Part 40

"When I recovered sense and partial sight--after the horrors of which thou knowest!--it was to find myself in the house of a good, poor Jew of Nazareth, whither--may the Holy One reward his charity! he had bribed the soldiers to carry me under cover of night. They, who were bidden--I being as one dead and covered with blood--to dig a pit and cast me in with quicklime--were glad to be saved the trouble at gain of certain moneys. Later, by the secret sale to another man,--a Hebrew jeweller,--of an emerald necklace I had worn on the day when the _sabtiehs_ arrested me--and which I had stitched into my clothing in the first hours of captivity--I know not whether it was overlooked or whether they did not dare to seize it--because!--" she does not finish the sentence--"I repaid the good Jew, though I found it hard to thank him. Hard as I find it even now...."

There is such tragedy in the low, whispering voice, such blistering truth in its plain, naked utterances, that John Hazel shudders as he listens to her....

"For I desired to die, when I did not remember Jacob! When I thought of him--what I wanted more than Death was--" A coal-black diamond-bright eye, sends a shaft from between the veils straight into the man's eyes. "Thou knowest. Three little words will hold it all:"

"_Revenge on Hamid...._"

Her veiled head nods at each slowly-uttered word.

"Verily, ay! but I did not want to say it. For that it was possible to endure this ordeal of Life. To kill him in some slow, strange, unimagined way, I would have given"--she laughs dryly. "What had I left to give, my soul being dead in me,--my body the foul thing his touch hath left it!--and the face my mother used to kiss, a mask to scare babes and men? Then I said,--I will wait and hate! ... Patience and hatred may bring me that I crave for. Meanwhile, keeping near him--I will succour those whom he hath wronged, feeding my hungry hatred with their curses--until the day comes when I shall hunger no more! ..."

"And surely the day of reckoning will come. Only be patient a little longer!" says the deep, stern voice that Katharine Forbis knows.

"How like thy voice is to our grandfather's. Almost I could believe that Eli spoke then! How strange, that he and thou, so greatly resembling, should never have met," sighs the woman beside the fire. "Of Hebrew hast thou any?"

"None but a word or so."

"Well, well, it matters not! Go on speaking in Arabic, or in the English that is thy home-speech--or in French if it pleases thee--thou art Hazaël in any tongue."

"It pleases me best to listen to thee. Tell me now, after what fashion wouldst thou have thy vengeance? ..." The man's voice sinks lower, and his face is very grim.

"My cousin, let us not speak of it!" she entreats in a whisper. He sees a wave of trembling pass over the fragile creature, huddled in her coarse disguise beside the rude stone hearth.

"Yet when a man bitten by a mad dog, goes to a Pasteur Institute for inoculation, he must--if it be possible--take the head of the dog." The fierce black eyes are upon her, and their strength seems a palpable weight bearing upon her frailness. "Since the beginning of this War, surgeons have attained wonderful skill in building up the bodies and faces of men, that other men have broken. When thou shalt go to the greatest of these, saying: '_Give me back my beauty!_' I promise thee, little Esther, thou shalt carry the head of the dog!"

The big teeth gleam in the dark face, and she answers with her chuckle, the thin derisive cachinnation that is so far removed from mirth:

"And if such a miracle might be wrought, could thy great surgeon's scalpel cut from my woman's soul the scars that make it hideous? Could he burn from my memory with his electric wire, the things that I have borne? Could he set my feet amongst the flowers on the hills near Kir Saba, with Jacob's and Reuben's, and Leah's, and little Benjamin's--and brim my heart with the happiness that was Life's golden wine? Could he give me back my father and our grandfather, the good old man who so loved me? How strange it is to remember that if I had not vexed my mother--and worn the chain of emeralds that were old Eli Hazaël's birthday gift, that day the _zabtiehs_ seized me, walking in the olive-groves near my father's house at Haffêd--I should have had nothing of value to sell for the wherewithal to live."

"It was Fate! Tell me, my little Esther, how old art thou?"

She laughs in her strange way.

"On that day--the thirtieth of Ab, in the Year of the World 5674,--the 8th of August, 1914--as thou wouldst write it--I was eighteen, my cousin John...."

Sickened to the very core, the man can barely keep back a groan. Twenty-one last August, and "beautiful as a rose of Sharon," to quote Old Mendel, and aged, withered, warped, body and soul, into the Mother of Ugliness. Words escape him, born of a sudden thought:

"Jacob and thy Cousin Eli are dead, like thy father, and our uncles, and our grandfather and thy little brother Benjamin. But--but Reuben the son of Ephraim lives. Has no one told thee?"

"Verily, I knew it. But"--her head is bowed and the words come faint between her veils--"the young girl whom Reuben loved lives no more. Even though thy surgeons might work the bodily miracle. Even if the herb Forgetfulness sprang from these stones, I would not gather it, and lose the memory of certain things that have lightened my labours, and sweetened my sufferings in this cruel place. As for my vengeance--more than once I have been very near it! Wilt thou believe?--I have opened mine hand and let the thing go!" The little dusky hand quivers into sight, shuts, opens and vanishes. "So--and so--the sharpness of desire for Hamid's blood having abated, since--since I came--to the knowledge of him!"

The little hand waves from the covert of her veils towards the ray-encircled head, past which the illuminating beam of sunshine has travelled. John, seeing this, says with something of astonishment:

"Knowledge of--the Christ? ... And thou a Jewess?"

"I speak of the servant, not of the Master, good Cousin John. For that stern, beautiful face is strangely like his whom thou didst come here to seek."

"I'll make a note of that. It may be useful." John Hazel's strong black eyes glue themselves upon the Face upon the wall, as the Mother of Ugliness goes on, whisperingly:

"This I have thought, seeing the life of the Sidi who is His servant. Thou art listening? ..."

"Verily, my little Esther. For it is needful for me to hear these things concerning the man."

So, with a full heart trembling on her timid lips, sometimes speaking in her swift, cultured Arabic, sometimes in her English that is tinctured with a Parisian accent--always speaking of the priest as the Sidi, or the Master, she tells John all she knows, up to the moment of Father Julian's arrest.

"And what happened then?" John asks.

"They took the Master to the--the Bey's room, over the gateway. The--the Bey accused him of pricking on the prisoners to rebellion. A German officer who was there bore testimony that the Master had so acted. He boldly--for he is as a lion, without fear--denied this, in the face of his enemies. All this I heard from a Turk, a _posta_ of the guard at the Barracks. The man loves a shameless woman of the Bazâr--and--and I carry messages between them, no office being too low for Ummshni, the Mother of Ugliness. Can dirt defile dirt?"

In her faint voice she asks the bitter question. John says, grinding his teeth:

"Damn it, Esther, drop that! I can't bear it!"

"Swear not, my Cousin John, but hear. _He_--" John knows she is speaking of Hamid--"He says to the Master: 'You tell me this, that and the other thing I do, gives offence to your Christian Messiah. I pay no heed, and, He lets me alone, because He has no power to punish me. For it is Allah and Allah only who rebukes the evil and rewards the virtuous. And to prove this, I shall put you under guard--in the barbed-wire enclosure where we kept the British War-prisoner officers. There is plenty of room to walk about, and a wooden hut where you may sleep. You will have grass, and clean air, but nothing to eat or drink--unless you sign this paper that I have here--saying that you repent of the slanders you have spoken against me before my face. Sign it now in the presence of witnesses, and you will be sent down to join the other War Prisoners at Smyrna. Do not sign it--and you will be taken to the wired enclosure, and any one found giving you food or water, will be beaten to death with _asayisi_. This will give your Nazarene Prophet, Whom we Turks and the Kaiser of the Alamani and his officers--who are all good Mohammedans--esteem very highly!--a chance to prove how great He is, and how He values you--by keeping you alive....'"

John licks lips that have suddenly grown dry.

"And what did Father Forbis say to this--not particularly original devil?"

"He told Hamid he was an ordinary priest, with no pretence to extra sanctity, and that if this was a challenge to the Christ, he as His servant refused to take it up...."

"And then?--"

"'Deprived of food,' the _posta_ says the Master said, 'I perish like any other miserable mortal. Yet if it were my Maker's Will that I should live through such an ordeal--I should live! ...'"

"Some priest that!" John imagines a voice like Katharine's saying 'I should live!' and a thrill goes through him. "And Hamid?--"

"Hamid said: '_We will wait and see!_' and all the Germans laughed. It is a phrase well known in England? ..."

"And dam' well hated too! But your Father Forbis is a peach.... Worthy to be his sister's brother...."

"She is so beautiful and noble? ..."

"All that," says loyal John, "and more! ..."

"Ah! I am glad. For I have thought much since I have known the Sidi, and learned in watching, somewhat. This amongst other things: that to be abject, ill-used, poor and despised, even as a lame sparrow in the sight of men--and to go about doing good, with one hate in the nest of the heart that chirps for vengeance, that is human, human enough! But to be all this, without hate or bitterness--to be wronged and pity the wronger!--being sinned against, to pardon and love the sinner, this is Divine! ..."

The softly-breathed words fall upon the air like scattered rose-petals, diffusing sweetness as they fall.

"If Jesus of Nazareth were not the Son of the Most High, O John, my cousin! after no other fashion will He come when He comes. Taking nothing from the world but a crust, and a garment to cover Him. Seeking the things that are held despicable by men. His Gospel Love, Forgiveness, Sacrifice. His only diadem the Shekinah. His path beset by thorns-- His triumph Failure.... His end a gibbet! ... What other could it have been?" ...

John admits....

"No other. For if there's one thing more prejudicial to a man than sheer Disinterestedness--I'm at a loss to name it! The world must have a motive--and it likes a mean one best. I don't pretend I've ever gone particularly deep into the subject, but I've sometimes thought--that if it were possible to see Jesus of Nazareth clearly for the Christians--we Jews might find Him to be very much a Jew!"

"Perhaps we shall see Him so, one day! ..."

She rises with noiseless, supple ease, and takes her bundle of sticks from the corner.

"Thou art weary. Deny it not, thy jaws ache with yawning, and already I have seen thee nod.... Take off thine upper garment and head-cloth, for it is warm here. Lie down and sleep, though the bed be somewhat short for legs as long as thine. For I have things to do--for the Master! '_What things?_' Oh! the man! ever asking questions! ... Broth to make, milk to scald, these pipe-stems," she shows her bundle of new, clean canes, five feet long, bound by a generous length of red India-rubber tubing, "to fit together after a plan. The Master shall not die of hunger to-night, the Most High being my helper. For I shall be helped!" She nods her small, veiled head. "It is borne in upon me, since I have found thee, the Bedawi who did not spit when I let him see my face. There is another Arab here," she gives her dry little rustling chuckle, "an Emir with his following. He did not spit or curse, either, and his grey eyes said, '_Poor thing!_'"

"The hell you say! ..." John, who has been horizontal, sits up suddenly and blurts out in English. "Forgive me, little Esther, but I happen to be on the track of an Arab with grey eyes. Where does the bloke hang out?"

"If thou speakest of the Emir Fadl Anga, he who lodges at the Khan et-Talab under that title--having with him two Bedu of the Beni Asir, and the horses of all three--"

"Good egg!" John sits up on the string bed in his brown camel's hair _kumbas_, grinning joyfully, and hugging his knees: "Does one of 'em carry a reed-cage chock-full of pigeons, strapped back of his saddle? Think!"

"Ay, verily, the Emir Fadl Anga being pigeon-master to one of the Princes of Mecca. Or such is the story that is told in the Bazâr." There is incredulity in the weary voice. "He hath brought the birds as a gift to the German General commanding at Nazareth, for use, so they say, in the Intelligence Department there. When the pigeon-master Sergeant Major comes from Nazareth, he will take them--and leave a cage of birds that have been trained by himself. All this I had in the Bazâr.... Where art thou going? ..."

John, lowering his feet to the stone floor, and reaching for his Arab head-cloth, very decidedly replies:

"To the Khan et-Talab, to dig out my man. For he's my man, this Fadl Anga."

"And how wilt thou get to the Khan, lame as thou art?"

"_I_ dunno!" John gingerly tests his bandaged leg: "You've handed me a poser. What's to be done?"

"What wouldst thou do, if it were possible for thee to go? Think now and say! ..."

He rests his brawny arms upon his knees, and says, slowly, as the fierce light in his black eyes dies out and leaves their surface dim and lustreless:

"I'd find out which was Fadl Anga's room--loaf into the courtyard among the horses, camels, goats, Arabs and Fellah grooms--squat down under his window, and sing--not out loud, but just between my teeth--"

Sagely she nods her little veiled head:

"_Bouche fermée_,--some English song that is a sign agreed upon between you. Sing it me now, for I will go, and carry thy disguised Englishman the message, while thou remainest here--watching the soup that it be not burned or boil over."

For all unnoticed while they talked, she has set a covered earthen pot containing water, and some kind of meat that she brought up with her, and has chopped fine and mixed with herbs, amongst the glowing ashes; and a faint steam, not unsavoury, is already beginning to spiral through the hole in the knobbed lid.

"Is it agreed upon? ..."

"I should smile! ..."

She understands the odd utterance as assent and says with a diamond sparkle between her veils:

"Now sing me thy song. And give me thy message, but otherwise advise me in nothing of how I am to do. For, verily, I am the Mother of Cunning as well as the Mother of Ugliness, and have carried the lives of many men between these hands of mine!" Laughing softly, she stretches them out. "And they are not as big as thy hands, my giant Cousin John."

"You blessed little brick!"

He reaches out and captures in his own, one of the little dusky hands, gently squeezes it, lets it go, and takes from his neck a square of parchment that hangs there, suspended by a slender green silk cord. On one side are two interlaced triangles outlined in thick black ink. On the other a square containing Arabic letters of the Sacred Name--within a double circle in which have been traced and thickly inked--the Signs of the Zodiac.

"That's that! ... Makes some Arab amulet, doesn't it? ... I cribbed the figures from the title-page of Pittaker's Almanac, and the Name off an inscribed tile. Two letters are stitched inside this--I've another letter hidden away inside my _tarbûsh_, but that I'll deliver myself to Father Forbis. Meanwhile, you're to get this somehow into Fadl Anga's hands. If--but mind you not _unless_ he tumbles to the first bars of 'Loch Lomond.'"

"Is it 'Loch Lomond'? That was one of the English songs we learnt to sing at my Paris boarding-school," says the Mother of Ugliness. "Hear now, O my cousin, if I remember it aright? ..."

She has a little faded voice, sweet but thin, and in this she sings to him the familiar refrain of the ballad that--hummed by a battered private of London Territorials--sitting on a captured bag of Turkish Army biscuits after Sheria--conjured up the chintz drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour, and Katharine Forbis singing at her piano in the twilight--before the stern, absorbed eyes of an Arab who knelt at prayer....

So it follows that, having taken a sparing meal of bread and fruit, and milk, the amulet containing the letters being hidden upon her person, and the song stowed away in her head, Ummshni-Esther sets forth, under the blaze of the sun of twelve o'clock midday (going by the watch under Ali Zaybuk's sheepskin wristlet, which is set at European time). He limps to the entrance of the tomb to let her out, and stands watching until the little slender, veiled figure--wrapped in the ample outer garment of coarse yellow-white sheeting, worn by Syrian women, passes from his sight.

"Good luck to you, you regular little Maccabee!" he mutters. "Now all You Big Old Men, butt in and help her! ... It's up to you to help her.... For she's thoroughbred to the backbone, if ever a woman was...."

"_Thud, thud--thud! Thud thud thud--thud! THUD!_"

The guns are still arguing heavily and persistently--in the hills west of Jerusalem, and in the vicinity of Hebron.... South, over Junction Station, the inflated grey bulks of three observation balloons wallow against the cloud-piled horizon, over the huge ark-like hangars that kennel them, as the experts in the dangling baskets read off, and transmit to their Headquarters by Wireless, the silvery flashes of helios from the hills. A Fokker biplane of pusher type with a Falk machine-gun mounted in her bows, is trying to drive down one of the observers; the rattle of the aviator's weapon sounding like the clickett of a typewriter. While a single-seater monoplane _Taube_ with a "Roland" bomb-dropping device, is endeavouring to deal in a similar manner with the other O.B.'s, and a British Anti-Aircraft gun mounted on a motor is spraying vicious little shells of H.E. and shrapnel at the Germans, from rapidly-changing vantages upon the ground below.

Even as John gets interested in the battle, the Fokker, hit in her petrol tank by a projectile, suddenly vomits flame, and drops like a singed moth, downwards. The Taube departs in haste for Hebron--seeing a half-squadron of D.H.6's coming over from the aërodrome near G.H.Q. further down south.... Germany has few eyes in the air in these days, and the Turk is well-nigh wingless. But difficulties of transport threaten to hold the British up at Nebi Samwil; and knowing this, the enemy's resistance stiffens. The sun will not sink on Ottoman dominion in Palestine, while the Turco-German forces hold the Jerusalem-Shechem road.

There is a glorious view from the summit of the Mount of Cursing, silvered with streams on her lower slopes, clothed with her groves of olive and almond, fig and apricot, orange and pomegranate, as high as there is soil enough to hold their roots. Through a gap in the Hills of Galilee, snow-crowned Hermon stands out in splendid relief against the deep blue sky. East, across the Jordan, are the Mountains of Gilead, Osha's summit conspicuously capped with a streaming panache of cirro-stratus; the coastal Plain of Sharon rolls emerald to the turquoise lip of the Mediterranean, and the huge bulk of Carmel thrusts out into the glittering distance a fortress defying the uttermost assaults of Time.

"Some view!" John comments, baldly, in his acquired idiom, narrowing his eyes under the hand that shields them from the sun. Yet in his heart he is drunken with the beauty--captive forever to the spell of this land of Palestine....

"_Thud, thud!_ ... BOOM! ..."

A colossal tree-shaped column of woolly brown vapour rises in the west where lies Jaffa. "We" are blowing up Turkish ammunition-dumps and provision stores.

"_Rat, tatt, tatt--tatt 't tat!_" go the machine-guns in the hills to the south....

"_Thud, hud, thud 'd 'd! ..._"

Great happenings are in the air. Trained as John Hazel is in the unimaginative school of London's Stock Exchange and the City, his keen Oriental brain is quickened to this consciousness. Time, after many ripening centuries, is giving birth to The Event foretold by and foreshadowed in prophecies, dreamed of by vision-seers. Can it be that after all these centuries of exile, Christianity is to give back Palestine to the Jews? ...

The onyx ring attracts the man's black eyes as he brings down the hand that shaded them. He tells himself that, after all, he wasn't quite such a blooming mug as little Esther thought. He remembers binding a cotton rag about the finger that wears the ancient heirloom, on the eve of the start from Ismailia. Somehow, the rag must have come off, either before, or when, he jumped from the aëroplane, at the signal of Essenian.

"The treacherous Egyptian brute! One of these days--" There is a promise in the hiatus that bodes ill for Essenian. There is also a token, adhering to the ring, that bodes not over-well for John. Only a speck of bright green sealing-wax, sticking in a fold of the lion-skin of Hercules, that was not there when its wearer left the house in the Rue el Farad, to dine with the Pasha at the Aviators' Club.

IX

The Khan of et Talab, or The Fox, is a thoroughly Oriental caravanserai; flat-roofed, two-storeyed, and built upon three sides of a square courtyard. The ground-floor rooms are deposits for travellers' baggage and stores, the windows of the guest-rooms look out upon the courtyard, the fourth side of which is a row of stables, with small rooms above them for Arab and Fellah camel-drivers and horse-keepers, cooks and scullions, and the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the Khan.

The rooms occupied by the Emir Fadl Anga, pigeon-master to the nephew of the King of the Hedjaz--purveyor of Intelligence to German Headquarters at Shechem, and owner of the dapple grey Arab mare, are upon the top floor, and possess the exclusive monopoly of the roof. Thus the smells which rise from the area of the courtyard and the harsh cries of itinerant fruit and sweetmeat sellers, pedlars of fish, hawkers of bread and vegetables; with the wrangling of servants and horse-boys, camel-drivers and muleteers, washermen and scullions, are somewhat tempered before they ascend to the nostrils and ears of the Emir.

The room is large, whitewashed and fairly lofty, with a cool tiled floor, on which are spread a few mats and Damascus carpets. Some stools, a few cushions, a low table; a carved chest with a huge, wooden lock, and the inevitable divan, are all its furniture. Opening on a broad balcony communicating by a staircase at each end with the housetop and the courtyard, the high, wide window is also the door.