"The people are in great spirits now, all their moaning and murmuring
being turned to gladness, and as we glide along they squat in the boats
and sing. Strangely enough, in a country where religion counts for so
much, there is hardly anything answering to sacred music, but there are
war-songs in abundance, full of references to the 'filly foal' and of
invocations to the God of Victory. These songs the men sing to
something like three notes, accompanied by the beat of their tiny drums,
and if the natives who stand on the banks to listen convey the warlike
words to their Moudirs it cannot be a matter for much surprise that the
Government thinks an army is coming down the Nile and that your father
finds it necessary to prepare to 'establish authority.'
"As for Ishmael, he is in a state of ecstasy that is bordering on
frenzy. He passes from boat to boat, teaching and preaching early and
late. Of course it is always the same message--the great Hope, the
Deliverer, the Redeemer, the Christ, the Kingdom or Empire that is to
come, but just as he drew his lessons from the desert before so now he
draws them from the Nile.
"The mighty river, mother of Egypt, numbered among the deities in olden
days, born in the heights and flowing down to the ocean, rising and
falling and bringing fertility, suckling the land, sustaining it, the
great waterway from North to South, the highway for humanity--what is it
but a symbol of the golden age so soon to begin, when all men will be
gathered together as the children of one Mother, with one God one Law
one Faith!
"It becomes more and more terrifying. I am sure the people are taking
their teaching literally, for they are like children in their delirious
joy; and when I think how surely their hopes are doomed to be crushed, I
ask myself what is to happen to Ishmael when the day of their
disappointment comes. They will kill him--I am sure they will!
"Gordon, I go through hell at certain moments. It was good of you to
tell me I need not charge myself with everything that is happening, but
I am hysterical when I think that although this hope may be only a
dream, a vain dream, and I had nothing to do with creating it, it is
through me that it is to be so ruthlessly destroyed.
"Then there is that masculine development in Ishmael's relation to me,
and the promise he has made himself that as soon as his task is finished
he will live the life of a man!
"Thank God, we are close to Luxor now, and when I get that letter I
shall be free to escape. Have you seen your father, I wonder? If so,
what has happened? Oh, my dear-dear! It is four years--days, I
mean--since I heard from you--what an age in a time like this! My
love--all, all my love! HELENA."
*CHAPTER X*
I
"CAIRO.
"MY DEAKEST HELENA,--El Hamdullillah! Hamid brought me the letter you
gave him at Assouan and I nearly fell on his neck and kissed him. He
also told me you were looking 'stout and well,' and added, with an
expression of astonishment, that you were 'the sweetest and most
beautiful woman in the world.' Of course you are--what the deuce did he
expect you to be?
"I am not ashamed to say that while I read your letter I was either
laughing like a boy or crying like a baby. What wonder? Helena was
speaking to me! I could see her very eyes, hear her very voice, feel
her very hand. No dream this time, no dear, sweet, murderous
make-believe, but Helena herself, actually Helena!
"I am not surprised, dearest, at what you tell me of the development of
the masculine side of Ishmael's interest in you. It was what I feared
and foresaw, yet how I am to stay here, now that I know it has come to
pass, heaven alone can say. I suppose I must, or else everything I have
come for, lived for, hoped for, and fought for will be wasted and thrown
away. Thank God, I have always hitherto been able, even in my blackest
hours, to rely on your love and courage, and I shall continue to do so,
and to tell myself that if you are in Ishmael's camp it must be for some
good and useful purpose, although I know that in the dead waste of every
blessed night I shall have some damnable pricks from the green-eyed
monster, not to speak of downright fear and honest conscience.
"Neither am I at all surprised at what you say of the growth of the
Mahdist element in and around Ishmael, though that is a pity in itself
and a deadly misfortune in relation to the Government. Of course it is
the old wretched story over again--the moment a man arises who has
anything of the divine in him, an apostle of the soul of humanity, a
flame-bearer in a realm of darkness, the world jumps on him, body and
soul, and he finds he has brought not peace but a sword. The
Governments of the world do not want the divine, for the simple reason
that the divine begets divided authority, which begets divided
allegiance, which begets riot and insurrection, so down with the
divine!--hang it, quarter it, crucify it--which is precisely what they
have been doing with it for two thousand years at all events.
"That, too, is a reason why I cannot carry out my first intention of
going to my father, and another is that I see only too plainly now that
he is playing for a _coup_. Not that I believe for a moment that like
the authorities under arbitrary Governments (Russian, for example) my
father would use provocation even if it were the only means by which
peaceful work and life seemed possible, but I fear he is becoming a sort
of conscientious collaborator with the accursed Grand Cadi, by
acquiescing in conspiracy and permitting it to go on until it has
reached a head in order to crush it with one blow.
"God forgive me if I am judging my own father, but I cannot help it.
There is such a thing as being 'drunk with power,' as the Arabs say, and
everything points to the fact that the Consul-General counts on making
one surprising and overwhelming effort to suppress this unrest. That he
did not take me (in my character of Ishmael) on my arrival in Cairo
points to it, and that he has invited me to the dinner in honour of the
King's Birthday puts it beyond the shadow of a doubt.
"How do I know that? I'll tell you how. Do you remember that when
Ishmael's return was first proposed it was suggested that he should
enter the city while the Consul-General and his officials were feasting
on the Ghezirah, the bridge of their island being drawn and the key of
the Pavilion being turned on them? Well, that was the scheme of the
Cadi, and I have reason to believe that having obtained Ishmael's
consent to it, he straightway revealed it to my father.
"What is the result? The Consul-General has invited the conspirators to
join him at his festivities, so that while they think they are to hold
him prisoner on Ghezirah until Ishmael's followers have entered Cairo,
he will in fact be holding them, the whole boiling of them, including
myself, especially myself, thus arresting his enemies in a bunch at the
very moment when their rebellion is being put down on the other side of
the Nile.
"There is something tragic in the idea that if I go to that dinner my
father may find that there has been one gigantic error in his
calculations, and I hate the thought of going, but if I go I go, and
(_D.V._) I shall not shrink.
"Good-night, dearest! 'Where is she now?' I ask myself for the
nine-hundredth time, and for the nine-hundred and first time I answer,
'Wherever she is she is mine and nobody else's.' In-sha-allah!"