PLANS OF ESCAPE
For three days Feversham rambled and wandered in his talk, and for three
days Trench fetched him water from the Nile, shared his food with him,
and ministered to his wants; for three nights, too, he stood with
Ibrahim and fought in front of Feversham in the House of Stone. But on
the fourth morning Feversham waked to his senses and, looking up, with
his own eyes saw bending over him the face of Trench. At first the face
seemed part of his delirium. It was one of those nightmare faces which
had used to grow big and had come so horribly close to him in the dark
nights of his boyhood as he lay in bed. He put out a weak arm and thrust
it aside. But he gazed about him. He was lying in the shadow of the
prison house, and the hard blue sky above him, the brown bare trampled
soil on which he lay, and the figures of his fellow-prisoners dragging
their chains or lying prone upon the ground in some extremity of
sickness gradually conveyed their meaning to him. He turned to Trench,
caught at him as if he feared the next moment would snatch him out of
reach, and then he smiled.
"I am in the prison at Omdurman," he said, "actually in the prison! This
is Umm Hagar, the House of Stone. It seems too good to be true."
He leaned back against the wall with an air of extreme relief. To
Trench the words, the tone of satisfaction in which they were uttered,
sounded like some sardonic piece of irony. A man who plumed himself upon
indifference to pain and pleasure--who posed as a being of so much
experience that joy and trouble could no longer stir a pulse or cause a
frown, and who carried his pose to perfection--such a man, thought
Trench, might have uttered Feversham's words in Feversham's voice. But
Feversham was not that man; his delirium had proved it. The
satisfaction, then, was genuine, the words sincere. The peril of Dongola
was past, he had found Trench, he was in Omdurman. That prison house was
his longed-for goal, and he had reached it. He might have been dangling
on a gibbet hundreds of miles away down the stream of the Nile with the
vultures perched upon his shoulders, the purpose for which he lived
quite unfulfilled. But he was in the enclosure of the House of Stone in
Omdurman.
"You have been here a long while," he said.
"Three years."
Feversham looked round the zareeba. "Three years of it," he murmured. "I
was afraid that I might not find you alive."
Trench nodded.
"The nights are the worst, the nights in there. It's a wonder any man
lives through a week of them, yet I have lived through a thousand
nights." And even to him who had endured them his endurance seemed
incredible. "A thousand nights of the House of Stone!" he exclaimed.
"But we may go down to the Nile by daytime," said Feversham, and he
started up with alarm as he gazed at the thorn zareeba. "Surely we are
allowed so much liberty. I was told so. An Arab at Wadi Halfa told me."
"And it's true," returned Trench. "Look!" He pointed to the earthen bowl
of water at his side. "I filled that at the Nile this morning."
"I must go," said Feversham, and he lifted himself up from the ground.
"I must go this morning," and since he spoke with a raised voice and a
manner of excitement, Trench whispered to him:--
"Hush. There are many prisoners here, and among them many tale-bearers."
Feversham sank back on to the ground as much from weakness as in
obedience to Trench's warning.
"But they cannot understand what we say," he objected in a voice from
which the excitement had suddenly gone.
"They can see that we talk together and earnestly. Idris would know of
it within the hour, the Khalifa before sunset. There would be heavier
fetters and the courbatch if we spoke at all. Lie still. You are weak,
and I too am very tired. We will sleep, and later in the day we will go
together down to the Nile."
Trench lay down beside Feversham and in a moment was asleep. Feversham
watched him, and saw, now that his features were relaxed, the marks of
those three years very plainly in his face. It was towards noon before
he awoke.
"There is no one to bring you food?" he asked, and Feversham answered:--
"Yes. A boy should come. He should bring news as well."
They waited until the gate of the zareeba was opened and the friends or
wives of the prisoners entered. At once that enclosure became a cage of
wild beasts. The gaolers took their dole at the outset. Little more of
the "aseeda"--that moist and pounded cake of dhurra which was the staple
diet of the town--than was sufficient to support life was allowed to
reach the prisoners, and even for that the strong fought with the weak,
and the group of four did battle with the group of three. From every
corner men gaunt and thin as skeletons hopped and leaped as quickly as
the weight of their chains would allow them towards the entrance. Here
one weak with starvation tripped and fell, and once fallen lay prone in
a stolid despair, knowing that for him there would be no meal that day.
Others seized upon the messengers who brought the food, and tore it from
their hands, though the whips of the gaolers laid their backs open.
There were thirty gaolers to guard that enclosure, each armed with his
rhinoceros-hide courbatch, but this was the one moment in each day when
the courbatch was neither feared, nor, as it seemed, felt.
Among the food-bearers a boy sheltered himself behind the rest and gazed
irresolutely about the zareeba. It was not long, however, before he was
detected. He was knocked down, and his food snatched from his hands; but
the boy had his lungs, and his screams brought Idris-es-Saier himself
upon the three men who had attacked him.
"For whom do you come?" asked Idris, as he thrust the prisoners aside.
"For Joseppi, the Greek," answered the boy, and Idris pointed to the
corner where Feversham lay. The boy advanced, holding out his empty
hands as though explaining how it was that he brought no food. But he
came quite close, and squatting at Feversham's side continued to explain
with words. And as he spoke he loosed a gazelle skin which was fastened
about his waist beneath his jibbeh, and he let it fall by Feversham's
side. The gazelle skin contained a chicken, and upon that Feversham and
Trench breakfasted and dined and supped. An hour later they were allowed
to pass out of the zareeba and make their way to the Nile. They walked
slowly and with many halts, and during one of these Trench said:--
"We can talk here."
Below them, at the water's edge, some of the prisoners were unloading
dhows, others were paddling knee-deep in the muddy water. The shore was
crowded with men screaming and shouting and excited for no reason
whatever. The gaolers were within view, but not within ear-shot.
"Yes, we can talk here. Why have you come?"
"I was captured in the desert, on the Arbain road," said Feversham,
slowly.
"Yes, masquerading as a lunatic musician who had wandered out of Wadi
Halfa with a zither. I know. But you were captured by your own
deliberate wish. You came to join me in Omdurman. I know."
"How do you know?"
"You told me. During the last three days you have told me much," and
Feversham looked about him suddenly in alarm, "Very much," continued
Trench. "You came to join me because five years ago I sent you a white
feather."
"And was that all I told you?" asked Feversham, anxiously.
"No," Trench replied, and he dragged out the word. He sat up while
Feversham lay on his side, and he looked towards the Nile in front of
him, holding his head between his hands, so that he could not see or be
seen by Feversham. "No, that was not all--you spoke of a girl, the same
girl of whom you spoke when Willoughby and Durrance and I dined with you
in London a long while ago. I know her name now--her Christian name. She
was with you when the feathers came. I had not thought of that
possibility. She gave you a fourth feather to add to our three. I am
sorry."
There was a silence of some length, and then Feversham replied slowly:--
"For my part I am not sorry. I mean I am not sorry that she was present
when the feathers came. I think, on the whole, that I am rather glad.
She gave me the fourth feather, it is true, but I am glad of that as
well. For without her presence, without that fourth feather snapped from
her fan, I might have given up there and then. Who knows? I doubt if I
could have stood up to the three long years in Suakin. I used to see you
and Durrance and Willoughby and many men who had once been my friends,
and you were all going about the work which I was used to. You can't
think how the mere routine of a regiment to which one had become
accustomed, and which one cursed heartily enough when one had to put up
with it, appealed as something very desirable. I could so easily have
run away. I could so easily have slipped on to a boat and gone back to
Suez. And the chance for which I waited never came--for three years."
"You saw us?" said Trench. "And you gave no sign?"
"How would you have taken it if I had?" And Trench was silent. "No, I
saw you, but I was careful that you should not see me. I doubt if I
could have endured it without the recollection of that night at
Ramelton, without the feel of the fourth feather to keep the
recollection actual and recent in my thoughts. I should never have gone
down from Obak into Berber. I should certainly never have joined you in
Omdurman."
Trench turned quickly towards his companion.
"She would be glad to hear you say that," he said. "I have no doubt she
is sorry about her fourth feather, sorry as I am about the other three."
"There is no reason that she should be, or that you either should be
sorry. I don't blame you, or her," and in his turn Feversham was silent
and looked towards the river. The air was shrill with cries, the shore
was thronged with a motley of Arabs and negroes, dressed in their long
robes of blue and yellow and dirty brown; the work of unloading the
dhows went busily on; across the river and beyond its fork the palm
trees of Khartum stood up against the cloudless sky; and the sun behind
them was moving down to the west. In a few hours would come the horrors
of the House of Stone. But they were both thinking of the elms by the
Lennon River and a hall of which the door stood open to the cool night
and which echoed softly to the music of a waltz, while a girl and a man
stood with three white feathers fallen upon the floor between them; the
one man recollected, the other imagined, the picture, and to both of
them it was equally vivid. Feversham smiled at last.
"Perhaps she has now seen Willoughby; perhaps she has now taken his
feather."
Trench held out his hand to his companion.
"I will take mine back now."
Feversham shook his head.
"No, not yet," and Trench's face suddenly lighted up. A hope which had
struggled up in his hopeless breast during the three days and nights of
his watch, a hope which he had striven to repress for very fear lest it
might prove false, sprang to life.
"Not yet,--then you _have_ a plan for our escape," and the anxiety
returned to Feversham's face.
"I said nothing of it," he pleaded, "tell me that! When I was delirious
in the prison there, I said nothing of it, I breathed no word of it? I
told you of the four feathers, I told you of Ethne, but of the plan for
your escape I said nothing."
"Not a single word. So that I myself was in doubt, and did not dare to
believe," and Feversham's anxiety died away. He had spoken with his hand
trembling upon Trench's arm, and his voice itself had trembled with
alarm.
"You see if I spoke of that in the House of Stone," he exclaimed, "I
might have spoken of it in Dongola. For in Dongola as well as in
Omdurman I was delirious. But I didn't, you say--not here, at all
events. So perhaps not there either. I was afraid that I should--how I
was afraid! There was a woman in Dongola who spoke some English--very
little, but enough. She had been in the 'Kauneesa' of Khartum when
Gordon ruled there. She was sent to question me. I had unhappy times in
Dongola."
Trench interrupted him in a low voice. "I know. You told me things which
made me shiver," and he caught hold of Feversham's arm and thrust the
loose sleeve back. Feversham's scarred wrists confirmed the tale.
"Well, I felt myself getting light-headed there," he went on. "I made up
my mind that of your escape I must let no hint slip. So I tried to think
of something else with all my might, when I was going off my head." And
he laughed a little to himself.
"That was why you heard me talk of Ethne," he explained.
Trench sat nursing his knees and looking straight in front of him. He
had paid no heed to Feversham's last words. He had dared now to give his
hopes their way.
"So it's true," he said in a quiet wondering voice. "There will be a
morning when we shall not drag ourselves out of the House of Stone.
There will be nights when we shall sleep in beds, actually in beds.
There will be--" He stopped with a sort of shy air like a man upon the
brink of a confession. "There will be--something more," he said lamely,
and then he got up on to his feet.
"We have sat here too long. Let us go forward."
They moved a hundred yards nearer to the river and sat down again.
"You have more than a hope. You have a plan of escape?" Trench asked
eagerly.
"More than a plan," returned Feversham. "The preparations are made.
There are camels waiting in the desert ten miles west of Omdurman."
"Now?" exclaimed Trench. "Now?"
"Yes, man, now. There are rifles and ammunition buried near the camels,
provisions and water kept in readiness. We travel by Metemneh, where
fresh camels wait, from Metemneh to Berber. There we cross the Nile;
camels are waiting for us five miles from Berber. From Berber we ride in
over the Kokreb pass to Suakin."
"When?" exclaimed Trench. "Oh, when, when?"
"When I have strength enough to sit a horse for ten miles, and a camel
for a week," answered Feversham. "How soon will that be? Not long,
Trench, I promise you not long," and he rose up from the ground.
"As you get up," he continued, "glance round. You will see a man in a
blue linen dress, loitering between us and the gaol. As we came past
him, he made me a sign. I did not return it. I shall return it on the
day when we escape."
"He will wait?"
"For a month. We must manage on one night during that month to escape
from the House of Stone. We can signal him to bring help. A passage
might be made in one night through that wall; the stones are loosely
built."
They walked a little farther and came to the water's edge. There amid
the crowd they spoke again of their escape, but with the air of men
amused at what went on about them.
"There is a better way than breaking through the wall," said Trench, and
he uttered a laugh as he spoke and pointed to a prisoner with a great
load upon his back who had fallen upon his face in the water, and
encumbered by his fetters, pressed down by his load, was vainly
struggling to lift himself again. "There is a better way. You have
money?"
"Ai, ai!" shouted Feversham, roaring with laughter, as the prisoner half
rose and soused again. "I have some concealed on me. Idris took what I
did not conceal."
"Good!" said Trench. "Idris will come to you to-day or to-morrow. He
will talk to you of the goodness of Allah who has brought you out of the
wickedness of the world to the holy city of Omdurman. He will tell you
at great length of the peril of your soul and of the only means of
averting it, and he will wind up with a few significant sentences about
his starving family. If you come to the aid of his starving family and
bid him keep for himself fifteen dollars out of the amount he took from
you, you may get permission to sleep in the zareeba outside the prison.
Be content with that for a night or two. Then he will come to you again,
and again you will assist his starving family, and this time you will
ask for permission for me to sleep in the open too. Come! There's Idris
shepherding us home."
It fell out as Trench had predicted. Idris read Feversham an abnormally
long lecture that afternoon. Feversham learned that now God loved him;
and how Hicks Pasha's army had been destroyed. The holy angels had done
that, not a single shot was fired, not a single spear thrown by the
Mahdi's soldiers. The spears flew from their hands by the angels'
guidance and pierced the unbelievers. Feversham heard for the first
time of a most convenient spirit, Nebbi Khiddr, who was the Khalifa's
eyes and ears and reported to him all that went on in the gaol. It was
pointed out to Feversham that if Nebbi Khiddr reported against him, he
would have heavier shackles riveted upon his feet, and many unpleasant
things would happen. At last came the exordium about the starving
children, and Feversham begged Idris to take fifteen dollars.
Trench's plan succeeded. That night Feversham slept in the open, and two
nights later Trench lay down beside him. Overhead was a clear sky and
the blazing stars.
"Only three more days," said Feversham, and he heard his companion draw
in a long breath. For a while they lay side by side in silence,
breathing the cool night air, and then Trench said:--
"Are you awake?"
"Yes."
"Well," and with some hesitation he made that confidence which he had
repressed on the day when they sat upon the foreshore of the Nile. "Each
man has his particular weak spot of sentiment, I suppose. I have mine. I
am not a marrying man, so it's not sentiment of that kind. Perhaps you
will laugh at it. It isn't merely that I loathe this squalid, shadeless,
vile town of Omdurman, or the horrors of its prison. It isn't merely
that I hate the emptiness of those desert wastes. It isn't merely that I
am sick of the palm trees of Khartum, or these chains or the whips of
the gaolers. But there's something more. I want to die at home, and I
have been desperately afraid so often that I should die here. I want to
die at home--not merely in my own country, but in my own village, and be
buried there under the trees I know, in the sight of the church and the
houses I know, and the trout stream where I fished when I was a boy.
You'll laugh, no doubt."
Feversham was not laughing. The words had a queer ring of familiarity to
him, and he knew why. They never had actually been spoken to him, but
they might have been and by Ethne Eustace.
"No, I am not laughing," he answered. "I understand." And he spoke with
a warmth of tone which rather surprised Trench. And indeed an actual
friendship sprang up between the two men, and it dated from that night.
It was a fit moment for confidences. Lying side by side in that
enclosure, they made them one to the other in low voices. The shouts and
yells came muffled from within the House of Stone, and gave to them both
a feeling that they were well off. They could breathe; they could see;
no low roof oppressed them; they were in the cool of the night air. That
night air would be very cold before morning and wake them to shiver in
their rags and huddle together in their corner. But at present they lay
comfortably upon their backs with their hands clasped behind their heads
and watched the great stars and planets burn in the blue dome of sky.
"It will be strange to find them dim and small again," said Trench.
"There will be compensations," answered Feversham, with a laugh; and
they fell to making plans of what they would do when they had crossed
the desert and the Mediterranean and the continent of Europe, and had
come to their own country of dim small stars. Fascinated and enthralled
by the pictures which the simplest sentence, the most commonplace
phrase, through the magic of its associations was able to evoke in their
minds, they let the hours slip by unnoticed. They were no longer
prisoners in that barbarous town which lay a murky stain upon the
solitary wide spaces of sand; they were in their own land, following
their old pursuits. They were standing outside clumps of trees, guns in
their hands, while the sharp cry, "Mark! Mark!" came to their ears.
Trench heard again the unmistakable rattle of the reel of his
fishing-rod as he wound in his line upon the bank of his trout stream.
They talked of theatres in London, and the last plays which they had
seen, the last books which they had read six years ago.
"There goes the Great Bear," said Trench, suddenly. "It is late." The
tail of the constellation was dipping behind the thorn hedge of the
zareeba. They turned over on their sides.
"Three more days," said Trench.
"Only three more days," Feversham replied. And in a minute they were
neither in England nor the Soudan; the stars marched to the morning
unnoticed above their heads. They were lost in the pleasant countries of
sleep.