Part 8

For an instant he was bemused, and one who passed by heard him muttering broken words. "The long way round," he murmured; "the lattice of Zobeida--a caravan of camels laden with sweetmeats--dog and the son of a dog." Then a wind passed over his face, and it seemed to him that he had been thinking foolishly. "Well for me," he replied, "that I went not round by the house of Zobeida. For the time is short and I too am called." And with that he crossed over, making haste that he might reach the other side before the marching column blocked the street.

The house of the Interpreter was built after the European fashion, and on the door was a large brass knocker after the manner of the Franks. Abdulla stretched forth his hand, and was about to raise the knocker when one plucked him by the sleeve. Turning round he saw a man in the uniform of an officer of artillery.

"Wherefore hast thou not reported thyself?" said the officer. "Thy name was called two days ago, and verily thou runnest a risk of being shot."

"O my master, a bewilderment hath overtaken me," said Abdulla, "so that I forget all things and know not the day from the night. Lo, even now, I seek the Interpreter of Dreams that the matter may be resolved."

"Thou art in a way to have thy dreams interpreted by a bullet through the brain," said the officer. "Leave then thy dreaming and hold thy peace; or, by Allah, I will proclaim thy cowardice forthwith and order thy arrest. Fall in!"

Abdulla had no choice. A moment later he was marching in step with a squad of reservists who followed in the rear of the guns.

As the column passed down the street a veiled woman stepped out from the edge of the crowd, and, taking three paces by the side of Abdulla, whispered in his ear:

"Play the man."

* * * * *

They were now at the station, entraining for the seat of war. The carriages were crowded with shouting soldiery, and many, unable to find room within, had clambered on the roofs. Among these was Abdulla, crouching silent.

Suddenly a man in European costume forced his way along the platform and called him by name.

"Art thou Abdulla, the water-seller of Damascus?" said the man.

"I am he."

"Come down, then, that I may speak with thee. And hasten, for the time is short."

"Stay thou behind and let these go," said the European, when Abdulla had descended from the roof. "I will purchase thy release from the Pasha. Nay, the matter is already arranged, and none of these will hinder thee if thou stayest."

"And wherefore should I do this?" asked Abdulla.

"For a weighty and good reason," said the European. "Know that the fame of thee has reached to London, to Paris, to New York. Thou art spoken of as one who hath a power upon thee which may aid in opening up the things that have been hidden from the foundation of the earth. And the probers of secrets have sent me that I may search thee out, and engage thee at a great salary, and take thee with me to the seats of the learned and the cities of the West."

"Thou art in error," said Abdulla, "for power such as thou speakest of belongeth not to me. Of a truth, I am one who walketh in a great bewilderment, and the spirit of forgetfulness hath overpowered me. But withal I am a common man, of whom Allah hath created millions, and it was but yesterday I was seeking the Interpreter of Dreams, that I might pay him the fee and have the matter resolved."

"I am the Interpreter of Dreams whom thou soughtest," said the other, "and I dwell in the house built in the European fashion, with the great knocker of brass, after the manner of the Franks."

"Thy name?" said Abdulla.

"My name is Professor----"--but an escape of steam from the panting locomotive drowned the next word,--"and I am come from London to fetch thee."

"I go not with thee," said Abdulla, "for thou seemest to be one whom the Deluder of Intelligence is leading astray. I have but dreams to tell thee; and if thou wantest dreams, hast thou none of thine own? Verily, a dream is but a little thing."

"Thou errest," shouted the other--for Abdulla had now climbed back on to the roof,--"a dream is a thing more wonderful than aught else the Creator hath appointed, and there is none among the sons of Adam who understandeth the coming and the going thereof. But if thou wilt come with me----"

The Interpreter broke off in the middle of his sentence, for the train was moving out of the station, and he saw that Abdulla could no longer hear the words.

* * * * *

The battery to which Abdulla was attached lay in a hollow to the rear of the main battle, awaiting orders to take up a position in the front. It was the first time he had been under fire. Dead bodies, horridly mangled, lay around, and a straggling throng of wounded men, some silent, some unmanned by agony, and all terrible to look upon, was passing by. As Abdulla saw these things, the fear of death grew strong within him. His body trembled and his face was blanched.

Seeing his state his companions began to deride him. Presently a gaily dressed officer, passing where he was, paused in front of him, and drawing a small mirror from his pocket held it in front of the trembling man, and said:

"Look in this, O Abdulla, and thou wilt see the face of a coward."

Abdulla looked in the mirror and saw there the very face which had confronted him not long ago in the shop window of the Greek.

The soldiers around him burst into a roar of laughter as Abdulla looked in the mirror; but he heard them not.

He was busy in inward colloquy. "O thou that tremblest in thy body," he was saying to himself, "O Abdulla the coward, hearken unto me. Behold yon rider coming swiftly, and know, O thou craven carcase, that he bringeth the order to advance. Thinkest thou to stay behind, and then run away stealthily, and get thee back to thy water-selling in Damascus and to thy dallyings with a woman? Yea, verily, thou thinkest it; and even now contrivest within thyself how thou mayest steal away and not be seen. But know thou that I who speak to thee will suffer not thy cowardice. I will force thee presently to carry thy trembling limbs to yonder line, whence come these whom thou seest in their pain. Thither will I take thee, and I will hold thee fast in a place where death cometh to four of every five. Not a step backward shalt thou go. Nay, rather, I will blow a flame through thy nostrils into the marrow of thy bones, driving thee forward, until I have thee firm in the very hottest of the fire. See, the signal rises! Hark, the trumpet sounds! Up then, thou quaking carrion, for thy hour is come.--Well done! Those behind thee are taking note that thou tremblest no more! By Allah, I have conquered thee and have thee utterly in my power!"

Every man was in his place. Abdulla, firm and ready, the rebuking voice now silent within him, sat on the leading gun-horse; the traces that bound it to the gun were already taut, and the whip-hand of the driver was aloft in air. The word is given, the whips descend, and the whole thundering train of men and beasts, with Abdulla at its head, sweeps forward to the place of sacrifice.

* * * * *

The battle was lost, and the long ridge on which Abdulla's battery had been posted was carpeted with dead and dying men. A pall of yellow smoke, broken from moment to moment by the flashes of exploding shrapnel, hung over the ridge, and a blazing house immediately behind the position shed a copper-coloured glare over the appalling scene. A cold and cursed rain was falling, and stricken men, in extremities of thirst, were lapping pools of water defiled with their own blood.

Of the twelve guns that formed the battery, all were dismantled save one, and by this there stood a solitary man, the only upright figure from end to end of the ridge. It was Abdulla. For five hours he had done his duty untouched by shot, shell, or bayonet. He had continued the service of his gun till the last round of ammunition was expended; and when a cry arose among the survivors that they should save themselves, he had watched the last stragglers depart and refused to stir from his post. And now he stood inactive and motionless, alone in a copper-coloured wilderness of agony and death.

Twice the enemy had attempted by desperate charges to storm the hill, and, save for the lull in the artillery fire which preceded these attacks, the work of death had hardly ceased for a moment. Even now it still went on, slaying those who were half slain. Unable to see clearly the state of things on the ridge, or behind it, and unaware that the defence was totally annihilated, the enemy had hardly slackened his fire. Scores of shrapnel were bursting overhead, and the singing of the rifle bullets was like the hum of bees in swarming time. As the shells exploded and the pitiless missiles came thrashing down, Abdulla noticed how, after each explosion, some portion of the human carpet would toss and undulate for a moment, as though the wind had got under it, and then subside again into its place. The numbness and exhaustion of other faculties had liberated his powers of observation, and at that moment they were abnormally acute.

Fear, even the memory of fear, had long departed, and of mental distress there was none, save a sense of immobility and powerlessness, such as a man may have in an ugly dream. Abdulla leaned on the wheel of the gun-carriage, gazing on the scene around him as a spectacle to be studied; and he watched the shells bursting overhead with no more concern than he would have felt for a passing flight of birds. He was aware of his utter loneliness, and now and then a slight stir of self-compassion would ripple the lucid depths of his consciousness. With a certain repugnance, also, he noticed the copper-coloured light, which shed its glare in every direction as far as he could see.

The tensest hours of his life, during which he had exerted his body with furious energy, and his senses had been incessantly assailed with every kind of shock, had ended in a feeling, amounting almost to conviction, that the events in which he had participated, the deeds he had done, and the spectacle now before him were the tissue of a dream.

Blustering facts that bludgeon and bombard the senses, often provoke us, by the very violence of their self-announcement, to suspect them as illusory. Reality is a low-voiced, soft-footed thing; a mean between two extremes, clothed at all times in the garments of modesty and reserve, which neither strives nor cries nor lifts up its voice in the streets. But when the gods are drunk and the heavens in uproar, and the thing called "fact" is unrestrained, ranting and storming about the stage like an ill-mannered actor--then it is that the cup begins to pass away from us, and a still small voice whispers within that the whole performance is a masquerade.

Thus had it happened to Abdulla. Dreamer as he was, he had never yet been able to detect himself in the act of dreaming. But now the waking state was over-wakeful, and at the very moment when each nerve in his body was strung to utmost tension, and the sense organs in full commission, and fact in its most brutal form thundering on the gates of his mind, there came to him a calm that was more than vacancy, a conviction that he was in the land of dreams, and a peaceful foreshadowing that he would soon awake.

"And yet," he thought, "it is weary work, this waiting for the spell to break. Ha, that one would have done it, had I stood a span further to the left! Why cannot they wake me? Are not a hundred pieces of artillery sufficient to rouse one solitary man from his dreams? Stay! What if I am wakened already? And what if this be hell? If so, is it so much worse than earth? But please Allah that I stand not thus for all eternity, waiting for the dream to pass. Ah! I was hit that time"--and he put his hand to the region of his heart. "A mere graze. Perhaps the next will do better. Allah send me a thing to do! Ho, thou Selim! Hast thou life in thee to stand upright and do a thing? I saw thee raise thyself a moment ago. If thou hast strength, bestir thyself a little, and thou and I will find another round, and fire a last shot before we pass."

Selim the courier was lying behind the gun with a dozen others, dead or wounded to death. Abdulla had hardly finished speaking when a shrapnel burst over the heap, and Selim, who had been lying face downward on the top, flung himself round in the last agony. As the bullets struck, the whole heap seemed to disperse, the bodies spreading outward into a ring with a hollow space in the midst.

Then Abdulla saw a thing that caused his heart to leap for joy. Lying in the hollow made by the dispersion of the bodies was a round of ammunition which some man had been carrying at the moment he was stricken down, and which had hitherto been covered up by the dead. At the sight of it, a sudden inspiration fell like a thunderbolt upon Abdulla's dream. The sense of immobility was gone. "By Allah, thou art alive and awake!" he cried, addressing himself. "Quick, thou slave of a body! Thou hast yet strength in thee to open the breech-piece of the gun, and the cartridge is not so heavy but that these arms can lift it. Up, then, and act!"

He sprang forward. Quick as thought he seized the cartridge and carried his burden back to the gun.

Then he stretched forth his hand to grasp the lever which controlled the mechanism of the breech. But before his fingers closed on the metal he paused for the briefest instant to look around him. In one glance he took in the whole scene in all its extent and detail--the long ridge under the copper-coloured light, the carpet of moaning or silent forms, the dead body of Selim, the dismantled guns, the valley below, the enemy's position on the further side, and the red spurts of flame from his artillery. He noted also that the rain had ceased and the setting sun had broken through the cloud.

Then, on a sudden, the vast view seemed to fall away into an immeasurable distance, and, as a landscape contracts when seen from the wrong end of the telescope, drew inwards from its edges with incredible rapidity until it occupied no more space than is enclosed by the circumference of the smallest coin. And in the same flash of time it was gone altogether.

As it went, Abdulla felt his fingers close on the cold metal.

They closed on the metal, and Abdulla saw without the least surprise that the thing he held in his hand was the knocker of brass on the door of the Interpreter of Dreams.

* * * * *

He knew no shock, asked himself no questions, perceived no breach of continuity. He lifted the knocker, and its fall sounded in the street of Damascus at the very instant that the boom of the bursting shell, which had blown the water-seller to fragments, was reverberating over Tchatalja.

Abdulla knocked. As he waited for the door to open he looked up and down the street. He had arrived in Damascus overnight, and his surroundings were yet strange to him. Nevertheless, as he continued to look at the houses and the passers-by, a suspicion crossed his mind that he had been in this place before. "Perhaps I have dreamed of such a place," he thought. "But surely the face of yonder man is familiar. Where did I see one like him? In Paris? In London? Ho thou, with the courier's badge on thine arm! A word with thee."

The man paused at the doorstep, and Abdulla looked him full in the face. Instantly his mind became confused, his tongue began to stammer, and he heard himself speaking of he knew not what. "Hast thou life in thee?" he said. "If so, bestir thyself and thou and I----" But the words broke off, and Abdulla stood mouthing.

"Thou babblest like one intoxicated," said the man. "May Allah preserve thy wits!" And he passed on.

The door opened, and Abdulla's mind became clear. A moment later he stood in the presence of the Interpreter of Dreams.

"Who art thou?" said the Interpreter, "and what is the occasion of thy coming?"

"I am a Cairene," said Abdulla, "born of Syrian parentage in this city, but taken hence when I was an infant of five years. I am come to Damascus for a purpose which thou and I have in common. I, too, am a student of dreams."

"Of which kind?" asked the Interpreter. "For know that dreams are of two kinds: dreams of the worlds that were, and dreams of the worlds that are to be. Of which hast thou knowledge?"

"Of a world that was," said Abdulla.

"Thou hast chosen a thankless study," answered the other. "Few will trust thy discoveries. For a thousand who will believe thee if thou teachest of a world that is to be, there is scarce one who will listen if thou speakest of a world that was. But tell me thy history, and name thy qualifications."

"I have been educated in the Universities of the West," said Abdulla, "and there I sat at the feet of one who taught me a doctrine which he had learnt from a master of the ancient time. And the doctrine was this: that worlds without end lie enfolded one within the other like the petals of a rose; and the next world after differs from the next world before no more than a full water-skin differs from itself when two drops of water have fallen from its mouth. 'The world,' taught the master, 'is a memory and a dream, and at every stage of its existence it beholds the image of its past and the fainter image of its future reflected as in a glass.'"

"And why makest thou the world that was before of more account than the world that comes after?"

"I said not that I made it of more account," answered Abdulla, "but that my knowledge was of this rather than of that. But know that I am a dreamer of dreams, and it is the world before that my dreams have revealed to me."

"Tell me thy dreams."

"It is of them that I came to speak with thee. There is one dream that ever recurreth both in the day and the night. Seventy times seven have I seen a frayed water-skin, having a hole in a certain part, no larger than an olive-stone."

"That is a small matter," said the Interpreter, "and such things concern us not. But I suspect that thou art not at the end of thy story. For, verily, thou hast not travelled from the cities of the West to speak of a thing so slight. Say, therefore, what has brought thee to Damascus."

"That also I would tell thee; for it is a matter to be pondered. Thou art of the wise, and knowest, therefore, that there is a virtue in places and a power in localities. In one, the light of the soul is extinguished; in another, it is kindled; in one, the reason dies; in another, the half-thought becomes a whole, and the doctrine that is dimly apprehended becomes clear. Now, being in the city of Paris, I conversed with one of the French who had visited the holy places of his religion, where he had meditated in solitude and seen visions and dreamed dreams; and I told him that I had a doctrine newly born, half grown. 'O Abdulla,' he said, 'there is a virtue in places and a power in localities. Go thou, therefore, to the city of Damascus, for that is a place where, in days that are gone, the half-thought became a whole, and the doctrine dimly apprehended became clear. Put thyself on the way to Damascus and await the issue.'"

At these words the Interpreter rose from his seat and paced the room in thought.

"The man of whom thou speakest," he said at length, "is known to me; and many are they whom he has guided to this place. Rightly sayest thou that there is a virtue in places and a power in localities. And here the power still lingers which the world lost when mankind took to babbling. Thy reason for coming hither is mine also. Seest thou not that I have made my dwelling in the Street that is called Straight?"

"I see and understand," said Abdulla.

There was another pause, and again the Interpreter paced the room. Then he resumed:

"Between thee and me there is need of little speech to attain a comprehension, and the short sentence meaneth more than the long explanation. Nevertheless, I would fain hear the rest of thy story. Proceed then, and tell me of the dreams that came to thee on the way to Damascus."

"On the way itself," said Abdulla, "there came no dreams. But this very day I sat by the bank of the river, full of thought, and methinks sleep overpowered me--though I know not. And there came a poor man carrying a water-skin, and I, looking upon him, saw that his face was like unto mine own, but marred by his toil and his poverty. And the man sat himself down, leaning against a palm-tree on the side away from the sun, and slept. Then I arose and stood before him, and expounded to him my doctrine, and he seemed as one that saw and heard, though asleep. And when his eyes were opened he saw me no more, but took up his water-skin and filled it at the river, making mention of the name of God.

"I followed him into the city, and saw one thrust him against the wall so that his water-skin was frayed. Thereafter the water-skin burst, and a hole appeared in a certain part the size of an olive-stone, and the remnant of the water flowed forth. But, passing a certain street, a woman called to him to give her little ones to drink. And I, being hard by, and seeming to know the woman, whispered to the man that he should pass his hands craftily over the skin, if peradventure a drop remained to moisten the lips of them that cried out for the thirst. But none remained, and the man went on his way sorrowing.

"Then I lost him for a while; but as night fell I found him again, standing in front of a glass window and meditating a thing that was dishonest. And the man looking through the window saw me standing among the goods that were in the shop. Whereupon he changed his design and ran away.

"I wandered through the streets of the city, and passing by a certain house, a frivolous woman looked out from a lattice and reviled me. I understood not the things that she spake, and having answered the woman I departed. Then I bethought me that she had taken me for another, and, remembering that the face of the water-seller was like unto mine own, I surmised that it was he.

"Suddenly, I know not how, I found myself in a place of battle, armed like the rest, and, turning aside, I saw, standing among the harnessed horses of a gun-team, the man whose water-selling I had watched in the city. And the spirit of fear was upon him; his countenance was blanched and his body all aquake; and I, ashamed that one who bore my own semblance should stand disgraced among his fellows, rebuked him for his cowardice; and methought I blew a fire through his nostrils into the marrow of his bones. Then the man took courage and, mounting his horse with alacrity, went forward with the bravest to the place of death.

"Thereafter I saw him no more. But this very hour, even as I lifted thy knocker of brass, a great light shone round about me, a sound of thunder shook the air, and a voice said, 'Lo! thy broken water-skin is mended and full of water. Go forth, therefore, and give to them that are athirst.' Whereupon it seemed to me that the half-thought became a whole, and the doctrine that was dimly apprehended grew clear. And now I am a man prepared to go forward, even as he was into whom I blew the breath of courage on the field of death. A thing that was holding me back is gone from me, and lo! I am free."

"Perchance one has ministered unto thee, even as thou didst minister to that other in the hour when he was afraid," said the Interpreter.

"That may be," said Abdulla. "But did I not tell thee that as yet I have no knowledge of the world that will be?"