The Companions of the Rosy Hours
We battled to a corner, where a jut of building stood out into the
street. It was our only chance to protect our backs, to stand up with
the rib of stone between us. It was only the work of seconds. One
instant we were groping our solitary way in the darkness, the next we
were pinned against a wall with a throaty mob surging round us.
It took me a moment or two to realize that we were attacked. Every man
has one special funk in the back of his head, and mine was to be the
quarry of an angry crowd. I hated the thought of it—the mess, the blind
struggle, the sense of unleashed passions different from those of any
single blackguard. It was a dark world to me, and I don’t like
darkness. But in my nightmares I had never imagined anything just like
this. The narrow, fetid street, with the icy winds fanning the filth,
the unknown tongue, the hoarse savage murmur, and my utter ignorance as
to what it might all be about, made me cold in the pit of my stomach.
“We’ve got it in the neck this time, old man,” I said to Peter, who had
out the pistol the commandant at Rustchuk had given him. These pistols
were our only weapons. The crowd saw them and hung back, but if they
chose to rush us it wasn’t much of a barrier two pistols would make.
Rasta’s voice had stopped. He had done his work, and had retired to the
background. There were shouts from the crowd—“_Alleman_” and a word
“_Khafiyeh_” constantly repeated. I didn’t know what it meant at the
time, but now I know that they were after us because we were Boches and
spies. There was no love lost between the Constantinople scum and their
new masters. It seemed an ironical end for Peter and me to be done in
because we were Boches. And done in we should be. I had heard of the
East as a good place for people to disappear in; there were no
inquisitive newspapers or incorruptible police.
I wished to Heaven I had a word of Turkish. But I made my voice heard
for a second in a pause of the din, and shouted that we were German
sailors who had brought down big guns for Turkey, and were going home
next day. I asked them what the devil they thought we had done? I don’t
know if any fellow there understood German; anyhow, it only brought a
pandemonium of cries in which that ominous word _Khafiyeh_ was
predominant.
Then Peter fired over their heads. He had to, for a chap was pawing at
his throat. The answer was a clatter of bullets on the wall above us.
It looked as if they meant to take us alive, and that I was very clear
should not happen. Better a bloody end in a street scrap than the
tender mercies of that bandbox bravo.
I don’t quite know what happened next. A press drove down at me and I
fired. Someone squealed, and I looked the next moment to be strangled.
And then, suddenly, the scrimmage ceased, and there was a wavering
splash of light in that pit of darkness.
I never went through many worse minutes than these. When I had been
hunted in the past weeks there had been mystery enough, but no
immediate peril to face. When I had been up against a real, urgent,
physical risk, like Loos, the danger at any rate had been clear. One
knew what one was in for. But here was a threat I couldn’t put a name
to, and it wasn’t in the future, but pressing hard at our throats.
And yet I couldn’t feel it was quite real. The patter of the pistol
bullets against the wall, like so many crackers, the faces felt rather
than seen in the dark, the clamour which to me was pure gibberish, had
all the madness of a nightmare. Only Peter, cursing steadily in Dutch
by my side, was real. And then the light came, and made the scene more
eerie!
It came from one or two torches carried by wild fellows with long
staves who drove their way into the heart of the mob. The flickering
glare ran up the steep walls and made monstrous shadows. The wind swung
the flame into long streamers, dying away in a fan of sparks.
And now a new word was heard in the crowd. It was _Chinganeh_, shouted
not in anger but in fear.
At first I could not see the newcomers. They were hidden in the deep
darkness under their canopy of light, for they were holding their
torches high at the full stretch of their arms. They were shouting,
too, wild shrill cries ending sometimes in a gush of rapid speech.
Their words did not seem to be directed against us, but against the
crowd. A sudden hope came to me that for some unknown reason they were
on our side.
The press was no longer heavy against us. It was thinning rapidly and I
could hear the scuffle as men made off down the side streets. My first
notion was that these were the Turkish police. But I changed my mind
when the leader came out into a patch of light. He carried no torch,
but a long stave with which he belaboured the heads of those who were
too tightly packed to flee.
It was the most eldritch apparition you can conceive. A tall man
dressed in skins, with bare legs and sandal-shod feet. A wisp of
scarlet cloth clung to his shoulders, and, drawn over his head down
close to his eyes, was a skull-cap of some kind of pelt with the tail
waving behind it. He capered like a wild animal, keeping up a strange
high monotone that fairly gave me the creeps.
I was suddenly aware that the crowd had gone. Before us was only this
figure and his half-dozen companions, some carrying torches and all
wearing clothes of skin. But only the one who seemed to be their leader
wore the skull-cap; the rest had bare heads and long tangled hair.
The fellow was shouting gibberish at me. His eyes were glassy, like a
man who smokes hemp, and his legs were never still for a second. You
would think such a figure no better than a mountebank, and yet there
was nothing comic in it. Fearful and sinister and uncanny it was; and I
wanted to do anything but laugh.
As he shouted he kept pointing with his stave up the street which
climbed the hillside.
“He means us to move,” said Peter. “For God’s sake let us get away from
this witch-doctor.”
I couldn’t make sense of it, but one thing was clear. These maniacs had
delivered us for the moment from Rasta and his friends.
Then I did a dashed silly thing. I pulled out a sovereign and offered
it to the leader. I had some kind of notion of showing gratitude, and
as I had no words I had to show it by deed.
He brought his stick down on my wrist and sent the coin spinning in the
gutter. His eyes blazed, and he made his weapon sing round my head. He
cursed me—oh, I could tell cursing well enough, though I didn’t follow
a word; and he cried to his followers and they cursed me too. I had
offered him a mortal insult and stirred up a worse hornet’s nest than
Rasta’s push.
Peter and I, with a common impulse, took to our heels. We were not
looking for any trouble with demoniacs. Up the steep, narrow lane we
ran with that bedlamite crowd at our heels. The torches seemed to have
gone out, for the place was black as pitch, and we tumbled over heaps
of offal and splashed through running drains. The men were close behind
us, and more than once I felt a stick on my shoulder. But fear lent us
wings, and suddenly before us was a blaze of light and we saw the
debouchment of our street in a main thoroughfare. The others saw it,
too, for they slackened off. Just before we reached the light we
stopped and looked round. There was no sound or sight behind us in the
dark lane which dipped to the harbour.
“This is a queer country, Cornelis,” said Peter, feeling his limbs for
bruises. “Too many things happen in too short a time. I am breathless.”
The big street we had struck seemed to run along the crest of the hill.
There were lamps in it, and crawling cabs, and quite civilized-looking
shops. We soon found the hotel to which Kuprasso had directed us, a big
place in a courtyard with a very tumble-down-looking portico, and green
sun-shutters which rattled drearily in the winter’s wind. It proved, as
I had feared, to be packed to the door, mostly with German officers.
With some trouble I got an interview with the proprietor, the usual
Greek, and told him that we had been sent there by Mr Kuprasso. That
didn’t affect him in the least, and we would have been shot into the
street if I hadn’t remembered about Stumm’s pass.
So I explained that we had come from Germany with munitions and only
wanted rooms for one night. I showed him the pass and blustered a good
deal, till he became civil and said he would do the best he could for
us.
That best was pretty poor. Peter and I were doubled up in a small room
which contained two camp-beds and little else, and had broken windows
through which the wind whistled. We had a wretched dinner of stringy
mutton, boiled with vegetables, and a white cheese strong enough to
raise the dead. But I got a bottle of whisky, for which I paid a
sovereign, and we managed to light the stove in our room, fasten the
shutters, and warm our hearts with a brew of toddy. After that we went
to bed and slept like logs for twelve hours. On the road from Rustchuk
we had had uneasy slumbers.
I woke next morning and, looking out from the broken window, saw that
it was snowing. With a lot of trouble I got hold of a servant and made
him bring us some of the treacly Turkish coffee. We were both in pretty
low spirits. “Europe is a poor cold place,” said Peter, “not worth
fighting for. There is only one white man’s land, and that is South
Africa.” At the time I heartily agreed with him.
I remember that, sitting on the edge of my bed, I took stock of our
position. It was not very cheering. We seemed to have been amassing
enemies at a furious pace. First of all, there was Rasta, whom I had
insulted and who wouldn’t forget it in a hurry. He had his crowd of
Turkish riff-raff and was bound to get us sooner or later. Then there
was the maniac in the skin hat. He didn’t like Rasta, and I made a
guess that he and his weird friends were of some party hostile to the
Young Turks. But, on the other hand, he didn’t like us, and there would
be bad trouble the next time we met him. Finally, there was Stumm and
the German Government. It could only be a matter of hours at the best
before he got the Rustchuk authorities on our trail. It would be easy
to trace us from Chataldja, and once they had us we were absolutely
done. There was a big black _dossier_ against us, which by no
conceivable piece of luck could be upset.
It was very clear to me that, unless we could find sanctuary and shed
all our various pursuers during this day, we should be done in for good
and all. But where on earth were we to find sanctuary? We had neither
of us a word of the language, and there was no way I could see of
taking on new characters. For that we wanted friends and help, and I
could think of none anywhere. Somewhere, to be sure, there was
Blenkiron, but how could we get in touch with him? As for Sandy, I had
pretty well given him up. I always thought his enterprise the craziest
of the lot and bound to fail. He was probably somewhere in Asia Minor,
and a month or two later would get to Constantinople and hear in some
pot-house the yarn of the two wretched Dutchmen who had disappeared so
soon from men’s sight.
That rendezvous at Kuprasso’s was no good. It would have been all right
if we had got here unsuspected, and could have gone on quietly
frequenting the place till Blenkiron picked us up. But to do that we
wanted leisure and secrecy, and here we were with a pack of hounds at
our heels. The place was horribly dangerous already. If we showed
ourselves there we should be gathered in by Rasta, or by the German
military police, or by the madman in the skin cap. It was a stark
impossibility to hang about on the off-chance of meeting Blenkiron.
I reflected with some bitterness that this was the 17th day of January,
the day of our assignation. I had had high hopes all the way down the
Danube of meeting with Blenkiron—for I knew he would be in time—of
giving him the information I had had the good fortune to collect, of
piecing it together with what he had found out, and of getting the
whole story which Sir Walter hungered for. After that, I thought it
wouldn’t be hard to get away by Rumania, and to get home through
Russia. I had hoped to be back with my battalion in February, having
done as good a bit of work as anybody in the war. As it was, it looked
as if my information would die with me, unless I could find Blenkiron
before the evening.
I talked the thing over with Peter, and he agreed that we were fairly
up against it. We decided to go to Kuprasso’s that afternoon, and to
trust to luck for the rest. It wouldn’t do to wander about the streets,
so we sat tight in our room all morning, and swopped old hunting yarns
to keep our minds from the beastly present. We got some food at
midday—cold mutton and the same cheese, and finished our whisky. Then I
paid the bill, for I didn’t dare to stay there another night. About
half-past three we went into the street, without the foggiest notion
where we would find our next quarters.
It was snowing heavily, which was a piece of luck for us. Poor old
Peter had no greatcoat, so we went into a Jew’s shop and bought a
ready-made abomination, which looked as if it might have been meant for
a dissenting parson. It was no good saving my money when the future was
so black. The snow made the streets deserted, and we turned down the
long lane which led to Ratchik ferry, and found it perfectly quiet. I
do not think we met a soul till we got to Kuprasso’s shop.
We walked straight through the cafe, which was empty, and down the dark
passage, till we were stopped by the garden door. I knocked and it
swung open. There was the bleak yard, now puddled with snow, and a
blaze of light from the pavilion at the other end. There was a scraping
of fiddles, too, and the sound of human talk. We paid the negro at the
door, and passed from the bitter afternoon into a garish saloon.
There were forty or fifty people there, drinking coffee and sirops and
filling the air with the fumes of latakia. Most of them were Turks in
European clothes and the fez, but there were some German officers and
what looked like German civilians—Army Service Corps clerks, probably,
and mechanics from the Arsenal. A woman in cheap finery was tinkling at
the piano, and there were several shrill females with the officers.
Peter and I sat down modestly in the nearest corner, where old Kuprasso
saw us and sent us coffee. A girl who looked like a Jewess came over to
us and talked French, but I shook my head and she went off again.
Presently a girl came on the stage and danced, a silly affair, all a
clashing of tambourines and wriggling. I have seen native women do the
same thing better in a Mozambique kraal. Another sang a German song, a
simple, sentimental thing about golden hair and rainbows, and the
Germans present applauded. The place was so tinselly and common that,
coming to it from weeks of rough travelling, it made me impatient. I
forgot that, while for the others it might be a vulgar little
dancing-hall, for us it was as perilous as a brigands’ den.
Peter did not share my mood. He was quite interested in it, as he was
interested in everything new. He had a genius for living in the moment.
I remember there was a drop-scene on which was daubed a blue lake with
very green hills in the distance. As the tobacco smoke grew thicker and
the fiddles went on squealing, this tawdry picture began to mesmerize
me. I seemed to be looking out of a window at a lovely summer landscape
where there were no wars or danger. I seemed to feel the warm sun and
to smell the fragrance of blossom from the islands. And then I became
aware that a queer scent had stolen into the atmosphere.
There were braziers burning at both ends to warm the room, and the thin
smoke from these smelt like incense. Somebody had been putting a powder
in the flames, for suddenly the place became very quiet. The fiddles
still sounded, but far away like an echo. The lights went down, all but
a circle on the stage, and into that circle stepped my enemy of the
skin cap.
He had three others with him. I heard a whisper behind me, and the
words were those which Kuprasso had used the day before. These
bedlamites were called the Companions of the Rosy Hours, and Kuprasso
had promised great dancing.
I hoped to goodness they would not see us, for they had fairly given me
the horrors. Peter felt the same, and we both made ourselves very small
in that dark corner. But the newcomers had no eyes for us.
In a twinkling the pavilion changed from a common saloon, which might
have been in Chicago or Paris, to a place of mystery—yes, and of
beauty. It became the Garden-House of Suliman the Red, whoever that
sportsman may have been. Sandy had said that the ends of the earth
converged there, and he had been right. I lost all consciousness of my
neighbours—stout German, frock-coated Turk, frowsy Jewess—and saw only
strange figures leaping in a circle of light, figures that came out of
the deepest darkness to make a big magic.
The leader flung some stuff into the brazier, and a great fan of blue
light flared up. He was weaving circles, and he was singing something
shrill and high, whilst his companions made a chorus with their deep
monotone. I can’t tell you what the dance was. I had seen the Russian
ballet just before the war, and one of the men in it reminded me of
this man. But the dancing was the least part of it. It was neither
sound nor movement nor scent that wrought the spell, but something far
more potent. In an instant I found myself reft away from the present
with its dull dangers, and looking at a world all young and fresh and
beautiful. The gaudy drop-scene had vanished. It was a window I was
looking from, and I was gazing at the finest landscape on earth, lit by
the pure clean light of morning.
It seemed to be part of the veld, but like no veld I had ever seen. It
was wider and wilder and more gracious. Indeed, I was looking at my
first youth. I was feeling the kind of immortal light-heartedness which
only a boy knows in the dawning of his days. I had no longer any fear
of these magic-makers. They were kindly wizards, who had brought me
into fairyland.
Then slowly from the silence there distilled drops of music. They came
like water falling a long way into a cup, each the essential quality of
pure sound. We, with our elaborate harmonies, have forgotten the charm
of single notes. The African natives know it, and I remember a learned
man once telling me that the Greeks had the same art. Those silver
bells broke out of infinite space, so exquisite and perfect that no
mortal words could have been fitted to them. That was the music, I
expect, that the morning stars made when they sang together.
Slowly, very slowly, it changed. The glow passed from blue to purple,
and then to an angry red. Bit by bit the notes spun together till they
had made a harmony—a fierce, restless harmony. And I was conscious
again of the skin-clad dancers beckoning out of their circle.
There was no mistake about the meaning now. All the daintiness and
youth had fled, and passion was beating the air—terrible, savage
passion, which belonged neither to day nor night, life nor death, but
to the half-world between them. I suddenly felt the dancers as
monstrous, inhuman, devilish. The thick scents that floated from the
brazier seemed to have a tang of new-shed blood. Cries broke from the
hearers—cries of anger and lust and terror. I heard a woman sob, and
Peter, who is as tough as any mortal, took tight hold of my arm.
I now realized that these Companions of the Rosy Hours were the only
thing in the world to fear. Rasta and Stumm seemed feeble simpletons by
contrast. The window I had been looking out of was changed to a prison
wall—I could see the mortar between the massive blocks. In a second
these devils would be smelling out their enemies like some foul
witch-doctors. I felt the burning eyes of their leader looking for me
in the gloom. Peter was praying audibly beside me, and I could have
choked him. His infernal chatter would reveal us, for it seemed to me
that there was no one in the place except us and the magic-workers.
Then suddenly the spell was broken. The door was flung open and a great
gust of icy wind swirled through the hall, driving clouds of ashes from
the braziers. I heard loud voices without, and a hubbub began inside.
For a moment it was quite dark, and then someone lit one of the flare
lamps by the stage. It revealed nothing but the common squalor of a low
saloon—white faces, sleepy eyes, and frowsy heads. The drop-piece was
there in all its tawdriness.
The Companions of the Rosy Hours had gone. But at the door stood men in
uniform, I heard a German a long way off murmur, “Enver’s bodyguards,”
and I heard him distinctly; for, though I could not see clearly, my
hearing was desperately acute. That is often the way when you suddenly
come out of a swoon.
The place emptied like magic. Turk and German tumbled over each other,
while Kuprasso wailed and wept. No one seemed to stop them, and then I
saw the reason. Those Guards had come for us. This must be Stumm at
last. The authorities had tracked us down, and it was all up with Peter
and me.
A sudden revulsion leaves a man with a low vitality. I didn’t seem to
care greatly. We were done, and there was an end of it. It was Kismet,
the act of God, and there was nothing for it but to submit. I hadn’t a
flicker of a thought of escape or resistance. The game was utterly and
absolutely over.
A man who seemed to be a sergeant pointed to us and said something to
Kuprasso, who nodded. We got heavily to our feet and stumbled towards
them. With one on each side of us we crossed the yard, walked through
the dark passage and the empty shop, and out into the snowy street.
There was a closed carriage waiting which they motioned us to get into.
It looked exactly like the Black Maria.
Both of us sat still, like truant schoolboys, with our hands on our
knees. I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t care. We seemed to
be rumbling up the hill, and then I caught the glare of lighted
streets.
“This is the end of it, Peter,” I said.
“_Ja_, Cornelis,” he replied, and that was all our talk.
By and by—hours later it seemed—we stopped. Someone opened the door and
we got out, to find ourselves in a courtyard with a huge dark building
around. The prison, I guessed, and I wondered if they would give us
blankets, for it was perishing cold.
We entered a door, and found ourselves in a big stone hall. It was
quite warm, which made me more hopeful about our cells. A man in some
kind of uniform pointed to the staircase, up which we plodded wearily.
My mind was too blank to take clear impressions, or in any way to
forecast the future. Another warder met us and took us down a passage
till we halted at a door. He stood aside and motioned us to enter.
I guessed that this was the governor’s room, and we should be put
through our first examination. My head was too stupid to think, and I
made up my mind to keep perfectly mum. Yes, even if they tried
thumbscrews. I had no kind of story, but I resolved not to give
anything away. As I turned the handle I wondered idly what kind of
sallow Turk or bulging-necked German we should find inside.
It was a pleasant room, with a polished wood floor and a big fire
burning on the hearth. Beside the fire a man lay on a couch, with a
little table drawn up beside him. On that table was a small glass of
milk and a number of Patience cards spread in rows.
I stared blankly at the spectacle, till I saw a second figure. It was
the man in the skin-cap, the leader of the dancing maniacs. Both Peter
and I backed sharply at the sight and then stood stock still.
For the dancer crossed the room in two strides and gripped both of my
hands.
“Dick, old man,” he cried, “I’m most awfully glad to see you again!”