Part 28

"159 Convalescent Patients were taken out for Drives, and nearly all of them given tea at the Nouzah Gardens--"

"I wonder," Katharine began, after watching the long thin hand move over the paper for a minute or so, "whether you ought to be doing that?"

Lady Wastwood's incredibly arched, impossibly-black eyebrows moved nearer her green-golden hair.

"Because my heart goes biff after a ducking, I resolutely decline to be treated as an invalid. Isn't it bad enough to know that another woman is doing my work of organisation at the Convalescent Officers' Hostel at El Naza--and doing it on rottenly unimaginative lines! A woman more than a dozen years younger,--who learned from me in the days of flapperdom how to camouflage a shiny nose? No, you mustn't try to take my work from me. It helps me to forget my unrealised visions of green lawns of rabbia shaded with palms and dotted with snow white sleeping tents, and golden haired English nurses in pale blue linen overalls, ministering to hundreds of weary War-worn men."

"But the nurses mightn't all have been golden-haired," objected Katharine.

"Peroxide," said Lady Wastwood, brainily, "is fairly cheap in Egypt. And I know a Contractor who would have supplied it in seven gallon glass jars." Her small triangular face regained its old vivacity, and her green eyes their brilliancy as she pursued: "Then, I meant, to have a restaurant built far out on the sea shore, where the surf ran up under the tables as the patients sat at lunch, or tea. Rowing, riding and fishing, camel-rides and picnics would have been part of the treatment under my _régime_. And now--" Trixie's voice wobbled a little and she cautiously dabbed with a minute lawn handkerchief at the corners of her bright green eyes--"when I think of all those Convalescent Officers and what they have lost through Me, I get pippy. To have pulled the thing through and made a success of it would have got back my credit with Wastwood and the boys."

"My dear!" Katharine began, and hesitated: "You don't believe _really_--"

Trixie dabbed her eyes again,--and dabbed her nose as an afterthought, and resolutely put away the handkerchief.

"I don't quite think Wastwood--my husband--would judge me hardly. He took me three times round the world with him, and though I was a jelly of terror all the time at sea, I somehow managed to camouflage my cowardice. It's only when I remember how I groused on that ship that I imagine I can hear my Jerry saying to his brother: 'Old Man, I don't half like to say it, but the Mums is rather letting us down ... What?' And Wastwood--"

"If Wastwood or Jerry said anything so unjust," Katharine broke out, "they ought to--to be thoroughly well spanked--both of them!" She went on as Trixie reluctantly yielded to laughter, "I don't know whether you've found it out yet,--but Nurse-Superintendent Bulleyne is in charge of No. 2 Ground Floor Ward at the Harem. And she has told Lady Donnithorpe and every one else here how--when the Incendiary Bomb from the Zeppelin dropped through the roof of No. 100, West Central Square--where you used to have your Red Cross Work Rooms,--and killed two poor orderlies, and dear Alicia Macintosh!--you went into action with sand-boxes and water-buckets, and fire-extinguishers,--and saved the place from being burned out! ..."

"That was nothing to brag about," declared Trixie. "Things that go off with a bang and a piff never much frighten me, and anyone with an iota of sense knows what to do in a fire. But shipwreck"--she shuddered "and drowning--"

Katharine saw the look on the white triangular face, and came to Trixie's side protectingly. Ever since the sinking of the Hospital Transport _Loyalty_, the terrible experience had been renewed in Lady Wastwood's nightly dreams. She looked frailer and more startlingly attenuated than ever, as she sat among the ledgers heading a fresh sheet of foolscap:

MONTANA WAR LIBRARY--AUGUST, 1917

Requisitions received ........................... 288 Hospitals, Depôts, etc., supplied ............... 73 Bound books ..................................... 1,000 Papers .......................................... 1,190

_Lent to Patients, Montana, and Auxiliary Canvas Convalescent Camps, Boulboul and Osra_

Magazines ....................................... 1,866 Penny Stories ................................... 647 Periodicals ..................................... 8,904 Bridge, Whist and Poker ......................... 10,966 Blighties ....................................... 19,230 French and Italian Books ........................ 30 Political Economy, Works on ..................... 1 Poetry .......................................... 4 Classics ........................................ 0

GIFTS OF BOOKS FOR THE MONTH

_The Kiss That Changed The World_--By Massy B. M'Dudgeon ............................. 1 copy

_Pond and Pink Powder_--By Gertie Stumps ... 1 copy

_Sermons For War Time_--By the Bishop of Bayswater ............................. 100 copies

"Come now, you really have done enough. Stop at the Bishop."

"I wish he would pay the freightage on his stupid sermons. Forty piastres to pay on the parcel. And he expects to be thanked for it. Well, I'll knock off if you'll come and laze with me for a bit in the garden.... Do I shine? I feel like it!"

Trixie gathered up her long thin limbs, stood up and produced a vanity-case.

"Here and there.... But every one does.... I'm beginning to get used to it. No! I'm not coming to smoke your new Macedonian cigarettes, and have iced-tea with lemon in the garden this afternoon. You are coming to tea with me, in the house of a great friend of mine."

"Who is your friend?" asked Trixie, intent on the little circular mirror.

"A Jew."

"I rather like Jews. Where does your friend live?"

"Numero VII., Rue el Farad, Alexandria. His house," Katharine went on, quoting John Hazel, "is one of the few relics extant of the ancient city, a wonderfully-preserved example of the Roman-Egyptian Domestic Style."

"'I guess I shall admire to come,' as that American Nursing-Sister said when you asked her to drive to the Antoniadis Gardens. And is your friend like his house--a wonderfully preserved example of the ancient what-do-you-call-it style?"

Katharine answered promptly and warmly:

"He certainly is a wonderfully-preserved example of unspoiled Faith, and unstained Honour, and old-world Loyalty."

"How nice!" said Lady Wastwood, sweetly. But she said to herself: "I would never have believed it--Kathy Forbis being Kathy Forbis. But--if she is able to forget poor Edward Yaill, even for a wonderfully-preserved example of all the old-world virtues, with shiny jet-black curls and a curly profile--it would be--for her, poor girl--rather a good thing."

VII

He was not in the waiting car before the guarded entrance to the Hospital, as Katharine and Lady Wastwood gave the pass to the sentry, and stepped forth upon the dusty metalled road.

The car proved a large, white-enamelled Clement-Talbot of some 22 h.p., luxuriously appointed and finished exquisitely as a gun. The chauffeur was a mahogany-skinned, almond-eyed Egyptian, in a crimson felt _tarbûsh_ and snow-white silver-braided native livery. The attendant, a grave, middle-aged man, with long curling side-locks and olive aquiline features,--who stood by the car door, imperturbably waiting the arrival of the ladies, wore the plain black _kaftan_ and high black felt cap distinctive of many middle-class Jews in the East.

The machine ran like oil along the seventeen miles of dusty metalled roads lying between the green foliage and verdure of Montana and the great fortified Egyptian seaport,--in its environs of palm-groves and fig-gardens, tennis-lawns and golf-grounds; its streets (roaring with motor-lorries; grid-ironed with tram-lines; rattling with hack-_gharis_ and _arabâyis_ full of English, French or Italians, their drivers kept from running people over by the red-fezzed mahogany-hued Military Police)--traversed by swinging processions of laden camels, strings of tiny overladen donkeys, Arab hawkers, stately veiled women with clashing silver anklets, Anglo-Egyptian ladies in last season's Paris fashions; soldiers of the Egyptian Army, sherbet and sweetmeat and coffee-sellers; gangs of blue-uniformed Turkish prisoners; working-parties of the indefatigable little men of the Egyptian Labour Corps; portly native stockbrokers or merchants in the red _tarbûsh_ and single-breasted blue frock-coat; _saisis_, vendors of antiques made yesterday, Dagoes and Bedwân chiefs; verminous and crazy beggars; impish native youths and urchins pressing copies of the _Alexandrian Post_, and the _Egyptian Mail_, _John Bull_, _La Bourse_, the _Messagéro_, the _Sydney Bulletin_ and the _Palestine Gazette_, upon tall Australians in slouched felt hats, New Zealanders in red-banded smashers, lean, bearded Indian Lancers, little Ghurka Riflemen, and newly-arrived Tommies with comparatively pink-and-white faces; respectfully lavish of drinks and sticky native sweetmeats to veterans bronzed to the colour of their own khaki by the suns and dust-winds of the Desert and Palestine....

A huge, endless, living screen-picture, various and polyglot, backed and reinforced by an infinite variety of smells.... Colours of all imaginable hues; scents and reeks, stinks and fragrances. The hiss and purr, the nasal whine of Oriental tongues, mingled with the Western click and rattle, and the clang and ring of the dominating North.... Pierced by the all-pervading yell, for backsheesh, Backsheesh, BACKSHEESH!--the never-ceasing slogan of the dominated East.

Beyond the crossing where the Road of the Rosetta Gate debouches into the Rue Sherif Pasha,--whither Trixie's inward being yearned because of the cream-puffs, pink-melon ices, and Persian tea to be had at Groppi's Restaurant,--the big white car swirled into the Rue el Farad, past the beautiful tree-adorned and well-kept grounds of the Armenian Church and School.

The thoroughfare occupies the ancient site of the Street of the Four Winds, south of where used to be the quadruple marble gate, the Tetrapylon, turning off the ancient Street of the Moon. No asphalte was here, but pavement of huge blocks of ancient flagstone, not all cemented together, on which the traffic of the city, the motor-lorries, hack-_gharis_, country-carts and trains of laden small-hoofed donkeys, made an atrocious sound.... Tall palms, overtopping the roofs of the houses set at intervals on either side of the thoroughfare, spoke of garden-grounds behind them.... Here and there, built into a courtyard-wall, some chipped and broken column, or capital of Græco-Roman carving, some incised stele of yellowish limestone-marble, black basalt or the red granite of Assouan, incised with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the symbols of the Sun, and Moon Mother, spoke to the remoteness of the city's antiquity....

Midway of a courtyard-wall, forbiddingly high and thickly whitewashed, before a high closed portico having a deep square depression on the right-hand as though a sculptured slab or plaque had been removed from beside the entrance, the Clement-Talbot stopped. The heavy, green-painted door bore, in its central compartment of white, red Hebrew lettering instead of an Arabic inscription; the Roman numerals VII. were on a small brass plate above the heavy metal ring surmounting the huge clumsy lock, a lock straight out of _The Arabian Nights_....

The grave attendant got down and opened the car. Alighting, Katharine and her companion passed in, over a square of ancient mosaic, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a chain attached to a scarlet collar, and displaying a formidable mouthful of teeth.

The vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was of yellowish Numidian marble, yet stained a faded red in places, and showing traces of having been divided into panels by a slender incised ornament, partly obliterated, but recognisable as a black caduceus wreathed with a black vine.

And the vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was long rather than wide, and ventilated by horizontal apertures below the roof, filled in with metal lattice-work. Through a similar but larger opening overhead poured the golden sunshine of the November noonday,--making a thick black strip of shadow beneath the long wooden bench that ran along the right-hand wall. The air of the place was cool and sweet,--in spite of an array of native shoes,--of all grades and descriptions from jaunty red morocco with pointed turned-up toes, and heels with sharp rims of brass or steel for the killing of snakes and scorpions,--to venerable footgear of soiled buff or yellow leather,--and the clumsy hide sandals commonly worn by peasants,--ranged along the left-hand wall. Even as she observed the rows of shoes, Katharine's keen ears were greeted by a curious deep-toned humming--as though innumerable, invisible bees, of Brobdingnagian proportions--were gathering honey from conjectural flowers in the near neighbourhood....

The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to the ladies; displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.

Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard the car snort and move away as the metal bolts scrooped in their ancient grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the imperturbable attendant in the black _kaftan_ waved them forward to where another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume, waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal _repoussée_, with an oval piece of glass inset--something like a human eye. And the big invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:

"_Bz'zz'z! .... Bzz'z! ... Bzz m' m'm! ..._"

Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which,--though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had opened doors,--the rows of shoes along the wall, the figure of Trixie at her side--the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black _tarbûshes_ and _kaftans_ had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked big.... He was there,--beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish secretary--on the farther side of the torrent of boiling amber sunshine pouring through a central opening in the roof of the inner hall that succeeded the vestibule of the mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet in length, paved with squares of black and yellow marble, with an oblong pool in the midst of it--upon whose still, crystal surface pink and crimson petals of roses had been strewn in patterns,--and in the centre of which a triple-jetted fountain played....

"_Bzz' zz m'm! ..._"

The humming of the unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway in the wall upon Katharine's right hand.... A wall of black polished marble, decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and red and pale green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not hide what lay beyond the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched, whitewashed room, cooled by big wooden electric fans working under the ceiling, and traversed by avenues of creamy-white Chinese matting, running between rows of low native desks; before each of which squatted--on naked or cotton-sock-covered heels, or sat cross-legged upon a square native chintz cushion, a coffee-coloured, almond-eyed young Copt, in a black or blue cotton nightgown, topped with the _tarbûsh_ of black felt or a dingy-white or olive-brown muslin turban; murmuring softly to himself as he made entries, from right to left, in a huge limp-covered ledger, or deftly fingered the balls of coloured clay strung on the wires of the abacus at his side.

"Oh! ... Wonderful! I'm so glad you brought me!"

Lady Wastwood's emphatic exclamation of pleasure in her surroundings brought cessation in the humming,--caused a swivelling of capped or turbaned heads all down the length of three avenues,--evoked a simultaneous flash of black Oriental eyes, and white teeth in dusky faces lifted or turned.... Then at the upper end of the long counting-house, where three wide glassless windows looked on a sanded palm-garden (and the leather-topped knee-hole tables, roll-top desks, copying ink presses, mahogany revolving-chairs, telephone installations, willow-paper baskets, pewter inkstands and Post Office Directories suggested Cornhill and Cheapside rather than the Orient)--one of the olive-faced Jewish head-clerks in _kaftans_ and side-curls coughed,--and as though he had pulled a string controlling all the observant faces,--every tooth was hidden and every eye discreetly bent on the big limp ledgers again....

All the Coptic bees were humming sonorously in unison as Katharine went forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to receive her the master of the hive....

The light being behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but he seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed skull; and his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and long-chinned,--with a humorous quirk at the corners of the heavy-lipped mouth that redeemed its sensuousness--was lighted by eyes of the intensest black, burning under heavy beetle-brows. His khaki uniform, though of fine material and admirable cut, was that of a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours over the heart, and the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung,--intimated to Lady Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already served with some degree of distinction,--and had been wounded in the War.

As he advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence save hers, Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering head, and sweep his right arm out and down, with slow Oriental stateliness, bringing back the supple hand to touch breast, lips and brow. Whether or not he had raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to his lips and kissed it, Lady Wastwood could not definitely determine. She was left with the impression that he had done this thing. And--as he rose up from the deep obeisance, there sounded in her ears these words of salutation spoken in English by a deep voice, with the timbre and volume of an Arab war-drum:

"_Hail! Lady of the noble house of Philoremus Fabius. Be welcome to this dwelling, the cradle of your race. Mine to-day as my forefathers' through bygone centuries, since your footstep crossed the threshold, we are stewards, and you are Queen!_"

VIII

He might have been quoting from some classical play, it occurred to Trixie,--perhaps he was an actor, this colossal khaki man.... Though Katharine had certainly said that he had offices and warehouses in the city. That was his counting-house, that populous hall, where rows and rows of Coptic clerks did sums in huge ledgers. And Katharine was presenting him as "Mr. John Hazel." And he was saying to Lady Wastwood, the usual civil nothings, in the voice that had the resonance of a Somali war-gong, the deep vibration of a Dervish battle-drum--and the clipped accent of the ordinary middle-class Londoner.

"Frightfully glad to meet you.... Miss Forbis said she'd bring you.... Won't you come inside? This is my room!"

"What a room!"

The exclamation came from Lady Wastwood, but the room's owner looked at Katharine. The stamp of her approval was evidently required.

"_You_ like it? ..."

Katharine answered, with a long-drawn breath, in utter sincerity:

"--Much more than like it! It is--perfectly wonderful!"

It had probably once served as the triclinium of this ancient Roman house. Of spacious width, it might have been some sixty feet in length, and twenty feet from the mosaic floor to the frescoed ceiling, representing a sky of intense blue, with stars of rusty gold. Framed, the blue starry sky, in a square of trellised roses, their hues faded and dimmed by the passage of centuries, the yellowish marble showing in patches through the gesso groundwork--as through that of the deep frieze below the Attic cornice,--painted by some ancient master in the noon of Alexandria's heyday,--and representing in hues still fresh and brilliant the Battles of the Greeks and Amazons.

Below the frieze an ebony shelf supported a collection of Oriental pottery and porcelain, interspersed with antique vases and statuettes in ivory and bronze. Down one side of the long room were glass-doored book-cases, built in recesses,--and cabinets stored with objects of beauty and rarity. A wide divan strewn with silken cushions and covered with brocade of Damascus, ran along the opposite side and under the window at the upper end,--where the floor--raised some eight inches, made a kind of daïs, upon which Persian carpets of beauty and evident value were laid....

The window, glassless, and closed at need, with delicately-carved wooden lattices, ran across the upper end of the room, nearly from wall to wall. Where the window ended, a door between twisted pillars of red and green serpentine--such as were set between the frames of the window-lattices--led to an open loggia, supported by slender columns. From the window and through the door--across the cool blue belt of shadow made by the fluted tiled roof of the loggia--were the green lawns and springing fountains, the groves and alleys and shrubberies of a well-kept and spacious garden; over whose fruit-burdened vines and fig-trees hosts of finches and orioles and fig-birds kept up a perpetual chirping and twittering.

It was restful and cool in the wide, lofty room,--would have been so had no wooden fans, driven by electric power--kept the air in continual movement underneath the frescoed ceiling. The heavy door at the hall-end being shut, the hum of the busy Coptic bees of Hazaël & Co.'s counting-house could not penetrate, where after months of keen anticipation John Hazel welcomed his liege lady, with outward stolidity and grave, rather clumsy politeness--masking the shy rapture--say, of an Eton Fourth Form boy doing the honours of his study to the prettiest sister of his chum.

"Now, where'll you perch?" he said to Lady Wastwood, after carefully installing Miss Forbis in the divan's right-hand window-corner. He was hospitable in the extreme, Trixie decided, and any thing but well-bred. How odd that such a man should possess sufficient insight and discrimination to admire Katharine as profoundly as John Hazel evidently did....

"By the way, Mr. Hazel," Katharine's fresh voice called to him, as he found a suitable resting-place for Lady Wastwood--and Trixie's observant green eyes saw him jump, and flush under his mahogany hide; "I've seen your name starred in to-day's paper. 'Commander-in-Chief's Despatches retelegraphed from Whitehall. Recommended for the Military Medal, Acting Company Sergeant John Benn Hazel--448th City of London (Fenchurch Street) Royal Fusiliers. Extraordinary valour displayed at Sheria.... Twelve Turks bayonetted, one after another....' Congratulations with all my heart!"

Her long arm swept out to John, and he took the hand, reddening, and promptly returned it, stammering: "Awfully obliged for what you say!--but as regards the M.M. there's no accounting for the way they have of ladling out these tin-and-gilt things. Mean well and one's obliged, but the men who earn 'em never get 'em!" He smote his giant palms together, evoking a terrific detonation. "Sorry if I made you jump." Nervous Trixie had done so. "But this is how we do in the East when we want 'em to bring tea!"