THE HOUSE OF STONE
These were the days before the great mud wall was built about the House
of Stone in Omdurman. Only a thorn zareeba as yet enclosed that noisome
prison and the space about it. It stood upon the eastern border of the
town, surely the most squalid capital of any empire since the world
began. Not a flower bloomed in a single corner. There was no grass nor
the green shade of any tree. A brown and stony plain, burnt by the sun,
and, built upon it a straggling narrow city of hovels crawling with
vermin and poisoned with disease.
Between the prison and the Nile no houses stood, and at this time the
prisoners were allowed, so long as daylight lasted, to stumble in their
chains down the half-mile of broken sloping earth to the Nile bank, so
that they might draw water for their use and perform their ablutions.
For the native or the negro, then, escape was not so difficult. For
along that bank the dhows were moored and they were numerous; the river
traffic, such as there was of it, had its harbour there, and the wide
foreshore made a convenient market-place. Thus the open space between
the river and the House of Stone was thronged and clamorous all day,
captives rubbed elbows with their friends, concerted plans of escape, or
then and there slipped into the thickest of the crowd and made their
way to the first blacksmith, with whom the price of iron outweighed any
risk he took. But even on their way to the blacksmith's shop, their
fetters called for no notice in Omdurman. Slaves wore them as a daily
habit, and hardly a street in all that long brown treeless squalid city
was ever free from the clink of a man who walked in chains.
But for the European escape was another matter. There were not so many
white prisoners but that each was a marked man. Besides relays of camels
stationed through the desert, much money, long preparations, and above
all, devoted natives who would risk their lives, were the first
necessities for their evasion. The camels might be procured and
stationed, but it did not follow that their drivers would remain at the
stations; the long preparations might be made and the whip of the gaoler
overset them at the end by flogging the captive within an inch of his
life, on a suspicion that he had money; the devoted servant might shrink
at the last moment. Colonel Trench began to lose all hope. His friends
were working for him, he knew. For at times the boy who brought his food
into the prison would bid him be ready; at times, too, when at some
parade of the Khalifa's troops he was shown in triumph as an emblem of
the destiny of all the Turks, a man perhaps would jostle against his
camel and whisper encouragements. But nothing ever came of the
encouragements. He saw the sun rise daily beyond the bend of the river
behind the tall palm trees of Khartum and burn across the sky, and the
months dragged one after the other.
On an evening towards the end of August, in that year when Durrance
came home blind from the Soudan, he sat in a corner of the enclosure
watching the sun drop westwards towards the plain with an agony of
anticipation. For however intolerable the heat and burden of the day, it
was as nothing compared with the horrors which each night renewed. The
moment of twilight came and with it Idris es Saier, the great negro of
the Gawaamah tribe, and his fellow-gaolers.
"Into the House of Stone!" he cried.
Praying and cursing, with the sound of the pitiless whips falling
perpetually upon the backs of the hindmost, the prisoners jostled and
struggled at the narrow entrance to the prison house. Already it was
occupied by some thirty captives, lying upon the swamped mud floor or
supported against the wall in the last extremities of weakness and
disease. Two hundred more were driven in at night and penned there till
morning. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, of which four feet
were occupied by a solid pillar supporting the roof. There was no window
in the building; a few small apertures near the roof made a pretence of
giving air, and into this foul and pestilent hovel the prisoners were
packed, screaming and fighting. The door was closed upon them, utter
darkness replaced the twilight, so that a man could not distinguish even
the outlines of the heads of the neighbours who wedged him in.
Colonel Trench fought like the rest. There was a corner near the door
which he coveted at that moment with a greater fierceness of desire than
he had ever felt in the days when he had been free. Once in that corner,
he would have some shelter from the blows, the stamping feet, the
bruises of his neighbour's shackles; he would have, too, a support
against which to lean his back during the ten interminable hours of
suffocation.
"If I were to fall! If I were to fall!"
That fear was always with him when he was driven in at night. It worked
in him like a drug producing madness. For if a man once went down amid
that yelling, struggling throng, he never got up again--he was trampled
out of shape. Trench had seen such victims dragged from the prison each
morning; and he was a small man. Therefore he fought for his corner in a
frenzy like a wild beast, kicking with his fetters, thrusting with his
elbows, diving under this big man's arm, burrowing between two others,
tearing at their clothes, using his nails, his fists, and even striking
at heads with the chain which dangled from the iron ring about his neck.
He reached the corner in the end, streaming with heat and gasping for
breath; the rest of the night he would spend in holding it against all
comers.
"If I were to fall!" he gasped. "O God, if I were to fall!" and he
shouted aloud to his neighbour--for in that clamour nothing less than a
shout was audible--"Is it you, Ibrahim?" and a like shout answered him,
"Yes, Effendi."
Trench felt some relief. Between Ibrahim, a great tall Arab of the
Hadendoas, and Trench, a friendship born of their common necessities had
sprung up. There were no prison rations at Omdurman; each captive was
dependent upon his own money or the charity of his friends outside. To
Trench from time to time there came money from his friends, brought
secretly into the prison by a native who had come up from Assouan or
Suakin; but there were long periods during which no help came to him,
and he lived upon the charity of the Greeks who had sworn conversion to
the Mahdist faith, or starved with such patience as he could. There were
times, too, when Ibrahim had no friend to send him his meal into the
prison. And thus each man helped the other in his need. They stood side
by side against the wall at night.
"Yes, Effendi, I am here," and groping with his hand in the black
darkness, he steadied Trench against the wall.
A fight of even more than common violence was raging in an extreme
corner of the prison, and so closely packed were the prisoners that with
each advance of one combatant and retreat of the other, the whole
jostled crowd swayed in a sort of rhythm, from end to end, from side to
side. But they swayed, fighting to keep their feet, fighting even with
their teeth, and above the din and noise of their hard breathing, the
clank of their chains, and their imprecations, there rose now and then a
wild sobbing cry for mercy, or an inhuman shriek, stifled as soon as
uttered, which showed that a man had gone down beneath the stamping
feet. Missiles, too, were flung across the prison, even to the foul
earth gathered from the floor, and since none knew from what quarter
they were flung, heads were battered against heads in the effort to
avoid them. And all these things happened in the blackest darkness.
For two hours Trench stood in that black prison ringing with noise, rank
with heat, and there were eight hours to follow before the door would be
opened and he could stumble into the clean air and fall asleep in the
zareeba. He stood upon tiptoe that he might lift his head above his
fellows, but even so he could barely breathe, and the air he breathed
was moist and sour. His throat was parched, his tongue was swollen in
his mouth and stringy like a dried fig. It seemed to him that the
imagination of God could devise no worse hell than the House of Stone on
an August night in Omdurman. It could add fire, he thought, but only
fire.
"If I were to fall!" he cried, and as he spoke his hell was made
perfect, for the door was opened. Idris es Saier appeared in the
opening.
"Make room," he cried, "make room," and he threw fire among the
prisoners to drive them from the door. Lighted tufts of dried grass
blazed in the darkness and fell upon the bodies of the prisoners. The
captives were so crowded they could not avoid the missiles; in places,
even, they could not lift their hands to dislodge them from their
shoulders or their heads.
"Make room," cried Idris. The whips of his fellow-gaolers enforced his
command, the lashes fell upon all within reach, and a little space was
cleared within the door. Into that space a man was flung and the door
closed again.
Trench was standing close to the door; in the dim twilight which came
through the doorway he had caught a glimpse of the new prisoner, a man
heavily ironed, slight of figure, and bent with suffering.
"He will fall," he said, "he will fall to-night. God! if I were to!" and
suddenly the crowd swayed against him, and the curses rose louder and
shriller than before.
The new prisoner was the cause. He clung to the door with his face
against the panels, through the chinks of which actual air might come.
Those behind plucked him from his vantage, jostled him, pressed him
backwards that they might take his place. He was driven as a wedge is
driven by a hammer, between this prisoner and that, until at last he was
flung against Colonel Trench.
The ordinary instincts of kindness could not live in the nightmare of
that prison house. In the daytime, outside, the prisoners were often
drawn together by their bond of a common misery; the faithful as often
as not helped the infidel. But to fight for life during the hours of
darkness without pity or cessation was the one creed and practice of the
House of Stone. Colonel Trench was like the rest. The need to live, if
only long enough to drink one drop of water in the morning and draw one
clean mouthful of fresh air, was more than uppermost in his mind. It was
the only thought he had.
"Back!" he cried violently, "back, or I strike!"--and, as he wrestled to
lift his arm above his head that he might strike the better, he heard
the man who had been flung against him incoherently babbling English.
"Don't fall," cried Trench, and he caught his fellow-captive by the arm.
"Ibrahim, help! God, if he were to fall!" and while the crowd swayed
again and the shrill cries and curses rose again, deafening the ears,
piercing the brain, Trench supported his companion, and bending down his
head caught again after so many months the accent of his own tongue. And
the sound of it civilised him like the friendship of a woman.
He could not hear what was said; the din was too loud. But he caught,
as it were, shadows of words which had once been familiar to him, which
had been spoken to him, which he had spoken to others--as a matter of
course. In the House of Stone they sounded most wonderful. They had a
magic, too. Meadows of grass, cool skies, and limpid rivers rose in grey
quiet pictures before his mind. For a moment he was insensible to his
parched throat, to the stench of that prison house, to the oppressive
blackness. But he felt the man whom he supported totter and slip, and
again he cried to Ibrahim:--
"If he were to fall!"
Ibrahim helped as only he could. Together they fought and wrestled until
those about them yielded, crying:--
"Shaitan! They are mad!"
They cleared a space in that corner and, setting the Englishman down
upon the ground, they stood in front of him lest he should be trampled.
And behind him upon the ground Trench heard every now and then in a lull
of the noise the babble of English.
"He will die before morning," he cried to Ibrahim, "he is in a fever!"
"Sit beside him," said the Hadendoa. "I can keep them back."
Trench stooped and squatted in the corner, Ibrahim set his legs well
apart and guarded Trench and his new friend.
Bending his head, Trench could now hear the words. They were the words
of a man in delirium, spoken in a voice of great pleading. He was
telling some tale of the sea, it seemed.
"I saw the riding lights of the yachts--and the reflections shortening
and lengthening as the water rippled--there was a band, too, as we
passed the pier-head. What was it playing? Not the overture--and I don't
think that I remember any other tune...." And he laughed with a crazy
chuckle. "I was always pretty bad at appreciating music, wasn't I?
except when you played," and again he came back to the sea. "There was
the line of hills upon the right as the boat steamed out of the bay--you
remember there were woods on the hillside--perhaps you have forgotten.
Then came Bray, a little fairyland of lights close down by the water at
the point of the ridge ... you remember Bray, we lunched there once or
twice, just you and I, before everything was settled ... it seemed
strange to be steaming out of Dublin Bay and leaving you a long way off
to the north among the hills ... strange and somehow not quite right ...
for that was the word you used when the morning came behind the
blinds--it is not right that one should suffer so much pain ... the
engines didn't stop, though, they just kept throbbing and revolving and
clanking as though nothing had happened whatever ... one felt a little
angry about that ... the fairyland was already only a sort of golden
blot behind ... and then nothing but sea and the salt wind ... and the
things to be done."
The man in his delirium suddenly lifted himself upon an elbow, and with
the other hand fumbled in his breast as though he searched for
something. "Yes, the things to be done," he repeated in a mumbling
voice, and he sank to unintelligible whisperings, with his head fallen
upon his breast.
Trench put an arm about him and raised him up. But he could do nothing
more, and even to him, crouched as he was close to the ground, the
noisome heat was almost beyond endurance. In front, the din of shrill
voices, the screams for pity, the swaying and struggling, went on in
that appalling darkness. In one corner there were men singing in a mad
frenzy, in another a few danced in their fetters, or rather tried to
dance; in front of Trench Ibrahim maintained his guard; and beside
Trench there lay in the House of Stone, in the town beyond the world, a
man who one night had sailed out of Dublin Bay, past the riding lanterns
of the yachts, and had seen Bray, that fairyland of lights, dwindle to a
golden blot. To think of the sea and the salt wind, the sparkle of light
as the water split at the ship's bows, the illuminated deck, perhaps the
sound of a bell telling the hour, and the cool dim night about and
above, so wrought upon Trench that, practical unimaginative creature as
he was, for very yearning he could have wept. But the stranger at his
side began to speak again.
"It is funny that those three faces were always the same ... the man in
the tent with the lancet in his hand, and the man in the back room off
Piccadilly ... and mine. Funny and not quite right. No, I don't think
that was quite right either. They get quite big, too, just when you are
going to sleep in the dark--quite big, and they come very close to you
and won't go away ... they rather frighten one...." And he suddenly
clung to Trench with a close, nervous grip, like a boy in an extremity
of fear. And it was in the tone of reassurance that a man might use to a
boy that Trench replied, "It's all right, old man, it's all right."
But Trench's companion was already relieved of his fear. He had come
out of his boyhood, and was rehearsing some interview which was to take
place in the future.
"Will you take it back?" he asked, with a great deal of hesitation and
timidity. "Really? The others have, all except the man who died at
Tamai. And you will too!" He spoke as though he could hardly believe
some piece of great good fortune which had befallen him. Then his voice
changed to that of a man belittling his misfortunes. "Oh, it hasn't been
the best of times, of course. But then one didn't expect the best of
times. And at the worst, one had always the afterwards to look forward
to ... supposing one didn't run.... I'm not sure that when the whole
thing's balanced, it won't come out that you have really had the worst
time. I know you ... it would hurt you through and through, pride and
heart and everything, and for a long time just as much as it hurt that
morning when the daylight came through the blinds. And you couldn't do
anything! And you hadn't the afterwards to help you--you weren't looking
forward to it all the time as I was ... it was all over and done with
for you ..." and he lapsed again into mutterings.
Colonel Trench's delight in the sound of his native tongue had now given
place to a great curiosity as to the man who spoke and what he said.
Trench had described himself a long while ago as he stood opposite the
cab-stand in the southwest corner of St. James's Square: "I am an
inquisitive, methodical person," he had said, and he had not described
himself amiss. Here was a life history, it seemed, being unfolded to his
ears, and not the happiest of histories, perhaps, indeed, with
something of tragedy at the heart of it. Trench began to speculate upon
the meaning of that word "afterwards," which came and went among the
words like the _motif_ in a piece of music and very likely was the life
_motif_ of the man who spoke them.
In the prison the heat became stifling, the darkness more oppressive,
but the cries and shouts were dying down; their volume was less great,
their intonation less shrill; stupor and fatigue and exhaustion were
having their effect. Trench bent his head again to his companion and now
heard more clearly.
"I saw your light that morning ... you put it out suddenly ... did you
hear my step on the gravel?... I thought you did, it hurt rather," and
then he broke out into an emphatic protest. "No, no, I had no idea that
you would wait. I had no wish that you should. Afterwards, perhaps, I
thought, but nothing more, upon my word. Sutch was quite wrong.... Of
course there was always the chance that one might come to grief
oneself--get killed, you know, or fall ill and die--before one asked you
to take your feather back; and then there wouldn't even have been a
chance of the afterwards. But that is the risk one had to take."
The allusion was not direct enough for Colonel Trench's comprehension.
He heard the word "feather," but he could not connect it as yet with any
action of his own. He was more curious than ever about that
"afterwards"; he began to have a glimmering of its meaning, and he was
struck with wonderment at the thought of how many men there were going
about the world with a calm and commonplace demeanour beneath which
were hidden quaint fancies and poetic beliefs, never to be so much as
suspected, until illness deprived the brain of its control.
"No, one of the reasons why I never said anything that night to you
about what I intended was, I think, that I did not wish you to wait or
have any suspicion of what I was going to attempt." And then
expostulation ceased, and he began to speak in a tone of interest. "Do
you know, it has only occurred to me since I came to the Soudan, but I
believe that Durrance cared."
The name came with something of a shock upon Trench's ears. This man
knew Durrance! He was not merely a stranger of Trench's blood, but he
knew Durrance even as Trench knew him. There was a link between them,
they had a friend in common. He knew Durrance, had fought in the same
square with him, perhaps, at Tokar, or Tamai, or Tamanieb, just as Trench
had done! And so Trench's curiosity as to the life history in its turn
gave place to a curiosity as to the identity of the man. He tried to
see, knowing that in that black and noisome hovel sight was impossible.
He might hear, though, enough to be assured. For if the stranger knew
Durrance, it might be that he knew Trench as well. Trench listened; the
sound of the voice, high pitched and rambling, told him nothing. He
waited for the words, and the words came.
"Durrance stood at the window, after I had told them about you, Ethne,"
and Trench repeated the name to himself. It was to a woman, then, that
his new-found compatriot, this friend of Durrance, in his delirium
imagined himself to be speaking--a woman named Ethne. Trench could
recall no such name; but the voice in the dark went on.
"All the time when I was proposing to send in my papers, after the
telegram had come, he stood at the window of my rooms with his back to
me, looking out across the park. I fancied he blamed me. But I think now
he was making up his mind to lose you.... I wonder."
Trench uttered so startled an exclamation that Ibrahim turned round.
"Is he dead?"
"No, he lives, he lives."
It was impossible, Trench argued. He remembered quite clearly Durrance
standing by a window with his back to the room. He remembered a telegram
coming which took a long while in the reading--which diffused among all
except Durrance an inexplicable suspense. He remembered, too, a man who
spoke of his betrothal and of sending in his papers. But surely this
could not be the man. Was the woman's name Ethne? A woman of
Donegal--yes; and this man had spoken of sailing out of Dublin Bay--he
had spoken, too, of a feather.
"Good God!" whispered Trench. "Was the name Ethne? Was it? Was it?"
But for a while he received no answer. He heard only talk of a
mud-walled city, and an intolerable sun burning upon a wide round of
desert, and a man who lay there all the day with his linen robe drawn
over his head, and slowly drew one face towards him across three
thousand miles, until at sunset it was near, and he took courage and
went down into the gate. And after that, four words stabbed Trench.
"Three little white feathers," were the words. Trench leaned back
against the wall. It was he who had devised that message. "Three little
white feathers," the voice repeated. "This afternoon we were under the
elms down by the Lennon River--do you remember, Harry?--just you and I.
And then came three little white feathers; and the world's at an end."
Trench had no longer any doubts. The man was quoting words, and words,
no doubt, spoken by this girl Ethne on the night when the three feathers
came. "Harry," she had said. "Do you remember, Harry?" Trench was
certain.
"Feversham!" he cried. "Feversham!" And he shook the man whom he held
in his arms and called to him again. "Under the elms by the Lennon
River--" Visions of green shade touched with gold, and of the sunlight
flickering between the leaves, caught at Trench and drew him like a
mirage in that desert of which Feversham had spoken. Feversham had been
under the elms of the Lennon River on that afternoon before the feathers
came, and he was in the House of Stone at Omdurman. But why? Trench asked
himself the question and was not spared the answer.
"Willoughby took his feather back"--and upon that Feversham broke off.
His voice rambled. He seemed to be running somewhere amid sandhills
which continually shifted and danced about him as he ran, so that he
could not tell which way he went. He was in the last stage of fatigue,
too, so that his voice in his delirium became querulous and weak. "Abou
Fatma!" he cried, and the cry was the cry of a man whose throat is
parched, and whose limbs fail beneath him. "Abou Fatma! Abou Fatma!" He
stumbled as he ran, picked himself up, ran and stumbled again; and about
him the deep soft sand piled itself into pyramids, built itself into
long slopes and ridges, and levelled itself flat with an extraordinary
and a malicious rapidity. "Abou Fatma!" cried Feversham, and he began to
argue in a weak obstinate voice. "I know the wells are here--close
by--within half a mile. I know they are--I know they are."
The clue to that speech Trench had not got. He knew nothing of
Feversham's adventure at Berber; he could not tell that the wells were
the Wells of Obak, or that Feversham, tired with the hurry of his
travelling, and after a long day's march without water, had lost his way
among the shifting sandhills. But he did know that Willoughby had taken
back his feather, and he made a guess as to the motive which had brought
Feversham now to the House of Stone. Even on that point, however, he was
not to remain in doubt; for in a while he heard his own name upon
Feversham's lips.
Remorse seized upon Colonel Trench. The sending of the feathers had been
his invention and his alone. He could not thrust the responsibility of
his invention upon either Willoughby or Castleton; it was just his
doing. He had thought it rather a shrewd and clever stroke, he
remembered at the time--a vengeance eminently just. Eminently just, no
doubt, it was, but he had not thought of the woman. He had not imagined
that she might be present when the feathers came. He had indeed almost
forgotten the episode, he had never speculated upon the consequences,
and now they rose up and smote the smiter.
And his remorse was to grow. For the night was not nearly at its end.
All through the dark slow hours he supported Feversham and heard him
talk. Now Feversham was lurking in the bazaar at Suakin and during the
siege.
"During the siege," thought Trench. "While we were there, then, he was
herding with the camel-drivers in the bazaar learning their tongues,
watching for his chance. Three years of it!"
At another moment Feversham was slinking up the Nile to Wadi Halfa with
a zither, in the company of some itinerant musicians, hiding from any
who might remember him and accuse him with his name. Trench heard of a
man slipping out from Wadi Halfa, crossing the Nile and wandering with
the assumed manner of a lunatic southwards, starving and waterless,
until one day he was snapped up by a Mahdist caravan and dragged to
Dongola as a spy. And at Dongola things had happened of which the mere
mention made Trench shake. He heard of leather cords which had been
bound about the prisoner's wrists, and upon which water had been poured
until the cords swelled and the wrists burst, but this was among the
minor brutalities. Trench waited for the morning as he listened,
wondering whether indeed it would ever come.
He heard the bolts dragged back at the last; he saw the door open and
the good daylight. He stood up and with Ibrahim's help protected this
new comrade until the eager rush was past. Then he supported him out
into the zareeba. Worn, wasted in body and face, with a rough beard
straggled upon his chin, and his eyes all sunk and very bright, it was
still Harry Feversham. Trench laid him down in a corner of the zareeba
where there would be shade; and in a few hours shade would be needed.
Then with the rest he scrambled to the Nile for water and brought it
back. As he poured it down Feversham's throat, Feversham seemed for a
moment to recognise him. But it was only for a moment, and the
incoherent tale of his adventures began again. Thus, after five years,
and for the first time since Trench had dined as Feversham's guest in
the high rooms overlooking St. James's Park, the two men met in the
House of Stone.