His legs were like pipe-stems, his body was like a board, but he was
straight enough, not unsoldierly, nor so bad to look at when his back
was on you; but when he showed his face you had little pleasure in him.
It seemed made of brown putty, the nose was like india-rubber, and the
eyes had that dull, sullen look of a mongrel got of a fox-terrier and a
bull-dog. Like this sort of mongrel also his eyes turned a brownish-red
when he was excited.
You could always tell when something had gone wrong with Ibrahim the
Orderly, by that curious dull glare in his eyes. Selamlik Pasha said
to Fielding that it was hashish; Fielding said it was a cross breed of
Soudanese and fellah. But little Dicky Donovan said it was something
else, and he kept his eye upon Ibrahim. And Dicky, with all his faults,
could screw his way from the front of a thing to the back thereof like
no other civilised man you ever knew. But he did not press his opinions
upon Fielding, who was an able administrator and a very clever fellow
also, with a genial habit of believing in people who served him: and
that is bad in the Orient.
As an orderly Ibrahim was like a clock: stiff in his gait as a pendulum,
regular as a minute. He had no tongue for gossip either, so far as
Fielding knew. Also, five times a day he said his prayers--an unusual
thing for a Gippy soldier-servant; for as the Gippy’s rank increases he
soils his knees and puts his forehead in the dust with discretion. This
was another reason why Dicky suspected him.
It was supposed that Ibrahim could not speak a word of English; and
he seemed so stupid, he looked so blank, when English was spoken, that
Fielding had no doubt the English language was a Tablet of Abydos to
him. But Dicky was more wary, and waited. He could be very patient and
simple, and his delicate face seemed as innocent as a girl’s when he
said to Ibrahim one morning: “Ibrahim, brother of scorpions, I’m going
to teach you English!” and, squatting like a Turk on the deck of the
Amenhotep, the stern-wheeled tub which Fielding called a steamer, he
began to teach Ibrahim.
“Say ‘Good-morning, kind sir,’” he drawled.
No tongue was ever so thick, no throat so guttural, as Ibrahim’s when he
obeyed this command. That was why suspicion grew the more in the mind
of Dicky. But he made the Gippy say: “Good-morning, kind sir,” over and
over again. Now, it was a peculiar thing that Ibrahim’s pronunciation
grew worse every time; which goes to show that a combination of
Soudanese and fellah doesn’t make a really clever villain. Twice, three
times, Dicky gave him other words and phrases to say, and practice made
Ibrahim more perfect in error.
Dicky suddenly enlarged the vocabulary thus: “An old man had three
sons: one was a thief, another a rogue, and the worst of them all was a
soldier. But the soldier died first!”
As he said these words he kept his eyes fixed on Ibrahim in a
smiling, juvenile sort of way; and he saw the colour--the brownish-red
colour--creep slowly into Ibrahim’s eyes. For Ibrahim’s father had three
sons: and certainly one was a thief, for he had been a tax-gatherer; and
one was a rogue, for he had been the servant of a Greek money-lender;
and Ibrahim was a soldier!
Ibrahim was made to say these words over and over again, and the red
fire in his eyes deepened as Dicky’s face lighted up with what seemed a
mere mocking pleasure, a sort of impish delight in teasing, like that of
a madcap girl with a yokel. Each time Ibrahim said the words he jumbled
them worse than before. Then Dicky asked him if he knew what an old man
was, and Ibrahim said no. Dicky said softly in Arabic that the old man
was a fool to have three such sons--a thief and a rogue and a soldier.
With a tender patience he explained what a thief and a rogue were, and
his voice was curiously soft when he added, in Arabic: “And the third
son was like you, Mahommed--and he died first.”
Ibrahim’s eyes gloomed under the raillery--under what he thought the
cackle of a detested Inglesi with a face like a girl, of an infidel who
had a tongue that handed you honey on the point of a two-edged sword.
In his heart he hated this slim small exquisite as he had never hated
Fielding. His eyes became like little pots of simmering blood, and he
showed his teeth in a hateful way, because he was sure he should glut
his hatred before the moon came full.
Little Dicky Donovan knew, as he sleepily told Ibrahim to go, that for
months the Orderly had listened to the wholesome but scathing talk of
Fielding and himself on the Egyptian Government, and had reported it to
those whose tool and spy he was.
That night, the stern-wheeled tub, the Amenhotep, lurched like a turtle
on its back into the sands by Beni Hassan. Of all the villages of Upper
Egypt, from the time of Rameses, none has been so bad as Beni Hassan.
Every ruler of Egypt, at one time or another, has raided it and razed it
to the ground. It was not for pleasure that Fielding sojourned there.
This day, and for three days past, Fielding had been abed in his cabin
with a touch of Nilotic fever. His heart was sick for Cairo, for he
had been three months on the river; and Mrs. Henshaw was in Cairo--Mrs.
Henshaw, the widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, who lived with her brother,
a stone’s-throw from the Esbekieh Gardens. Fielding longed for Cairo,
but Beni Hassan intervened. The little man who worried Ibrahim urged him
the way his private inclinations ran, but he was obdurate: duty must be
done.
Dicky Donovan had reasons other than private ones for making haste to
Cairo. During the last three days they had stopped at five villages
on the Nile, and in each place Dicky, who had done Fielding’s work of
inspection for him, had been met with unusual insolence from the Arabs
and fellaheen, officials and others; and the prompt chastisement he
rendered with his riding-whip in return did not tend to ease his mind,
though it soothed his feelings. There had been flying up the river
strange rumours of trouble down in Cairo, black threats of rebellion--of
a seditious army in the palm of one man’s hand. At the cafes on the
Nile, Dicky himself had seen strange gatherings, which dispersed as he
came on them. For, somehow, his smile had the same effect as other men’s
frowns.
This evening he added a whistle to his smile as he made his inspection
of the engine-room and the galley and every corner of the Amenhotep,
according to his custom. What he whistled no man knew, not even himself.
It was ready-made. It might have been a medley, but, as things happened,
it was an overture; and by the eyes, the red-litten windows of the mind
of Mahommed Ibrahim, who squatted beside the Yorkshire engineer at the
wheel, playing mankalah, he knew it was an overture.
As he went to his cabin he murmured to himself “There’s the devil to
pay: now I wonder who pays?” Because he was planning things of moment,
he took a native drum down to Fielding’s cabin, and made Fielding play
it, native fashion, as he thrummed his own banjo and sang the airy
ballad, “The Dragoons of Enniskillen.” Yet Dicky was thinking hard all
the time.
Now there was in Beni Hassan a ghdzeeyeh, a dancing-woman of the
Ghawazee tribe, of whom, in the phrase of the moralists, the less said
the better. What her name was does not matter. She was well-to-do. She
had a husband who played the kemengeh for her dancing. She had as good a
house as the Omdah, and she had two female slaves.
Dicky Donovan was of that rare type of man who has the keenest desire to
know all things, good or evil, though he was fastidious when it came
to doing them. He had a gift of keeping his own commandments. If he
had been a six-footer and riding eighteen stone--if he hadn’t been, as
Fielding often said, so “damned finicky,” he might easily have come a
cropper. For, being absolutely without fear, he did what he listed and
went where he listed. An insatiable curiosity was his strongest point,
save one. If he had had a headache--though he never had--he would at
once have made an inquiry into the various kinds of headache possible to
mortal man, with pungent deductions from his demonstrations. So it was
that when he first saw a dancing-girl in the streets of Cairo he
could not rest until by circuitous routes he had traced the history of
dancing-girls back through the ages, through Greece and the ruby East,
even to the days when the beautiful bad ones were invited to the feasts
of the mighty, to charm the eyes of King Seti or Queen Hatsu.
He was an authority on the tribe of the Ghawazee, proving, to their
satisfaction and his own, their descent from the household of Haroon al
Rashid. He was, therefore, welcome among them. But he had found also,
as many another wise man has found in “furrin parts,” that your greatest
safety lies in bringing tobacco to the men and leaving the women alone.
For, in those distant lands, a man may sell you his nuptial bed, but he
will pin the price of it to your back one day with the point of a lance
or the wedge of a hatchet.
Herebefore will be found the reason why Dicky Donovan--twenty-five and
no moustache, pink-cheeked and rosy-hearted, and “no white spots on his
liver”--went straight, that particular night, to the house of the chief
dancing-girl of Beni Hassan for help in his trouble. From her he had
learned to dance the dance of the Ghawazee. He had learned it so that,
with his insatiable curiosity, his archaeological instinct, he should be
able to compare it with the Nautch dance of India, the Hula-Hula of the
Sandwich Islanders, the Siva of the Samoans.
A half-hour from the time he set his foot in Beni Hassan two
dancing-girls issued from the house of the ghdzeeyeh, dressed in
shintiydn and muslin tarah, anklets and bracelets, with gold coins about
the forehead--and one was Dicky Donovan. He had done the rare thing: he
had trusted absolutely that class of woman who is called a “rag” in that
far country, and a “drab” in ours. But he was a judge of human nature,
and judges of human nature know you are pretty safe to trust a woman
who never trusts, no matter how bad she is, if she has no influence over
you. He used to say that the better you are and the worse she is, the
more you can trust her. Other men may talk, but Dicky Donovan knows.
What Dicky’s aunt, the Dowager Lady Carmichael, would have said to have
seen Dicky flaunting it in the clothes of a dancing-girl through the
streets of vile Beni Hassan, must not be considered. None would have
believed that his pink-and-white face and slim hands and staringly white
ankles could have been made to look so boldly handsome, so impeachable.
But henna in itself seems to have certain qualities of viciousness in
its brownish-red stain, and Dicky looked sufficiently abandoned. The
risk was great, however, for his Arabic was too good and he had to
depend upon the ghdzeeyeh’s adroitness, on the peculiar advantage of
being under the protection of the mistress of the house as large as the
Omdah’s.
From one cafe to another they went. Here a snakecharmer gathered a
meagre crowd about him; there an ‘A’l’meh, or singing-girl, lilted a
ribald song; elsewhere hashish-smokers stretched out gaunt, loathsome
fingers towards them; and a Sha’er recited the romance of Aboo Zeyd.
But Dicky noticed that none of the sheikhs, none of the great men of
the village, were at these cafes; only the very young, the useless,
the licentious, or the decrepit. But by flickering fires under the
palm-trees were groups of men talking and gesticulating; and now and
then an Arab galloped through the street, the point of his long lance
shining. Dicky felt a secret, like a troubled wind, stirring through the
place, a movement not explainable by his own inner tremulousness.
At last they went to the largest cafe beside the Mosque of Hoseyn. He
saw the Sheikh-el-beled sitting on his bench, and, grouped round him,
smoking, several sheikhs and the young men of the village. Here he and
the ghdzeeyeh danced. Few noticed them; for which Dicky was thankful;
and he risked discovery by coming nearer the circle. He could,
however, catch little that they said, for they spoke in low tones, the
Sheikh-el-beled talking seldom, but listening closely.
The crowd around the cafe grew. Occasionally an Arab would throw back
his head and cry: “Allahu Akbar!” Another drew a sword and waved it
in the air. Some one in front of him whispered one startling word to a
camel-driver.
Dicky had got his cue. To him that whisper was as loud and clear as the
“La ilaha illa-llah!” called from the top of a mosque. He understood
Ibrahim the Orderly now; he guessed all--rebellion, anarchy, massacre.
A hundred thoughts ran through his head: what was Ibrahim’s particular
part in the swaggering scheme was the first and the last of them.
Ibrahim answered for himself, for at that moment he entered the burning
circle. A movement of applause ran round, then there was sudden silence.
The dancing-girls were bid to stop their dancing, were told to be gone.
The ghazeeyeh spat at them in an assumed anger, and said that none but
swine of Beni Hassan would send a woman away hungry. And because the
dancing-girl has power in the land, the Sheikh-el-beled waved his hand
towards the cafe, hastily calling the name of a favourite dish. Eyes
turned unconcernedly towards the brown clattering ankles of the two as
they entered the cafe and seated themselves immediately behind where the
Sheikh-el-beled squatted. Presently Dicky listened to as sombre a tale
as ever was told in the darkest night. The voice of the tale-teller was
that of Ibrahim, and the story was this: that the citadel at Cairo was
to be seized, that the streets of Alexandria were to be swept free of
Europeans, that every English official between Cairo and Kordofan was to
be slain. Mahommed Ibrahim, the spy, who knew English as well as Donovan
Pasha knew Arabic, was this very night to kill Fielding Bey with his own
hand!
This night was always associated in Dicky’s mind with the memory of
stewed camel’s-meat. At Ibrahim’s words he turned his head from the rank
steam, and fingered his pistol in the loose folds of his Arab trousers.
The dancing-girl saw the gesture and laid a hand upon his arm.
“Thou art one against a thousand,” she whispered; “wait till thou art
one against one.”
He dipped his nose in the camel-stew, for some one poked a head in at
the door--every sense in him was alert, every instinct alive.
“To-night,” said Mahommed Ibrahim, in the hoarse gutturals of the
Bishareen, “it is ordered that Fielding Bey shall die--and by my hand,
mine own, by the mercy of God! And after Fielding Bey the clean-faced
ape that cast the evil eye upon me yesterday, and bade me die. ‘An old
man had three sons,’ said he, the infidel dog, ‘one was a thief, another
a rogue, and the third a soldier--and the soldier died first.’ ‘A camel
of Bagdad,’ he called me. Into the belly of a dead camel shall he go, be
sewn up like a cat’s liver in a pudding, and cast into the Nile before
God gives tomorrow a sun.”
Dicky pushed away the camel-stew. “It is time to go,” he said.
The ghdzeeyeh rose with a laugh, caught Dicky by the hand, sprang out
among the Arabs, and leapt over the head of the village barber, calling
them all “useless, sodden greybeards, with no more blood than a Nile
shad, poorer than monkeys, beggars of Beni Hassan!” Taking from her
pocket a handful of quarter-piastres, she turned on her heels and tossed
them among the Arabs with a contemptuous laugh. Then she and Dicky
disappeared into the night.