WEST AND EAST
Durrance found his body-servant waiting up for him when he had come
across the fields to his own house of "Guessens."
"You can turn the lights out and go to bed," said Durrance, and he
walked through the hall into his study. The name hardly described the
room, for it had always been more of a gun-room than a study.
He sat for some while in his chair and then began to walk gently about
the room in the dark. There were many cups and goblets scattered about
the room, which Durrance had won in his past days. He knew them each one
by their shape and position, and he drew a kind of comfort from the feel
of them. He took them up one by one and touched them and fondled them,
wondering whether, now that he was blind, they were kept as clean and
bright as they used to be. This one, a thin-stemmed goblet, he had won
in a regimental steeple-chase at Colchester; he could remember the day
with its clouds and grey sky and the dull look of the ploughed fields
between the hedges. That pewter, which stood upon his writing table and
which had formed a convenient holder for his pens, when pens had been of
use, he had acquired very long ago in his college "fours," when he was a
freshman at Oxford. The hoof of a favourite horse mounted in silver
made an ornament upon the mantelpiece. His trophies made the room a
gigantic diary; he fingered his records of good days gone by and came at
last to his guns and rifles.
He took them down from their racks. They were to him much what Ethne's
violin was to her and had stories for his ear alone. He sat with a
Remington across his knee and lived over again one long hot day in the
hills to the west of Berenice, during which he had stalked a lion across
stony, open country, and killed him at three hundred yards just before
sunset. Another talked to him, too, of his first ibex shot in the Khor
Baraka, and of antelope stalked in the mountains northward of Suakin.
There was a little Greener gun which he had used upon midwinter nights
in a boat upon this very creek of the Salcombe estuary. He had brought
down his first mallard with that, and he lifted it and slid his left
hand along the under side of the barrel and felt the butt settle
comfortably into the hollow of his shoulder. But his weapons began to
talk over loudly in his ears, even as Ethne's violin, in the earlier
days after Harry Feversham was gone and she was left alone, had spoken
with too penetrating a note to her. As he handled the locks, and was
aware that he could no longer see the sights, the sum of his losses was
presented to him in a very definite and incontestable way.
He put his guns away, and was seized suddenly with a desire to disregard
his blindness, to pretend that it was no hindrance and to pretend so
hard that it should prove not to be one. The desire grew and shook him
like a passion and carried him winged out of the countries of dim stars
straight to the East. The smell of the East and its noises and the
domes of its mosques, the hot sun, the rabble in its streets, and the
steel-blue sky overhead, caught at him till he was plucked from his
chair and set pacing restlessly about his room.
He dreamed himself to Port Said, and was marshalled in the long
procession of steamers down the waterway of the canal. The song of the
Arabs coaling the ship was in his ears, and so loud that he could see
them as they went at night-time up and down the planks between the
barges and the deck, an endless chain of naked figures monotonously
chanting and lurid in the red glare of the braziers. He travelled out of
the canal, past the red headlands of the Sinaitic Peninsula, into the
chills of the Gulf of Suez. He zigzagged down the Red Sea while the
Great Bear swung northward low down in the sky above the rail of the
quarterdeck, and the Southern Cross began to blaze in the south; he
touched at Tor and at Yambo; he saw the tall white houses of Yeddah lift
themselves out of the sea, and admired the dark brine-withered woodwork
of their carved casements; he walked through the dusk of its roofed
bazaars with the joy of the homesick after long years come home; and
from Yeddah he crossed between the narrowing coral-reefs into the
land-locked harbour of Suakin.
Westward from Suakin stretched the desert, with all that it meant to
this man whom it had smitten and cast out--the quiet padding of the
camels' feet in sand; the great rock-cones rising sheer and abrupt as
from a rippleless ocean, towards which you march all day and get no
nearer; the gorgeous momentary blaze of sunset colours in the west; the
rustle of the wind through the short twilight when the west is a pure
pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop of the
planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places
dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro,
forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a
fever--until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows
bustling and piping in the garden, and knew that outside his windows the
world was white with dawn.
He waked from his dream at the homely sound. There were to be no more
journeys for him; affliction had caged him and soldered a chain about
his leg. He felt his way by the balustrade up the stairs to his bed. He
fell asleep as the sun rose.
* * * * *
But at Dongola, on the great curve of the Nile southwards of Wadi Halfa,
the sun was already blazing and its inhabitants were awake. There was
sport prepared for them this morning under the few palm trees before the
house of the Emir Wad El Nejoumi. A white prisoner captured a week
before close to the wells of El Agia on the great Arbain road, by a
party of Arabs, had been brought in during the night and now waited his
fate at the Emir's hands. The news spread quick as a spark through the
town; already crowds of men and women and children flocked to this rare
and pleasant spectacle. In front of the palm trees an open space
stretched to the gateway of the Emir's house; behind them a slope of
sand descended flat and bare to the river.
Harry Feversham was standing under the trees, guarded by four of the
Ansar soldiery. His clothes had been stripped from him; he wore only a
torn and ragged jibbeh upon his body and a twist of cotton on his head
to shield him from the sun. His bare shoulders and arms were scorched
and blistered. His ankles were fettered, his wrists were bound with a
rope of palm fibre, an iron collar was locked about his neck, to which a
chain was attached, and this chain one of the soldiers held. He stood
and smiled at the mocking crowd about him and seemed well pleased, like
a lunatic.
That was the character which he had assumed. If he could sustain it, if
he could baffle his captors, so that they were at a loss whether he was
a man really daft or an agent with promises of help and arms to the
disaffected tribes of Kordofan--then there was a chance that they might
fear to dispose of him themselves and send him forward to Omdurman. But
it was hard work. Inside the house the Emir and his counsellors were
debating his destiny; on the river-bank and within his view a high
gallows stood out black and most sinister against the yellow sand. Harry
Feversham was very glad of the chain about his neck and the fetters on
his legs. They helped him to betray no panic, by assuring him of its
futility.
These hours of waiting, while the sun rose higher and higher and no one
came from the gateway, were the worst he had ever as yet endured. All
through that fortnight in Berber a hope of escape had sustained him, and
when that lantern shone upon him from behind in the ruined acres, what
had to be done must be done so quickly there was no time for fear or
thought. Here there was time and too much of it.
He had time to anticipate and foresee. He felt his heart sinking till
he was faint, just as in those distant days when he had heard the hounds
scuffling and whining in a covert and he himself had sat shaking upon
his horse. He glanced furtively towards the gallows, and foresaw the
vultures perched upon his shoulders, fluttering about his eyes. But the
man had grown during his years of probation. The fear of physical
suffering was not uppermost in his mind, nor even the fear that he would
walk unmanfully to the high gallows, but a greater dread that if he died
now, here, at Dongola, Ethne would never take back that fourth feather,
and his strong hope of the "afterwards" would never come to its
fulfilment. He was very glad of the collar about his neck and the
fetters on his legs. He summoned his wits together and standing there
alone, without a companion to share his miseries, laughed and scraped
and grimaced at his tormentors.
An old hag danced and gesticulated before him, singing the while a
monotonous song. The gestures were pantomimic and menaced him with
abominable mutilations; the words described in simple and unexpurgated
language the grievous death agonies which immediately awaited him, and
the eternity of torture in hell which he would subsequently suffer.
Feversham understood and inwardly shuddered, but he only imitated her
gestures and nodded and mowed at her as though she was singing to him of
Paradise. Others, taking their war-trumpets, placed the mouths against
the prisoner's ears and blew with all their might.
"Do you hear, Kaffir?" cried a child, dancing with delight before him.
"Do you hear our ombeyehs? Blow louder! Blow louder!"
But the prisoner only clapped his hands, and cried out that the music
was good.
Finally there came to the group a tall warrior with a long, heavy spear.
A cry was raised at his approach, and a space was cleared. He stood
before the captive and poised his spear, swinging it backward and
forward, to make his arm supple before he thrust, like a bowler before
he delivers a ball at a cricket match. Feversham glanced wildly about
him, and seeing no escape, suddenly flung out his breast to meet the
blow. But the spear never reached him. For as the warrior lunged from
the shoulder, one of the four guards jerked the neck chain violently
from behind, and the prisoner was flung, half throttled, upon his back.
Three times, and each time to a roar of delight, this pastime was
repeated, and then a soldier appeared in the gateway of Nejoumi's house.
"Bring him in!" he cried; and followed by the curses and threats of the
crowd, the prisoner was dragged under the arch across a courtyard into a
dark room.
For a few moments Feversham could see nothing. Then his eyes began to
adapt themselves to the gloom, and he distinguished a tall, bearded man,
who sat upon an angareb, the native bedstead of the Soudan, and two
others, who squatted beside him on the ground. The man on the angareb
was the Emir.
"You are a spy of the Government from Wadi Halfa," he said.
"No, I am a musician," returned the prisoner, and he laughed happily,
like a man that has made a jest.
Nejoumi made a sign, and an instrument with many broken strings was
handed to the captive. Feversham seated himself upon the ground, and
with slow, fumbling fingers, breathing hard as he bent over the zither,
he began to elicit a wavering melody. It was the melody to which
Durrance had listened in the street of Tewfikieh on the eve of his last
journey into the desert; and which Ethne Eustace had played only the
night before in the quiet drawing-room at Southpool. It was the only
melody which Feversham knew. When he had done Nejoumi began again.
"You are a spy."
"I have told you the truth," answered Feversham, stubbornly, and Nejoumi
took a different tone. He called for food, and the raw liver of a camel,
covered with salt and red pepper, was placed before Feversham. Seldom
has a man had smaller inclination to eat, but Feversham ate, none the
less, even of that unattractive dish, knowing well that reluctance would
be construed as fear, and that the signs of fear might condemn him to
death. And, while he ate, Nejoumi questioned him, in the silkiest voice,
about the fortifications of Cairo and the strength of the garrison at
Assouan, and the rumours of dissension between the Khedive and the
Sirdar.
But to each question Feversham replied:--
"How should a Greek know of these matters?"
Nejoumi rose from his angareb and roughly gave an order. The soldiers
seized upon Feversham and dragged him out again into the sunlight. They
poured water upon the palm-rope which bound his wrists, so that the
thongs swelled and bit into his flesh.
"Speak, Kaffir. You carry promises to Kordofan."
Feversham was silent. He clung doggedly to the plan over which he had
so long and so carefully pondered. He could not improve upon it, he was
sure, by any alteration suggested by fear, at a moment when he could not
think clearly. A rope was flung about his neck, and he was pushed and
driven beneath the gallows.
"Speak, Kaffir," said Nejoumi; "so shall you escape death."
Feversham smiled and grimaced, and shook his head loosely from side to
side. It was astonishing to him that he could do it, that he did not
fall down upon his knees and beg for mercy. It was still more
astonishing to him that he felt no temptation so to demean himself. He
wondered whether the oft repeated story was true, that criminals in
English prisons went quietly and with dignity to the scaffold, because
they had been drugged. For without drugs he seemed to be behaving with
no less dignity himself. His heart was beating very fast, but it was
with a sort of excitement. He did not even think of Ethne at that
moment; and certainly the great dread that his strong hope would never
be fulfilled did not trouble him at all. He had his allotted part to
play, and he just played it; and that was all.
Nejoumi looked at him sourly for a moment. He turned to the men who
stood ready to draw away from Feversham the angareb on which he was
placed:--
"To-morrow," said he, "the Kaffir shall go to Omdurman."
Feversham began to feel then that the rope of palm fibre tortured his
wrists.