, came into the room.
"Tea, Mosie, quick! Tell the cook the Colonel has to catch a train."
The black boy kissed her hand and went bounding out, whereupon she
talked again to prevent Gordon from talking.
"Didn't I tell you that boy was falling in love with me? I found him
fighting in the market-place. That was a week ago, since when he has
adopted me, and now he is always kissing my hand or the hem of my gown,
as who would say, 'I have none but her, and I love her like my eyes.' A
most dear little human dog, and I do believe--yes, I really do
believe--if I wished it he would go to his death for me."
Gordon, who was gloomy and dejected, and had been drumming on the
window-pane without listening, then said--
"Helena, can you imagine what it is to a soldier to feel that he is on
the wrong side in battle? If he is to fight well he ought to feel that
he is fighting for his country, his flag, and--justice. But when the
position is the reverse of that; when, for example----"
But at that moment the General came into the room and welcomed Gordon
with a shout.
"Just been writing to Alexandria, telling Jenkinson to keep a force in
readiness for you night and day," he said. "Only way, my boy! Force is
the one thing the Easterns understand. Of course we don't want
bloodshed, but if these rascals are telling the people that the power is
not in our hands, or that England will not allow us to use it--we must
let them see--we can't help it. Glorious commission, Gordon! I
congratulate you! My job, though, and there's only one man I could give
it up to--only one man in the world."
And then Gordon, who had been biting his underlip, said, "I almost wish
you could do it yourself, General."
"Why, what the deuce----"
"Gordon has been taking counsel with the Chancellor of El Azhar," said
Helena, "and the old silly seems to have given him 'the eye' or talked
nonsense out of the noble Koran."
"Not nonsense, Helena, and not out of the Koran, but out of the book of
life itself," said Gordon, and after the black boy had brought in the
tea, he told them what the Chancellor had said.
"So you see," he said, "the preaching of this new prophet has nothing to
do with England in Egypt--nothing more, at least, than with England in
India, or South Africa, or even Canada itself. It transcends all that,
and is teaching for the world, for humanity. Isn't it true, too? Take
what he says about the lust of empire, and look at the conduct of the
Christian countries. They are praying in their churches 'that it may
please Thee to give to all nations unity, peace, and concord,' yet they
are increasing their armaments every day. What for--defence?
Certainly! But what does that mean?--fear of aggression. So, while in
our King's speeches and our President's messages, in our newspapers and
even in our pulpits we keep up the pretence that we are at peace with
the world, we are always, according to the devil's code of honour,
preparing for the time when two high-spirited nations may find it
convenient to fly at each other's throats. Peace with the world! Lies,
sir, all lies, and barefaced hypocrisy! The nations never are at peace
with the world, never have been, never want to be."