So it was that the broad-shouldered Seti went to be a soldier, with
all the women of the village wailing behind him, and Ahassa his wife
covering her head with dust and weeping by his side as he stepped out
towards Dongola. For himself, Seti was a philosopher; that is to say,
he was a true Egyptian. Whatever was, was to be; and Seti had a good
digestion, which is a great thing in the desert. Moreover, he had a
capacity for foraging--or foray. The calmness with which he risked his
life for an onion or a water-bag would have done credit to a prince of
buccaneers. He was never flustered. He had dropped a grindstone on the
head of his rival, but the smile that he smiled then was the same smile
with which he suffered and forayed and fought and filched in the desert.
With a back like a door, and arms as long and strong as a gorilla’s,
with no moral character to speak of, and an imperturbable selfishness,
even an ignorant Arab like Seti may go far. More than once his bimbashi
drew a sword to cut him down for the peaceful insolent grin with which
he heard himself suddenly charged with very original crimes; but even
the officer put his sword up again, because he remembered that though
Seti was the curse of the regiment on the march, there was no man
like him in the day of battle. Covered with desert sand and blood,
and fighting and raging after the manner of a Sikh, he could hold
ten companies together like a wall against a charge of Dervishes. The
bimbashi rejoiced at this, for he was a coward; likewise his captain
was a coward, and so was his lieutenant: for they were half Turks, half
Gippies, who had seen Paris and had not the decency to die there. Also
it had been discovered that no man made so good a spy or envoy as Seti.
His gift for lying was inexpressible: confusion never touched him;
for the flattest contradictions in the matter of levying backsheesh he
always found an excuse. Where the bimbashi and his officers were afraid
to go lest the bald-headed eagle and the vulture should carry away their
heads as tit-bits to the Libyan hills, Seti was sent. In more than one
way he always kept his head. He was at once the curse and the pride of
the regiment. For his sins he could not be punished, and his virtues
were of value only to save his life.
In this fashion, while his regiment thinned out by disease, famine,
fighting, and the midnight knife, Seti came on to Dongola, to Berber, to
Khartoum; and he grinned with satisfaction when he heard that they
would make even for Kordofan. He had outlived all the officers who left
Manfaloot with the regiment save the bimbashi, and the bimbashi
was superstitious and believed that while Seti lived he would live.
Therefore, no clansman ever watched his standard flying in the van as
the bimbashi--from behind--watched the long arm of Seti slaying, and
heard his voice like a brass horn above all others shouting his war-cry.
But at Khartoum came Seti’s fall. Many sorts of original sin had been
his, with profit and prodigious pleasure, but when, by the supposed
orders of the bimbashi, he went through Khartoum levying a tax upon
every dancing-girl in the place and making her pay upon the spot at the
point of a merciless tongue, he went one step too far. For his genius
had preceded that of Selamlik Pasha, the friend of the Mouffetish
at Cairo, by one day only. Selamlik himself had collected taxes on
dancing-girls all the way from Cairo to Khartoum; and to be hoist by
an Arab in a foot regiment having no authority and only a limitless
insolence, was more than the Excellency could bear.
To Selamlik Pasha the bimbashi hastily disowned all knowledge of Seti’s
perfidy, but both were brought out to have their hands and feet and
heads cut off in the Beit-el-Mal, in the presence of the dancing-girls
and the populace. In the appointed place, when Seti saw how the bimbashi
wept--for he had been to Paris and had no Arab blood in him; how he
wrung his hands--for had not absinthe weakened his nerves in the cafes
of St. Michel?--when Seti saw that he was no Arab and was afraid to die,
then he told the truth to Selamlik Pasha. He even boldly offered to tell
the pasha where half his own ill-gotten gains were hid, if he would
let the bimbashi go. Now, Selamlik Pasha was an Egyptian, and is it
not written in the Book of Egypt that no man without the most dangerous
reason may refuse backsheesh? So it was that Selamlik talked to the
Ulema, the holy men, who were there, and they urged him to clemency, as
holy men will, even in Egypt--at a price.
So it was also that the bimbashi went back to his regiment with all his
limbs intact. Seti and the other half of his ill-gotten gains were left.
His hands were about to be struck off, when he realised of how little
account his gold would be without them; so he offered it to Selamlik
Pasha for their sake. The pasha promised, and then, having found the
money, serenely prepared the execution. For his anger was great. Was not
the idea of taxing the dancing-girls his very own, the most original tax
ever levied in Egypt? And to have the honour of it filched from him by a
soldier of Manfaloot--no, Mahommed Seti should be crucified!
And Seti, the pride and the curse of his regiment, would have been
crucified between two palms on the banks of the river had it not been
for Fielding Bey, the Englishman--Fielding of St. Bartholomew’s--who had
burned gloriously to reform Egypt root and branch, and had seen the
fire of his desires die down. Fielding Bey saved Seti, but not with
backsheesh.
Fielding intervened. He knew Selamlik Pasha well, and the secret of his
influence over him is for telling elsewhere. But whatever its source, it
gave Mahommed Seti his life. It gave him much more, for it expelled him
from the Khedive’s army. Now soldiers without number, gladly risking
death, had deserted from the army of the Khedive; they had bought
themselves out with enormous backsheesh, they had been thieves,
murderers, panderers, that they might be freed from service by some
corrupt pasha or bimbashi; but no one in the knowledge of the world had
ever been expelled from the army of the Khedive.
There was a satanic humour in the situation pleasant to the soul of
Mahommed Seti, if soul his subconsciousness might be called. In the
presence of his regiment, drawn up in the Beit-el-Mal, before his
trembling bimbashi, whose lips were now pale with terror at the loss of
his mascot, Mahommed Seti was drummed out of line, out of his regiment,
out of the Beit-el-Mal. It was opera boufe, and though Seti could
not know what opera boufe was, he did know that it was a ridiculous
fantasia, and he grinned his insolent grin all the way, even to the
corner of the camel-market, where the drummer and the sergeant and his
squad turned back from ministering a disgrace they would gladly have
shared.
Left at the corner of the camel-market, Mahommed Seti planned his
future. At first it was to steal a camel and take the desert for Berber.
Then he thought of the English hakim, Fielding Bey, who had saved his
life. Now, a man who has saved your life once may do it again; one
favour is always the promise of another. So Seti, with a sudden
inspiration, went straight to the house of Fielding Bey and sat down
before it on his mat.
With the setting of the sun came a clatter of tins and a savoury odour
throughout Khartoum to its farthest precincts, for it was Ramadan, and
no man ate till sunset. Seti smiled an avid smile, and waited. At last
he got up, turned his face towards Mecca, and said his prayers. Then he
lifted the latch of Fielding’s hut, entered, eyed the medicine bottles
and the surgical case with childish apprehension, and made his way to
the kitchen. There he foraged. He built a fire; his courage grew; he ran
to the bazaar, and came back with an armful of meats and vegetables.
So it was that when Fielding returned he found Mahommed Seti and a
savoury mess awaiting him. Also there was coffee and a bottle of brandy
which Seti had looted in the bazaar. In one doorway stood Fielding; in
another stood Mahommed Seti, with the same grin which had served
his purpose all the way from Cairo, his ugly face behind it, and his
prodigious shoulders below it, and the huge chest from which came forth,
like the voice of a dove:
“God give thee long life, saadat el bey!”
Now an M.D. degree and a course in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital do not
necessarily give a knowledge of the human soul, though the outlying
lands of the earth have been fattened by those who thought there
was knowledge and salvation in a conquered curriculum. Fielding Bey,
however, had never made pretence of understanding the Oriental mind, so
he discreetly took his seat and made no remarks. From sheer instinct,
however, when he came to the coffee he threw a boot which caught
Mahommed Seti in the middle of the chest, and said roughly: “French, not
Turkish, idiot!”
Then Mahommed Seti grinned, and he knew that he was happy; for it was
deep in his mind that that was the Inglesi’s way of offering a long
engagement. In any case Seti had come to stay. Three times he made
French coffee that night before it suited, and the language of Fielding
was appropriate in each case. At last a boot, a native drum, and a
wood sculpture of Pabst the lion-headed goddess, established perfect
relations between them. They fell into their places of master and man as
accurately as though the one had smitten and the other served for twenty
years.
The only acute differences they had were upon two points--the cleaning
of the medicine bottles and surgical instruments, and the looting. But
it was wonderful to see how Mahommed Seti took the kourbash at the hands
of Fielding, when he shied from the medicine bottles. He could have
broken, or bent double with one twist, the weedy, thin-chested Fielding.
But though he saw a deadly magic and the evil eye in every stopper, and
though to him the surgical instruments were torturing steels which the
devil had forged for his purposes, he conquered his own prejudices so
far as to assist in certain bad cases which came in Fielding’s way on
the journey down the Nile.
The looting was a different matter. Had not Mahommed Seti looted all his
life--looted from his native village to the borders of Kordofan? Did
he not take to foray as a wild ass to bersim? Moreover, as little Dicky
Donovan said humorously yet shamelessly when he joined them at Korosko:
“What should a native do but loot who came from Manfaloot?”
Dicky had a prejudice against the Murderer, because he was a murderer;
and Mahommed Seti viewed with scorn any white man who was not Fielding;
much more so one who was only five feet and a trifle over. So for a time
there was no sympathy between the two. But each conquered the other in
the end. Seti was conquered first.
One day Dicky, with a sudden burst of generosity--for he had a button
to his pocket--gave Mahommed Seti a handful of cigarettes. The next
day Seti said to Fielding: “Behold, God has given thee strong men
for friends. Thou hast Mahommed Seti”--his chest blew out like a
bellows--“and thou hast Donovan Pasha.”
Fielding grunted. He was not a fluent man, save in forbidden language,
and Seti added:
“Behold thou, saadat el bey, who opens a man’s body and turns over his
heart with a sword-point, and sewing him up with silken cords bids him
live again, greatness is in thy house! Last night thy friend, Donovan
Pasha, gave into my hands a score of those cigarettes which are like the
smell of a camel-yard. In the evening, having broken bread and prayed,
I sat down at the door of the barber in peace to smoke, as becomes a man
who loves God and His benefits. Five times I puffed, and then I stayed
my lips, for why should a man die of smoke when he can die by the sword?
But there are many men in Korosko whose lives are not as clean linen.
These I did not love. I placed in their hands one by one the cigarettes,
and with their blessings following me I lost myself in the dusk and
waited.”
Mahommed Seti paused. On his face was a smile of sardonic retrospection.
“Go on, you fool!” grunted Fielding.
“Nineteen sick men, unworthy followers of the Prophet, thanked Allah in
the mosque to-day that their lives were spared. Donovan Pasha is a great
man and a strong, effendi! We be three strong men together.”
Dicky Donovan’s conversion to a lasting belief in Mahommed Seti came a
year later.
The thing happened at a little sortie from the Nile. Fielding was chief
medical officer, and Dicky, for the moment, was unattached. When the
time came for starting, Mahommed Seti brought round Fielding’s horse
and also Dicky Donovan’s. Now, Mahommed Seti loved a horse as well as a
Bagarra Arab, and he had come to love Fielding’s waler Bashi-Bazouk as
a Farshoot dog loves his master. And Bashi-Bazouk was worthy of Seti’s
love. The sand of the desert, Seti’s breath and the tail of his yelek
made the coat of Bashi-Bazouk like silk. It was the joy of the regiment,
and the regiment knew that Seti had added a new chapter to the Koran
concerning horses, in keeping with Mahomet’s own famous passage--
“By the CHARGERS that pant,
And the hoofs that strike fire,
And the scourers at dawn,
Who stir up the dust with it,
And cleave through a host with it!”
But Mahomet’s phrases were recited in the mosque, and Seti’s, as he
rubbed Bashi-Bazouk with the tail of his yelek.
There was one thing, however, that Seti loved more than horses, or at
least as much. Life to him was one long possible Donnybrook Fair. That
was why, although he was no longer in the army, when Fielding and Dicky
mounted for the sortie he said to Fielding:
“Oh, brother of Joshua and all the fighters of Israel, I have a
bobtailed Arab. Permit me to ride with thee.” And Fielding replied: “You
will fight the barn-yard fowl for dinner; get back to your stew-pots.”
But Seti was not to be fobbed off. “It is written that the Lord, the
Great One, is compassionate and merciful. Wilt thou then, O saadat.”
Fielding interrupted: “Go, harry the onion-field for dinner. You’re
a dog of a slave, and a murderer too: you must pay the price of that
grindstone!”
But Seti hung by the skin of his teeth to the fringe of Fielding’s
good-nature--Fielding’s words only were sour and wrathful. So Seti
grinned and said: “For the grindstone, behold it sent Ebn Haroun to the
mercy of God. Let him rest, praise be to God!”
“You were drummed out of the army. You can’t fight,” said Fielding
again; but he was smiling under his long moustache.
“Is not a bobtailed nag sufficient shame? Let thy friend ride the
bobtailed nag and pay the price of the grindstone and the drum,” said
Seti.
“Fall in!” rang the colonel’s command, and Fielding, giving Seti a
friendly kick in the ribs, galloped away to the troop.
Seti turned to the little onion-garden. His eye harried it for a moment,
and he grinned. He turned to the doorway where a stew-pot rested, and
his mind dwelt cheerfully on the lamb he had looted for Fielding’s
dinner. But last of all his eye rested upon his bobtailed Arab, the
shameless thing in an Arab country, where every horse rears his tail as
a peacock spreads his feathers, as a marching Albanian lifts his foot.
The bobtailed Arab’s nose was up, his stump was high. A hundred times he
had been in battle; he was welted and scarred like a shoe-maker’s apron.
He snorted his cry towards the dust rising like a surf behind the heels
of the colonel’s troop.
Suddenly Seti answered the cry--he answered the cry and sprang forward.
That was how in the midst of a desperate melee twenty miles away on the
road to Dongola little Dicky Donovan saw Seti riding into the thick of
the fight armed only with a naboot of domwood, his call, “Allala-Akbar!”
rising like a hoarse-throated bugle, as it had risen many a time in the
old days on the road from Manfaloot. Seti and his bobtailed Arab, two
shameless ones, worked their way to the front. Not Seti’s strong right
arm alone and his naboot were at work, but the bobtailed Arab, like
an iron-handed razor toothed shrew, struck and bit his way, his eyes
bloodred like Seti’s. The superstitious Dervishes fell back before this
pair of demons; for their madness was like the madness of those who at
the Dosah throw themselves beneath the feet of the Sheikh’s horse by the
mosque of El Hassan in Cairo. The bobtailed Arab’s lips were drawn back
over his assaulting teeth in a horrible grin. Seti grinned too, the grin
of fury and of death.
Fielding did not know how it was that, falling wounded from his horse,
he was caught by strong arms, as Bashi-Bazouk cleared him at a bound
and broke into the desert. But Dicky Donovan, with his own horse
lanced under him, knew that Seti made him mount the bobtailed Arab with
Fielding in front of him, and that a moment later they had joined the
little band retreating to Korosko, having left sixty of their own dead
on the field, and six times that number of Dervishes.
It was Dicky Donovan who cooked Fielding’s supper that night, having
harried the onion-field and fought the barn-yard fowl, as Fielding had
commanded Seti.
But next evening at sunset Mahommed Seti came into the fort, slashed and
bleeding, with Bashi-Bazouk limping heavily after him.
Fielding said that Seti’s was the good old game for which V.C.’s were
the reward--to run terrible risks to save a life in the face of the
enemy; but, heretofore, it had always been the life of a man, not of
a horse. To this day the Gippies of that regiment still alive do not
understand why Seti should have stayed behind and risked his life to
save a horse and bring him wounded back to his master. But little
Dicky Donovan understood, and Fielding understood; and Fielding never
afterwards mounted Bashi-Bazouk but he remembered. It was Mahommed Seti
who taught him the cry of Mahomet:
“By the CHARGERS that pant,
And the hoofs that strike fire,
And the scourers at dawn,
Who stir up the dust with it,
And cleave through a host with it!”
And in the course of time Mahommed Seti managed to pay the price of the
grindstone and also of the drum.