Part 48

"I will go, I will go! Do not handle me roughly.... Remember that I am an old--a very old man! Miss Forbis, I knew your father once! Speak for me! Use your influence! Remember," the quavering voice broke in a fit of senile coughing, the manacled hands extended to Katharine in supplication, looked like those of a mummy, so discoloured and shrunken were they: "You do not answer? You triumph in my downfall?" The narrow eyes glimmered hatred out of their deep-dug caves. "Do not forget your brother, and your friend, Mr. Hazel--whose fate is practically in my hands!"

"Their fate is in the Hands of God," Katharine answered gently, moving beyond the reach of the withered, trembling clutch. "Like yours and mine, and that of every other creature. Good-bye, Major Essenian...."

He made no reply. He was muttering to himself, and looked, indeed, an old man. His head fell on his breast as the word to move was given--and the party of policemen, with the orange-robed figure tottering in their midst--tramped over the white bridge in the bluish-pale light of the small hours, and followed by Katharine and the Lieutenant, went down through the airless house....

When the tail-light of the last of the string of the four Military Police cars had winked past the turn in the avenue, and the _porte cochère_ was closed, Nasr Ullah went back to his "house" and found her waking. She hastened out of the inner apartment and ran to him in alarm.

"Oh, my eyes! Oh, my husband! _Alhamdolillah_ thou hast returned to us! Little sleep have we had this night. Strange scrapings at the back of the house, and whistles as of Afrits talking.... The children woke and wept, and I scarce had wits to lie to them--thinking the Servants of Eblis were carrying the Presence away! ..."

"The Presence hath gone, sure enough, but Inglizi soldiers took him. Always I have known," said Nasr Ullah, "that some day the soldiers would come. They followed the woman secretly, climbing the trees like monkeys, and leaped in upon the Presence when she cried out.... Perhaps she was a spy--God knows! ..."

"Praise be to Him the soldiers took thee not also! Tell me--in this matter of the pigeons.... Didst thou--"

Nasr Ullah shook his head:

"My heart was straitened when I left thee,--but Allah enlightening me--I dealt wisely. For at the compound of the Commandant--at the Headquarters of Intelligence and at Garrison Headquarters--one grain of barley threw I at each place,--and picked it up again! Then, burying the pot and the grain in a place where none will find them--I returned at the fourth hour, and said to the Presence--'Lo! I have done thy bidding, in the casting of poisoned barley.' And in this I spake the very truth, yet Nûh's birds are safe for me!"

"It is well. The Compassionate shielded thee. Think you, my husband, the Presence will return?"

"I think not, but if he does, he will not find Nasr Ullah. The Eye of Radiance is broken, so even did he look in it he could not find me. The Englishmen have opened his _maktabs_ and taken all his papers. Come, let us take the children, and thy jewels, and our money and the best of the clothing and go away from here!"

"When the fleas leave the cat, he is dead!" said Fatimeh acutely.

"No flea am I!" denied Nasr Ullah stoutly. "Forty-two years have I served The Presence, and by Allah! I have served him well and faithfully. Now, I shall serve Allah, Who is the better Master, and my sons shall grow up without knowledge of ink-pools and wizardry...."

"And the bag that is buried under the bed hath enough in it to buy thee a homestead. Verily the Beneficent hath hearkened to my prayers. Go we by day, or now?"

"Now. Make haste and dress the children--hide thy jewels about thee." He looked round for something to dig with, and picked up a big brass ladle. "Strange, how a man may feel like a thief in digging up his own hoard!"

"Will there--is there likely to be a Court Martial?" Katharine asked the Lieutenant, as some hours later, a Police Ford Car, diverted from official use for the purposes of chivalry, ran between green fields of fodder on the road by the Canal, and the Lieutenant--having fed his charge with sandwiches of cold chicken, hard eggs, ripe figs and bananas, and hot coffee out of a thermos--was pressing Turkish cigarettes on her and offering a light.

"Something in the nature of one, possibly. But precious short, and to the point. I'm not broaching official secrets!--but the evidence is solid. We've had quite a cloud of witnesses to prove that the Pasha has been playing the kind of trick with the British Government that he tried to play on you. There were two of our Secret Intelligence men, in Shechem, one of 'em a prisoner in the Barracks and the other in disguise. And he was twice seen by these chaps to shed despatches into the town-square...."

"But weren't the despatches dummies?" Katharine asked.

"That was the tale he fed 'em with at H.Q., but it won't wash!"--the owner of the ginger toothbrush shook his head: "We've got hold of the last lot and they're genuine enough. Seditious propaganda--from centres in the Far East--that's the sort of stuff he's been dropping in Palestine.... What's more--it has just come out that he murdered his observer--the S.I. man who was shut up with the other War Prisoners in the Barracks saw the thing done--in mid-air over Shechem--just as he'd focussed his binnics on Essenian's machine. 'The Two-Faced Nightingale,' the War Prisoners used to call her--because of her transferable number and colour-plates--a clever invention of the Pasha's, you see...."

"But I thought they'd approved of the invention at Headquarters? ..."

Said the Lieutenant, with a shrewdness that went curiously with his youthful face:

"Oh, right enough, the Brass Hats approved of the invention! But they didn't approve of its being approved of," he twinkled at the alliteration--"by the fellows on the other side. The man's a dud! And he's jolly well earned what's he's going"--he looked at his wrist-watch--"what he's bound to get--half-an-hour after morning gun."

"_Boom!_"

Even as the Lieutenant spoke, the radiant air vibrated, and flocks of swallows, newly arrived, scared by the detonation, rose and wheeled shrieking over the Fortress of Alexander's Town....

The Hospital was already astir as Katharine passed in. She did not go at once to the sleeping-tent she shared with Lady Wastwood, but passed the white rows of canvas dwellings, and turned into the dewy, deserted gardens, where odours of Eden breathed from the newly opened roses, and all the thrushes and blackbirds and bulbuls were singing in chorus to greet the birth of another day.

Her glance sought the table where she had left the card and the letter. They were not there. Lady Wastwood must have taken them. One could always count on Trixie for such kind, considerate acts.

She threw down her hat and the serge uniform-cape on the table and stepped out upon the terrace to drink in the sweet coolness, resting her hands on the balustrade as she looked out over the gardens, and the Khedive's boasted tennis-lawns of rafia--beyond the belt of palms, evergreen oaks, tamarisks and stone pines and rustling casuarinas, that clothe the slopes of Montana, to the changing blues and beryls of the classic Western Sea.

Among the cistus-blossoms at her feet, the early bees were humming; orioles were busy weaving their nest in the overhead vine. A light step sounded on the mosaic floor behind her. Trixie had come out to look for her. No--not Trixie! A sudden shock passed through her. Her heart leaped and seemed to stop, then went on beating furiously. She felt, without knowledge, that Edward Yaill was near....

Waves of carnation swamped her creamy fairness. Great waves of joy surged in her heart. She held her breath and looked down at the white hands folded before her on the creamy stone of the balcony....

The hand that lay uppermost wore the ancient gem of Hercules. Now a breath fanned upon her neck, the subtle scents of the Desert surrounded and enveloped her, an arm in a khaki sleeve gently stole round her, and a familiar hand covered the onyx ring.... Yaill's hand. Beautiful and strong, masculine and soldierly even in its slimness, scorched to the colour of lion-hide by savage Asian suns.

"O! Edward.... O my man of men! God gives you back to me! ...."

"Sweetheart! Dear woman! I had not hoped for this! ..."

Wonderful, unexpected boon. Heaven's manna to the starving. His Katharine's heart upon his own, her lips as freely yielded as though the hateful barrier had never risen between.... Soon he would wake, Yaill told himself--to aching desolation. But for a little he would take what Katharine granted him.

"Julian? ..." She started in his arms.

"Julian is safe, my sweetheart, but not yet fit to travel. I left him in the best of care, at G.H.Q. at Lydd. The General got me a passage down by one of their coasting sea-planes. A Sopwith from the 'Raquin'--and she did it in splendid time, too! Another kiss! ... For a fellow who has lived on memories of kisses--since that day we parted at Kerr's Arbour, Katharine! How your letter brought the whole thing back, when it came to me at the Khan at Shechem...."

"By John Hazel? ..."

"A woman brought it, certainly--but Hazel sent it me...."

"Dear Edward, where is he? You do not answer! ..." She drew away from Yaill, looking in his troubled face. "Where is John Hazel? ..."

"I would give much to tell you! ..."

"You mean that he is dead? ..."

"Frankly, we fear the worst. When we escaped from Shechem, Hazel was lame through an accident. He would not hamper us--he stayed behind to keep the road. The road to Kir Saba.... It runs through a defile among the mountains--just where a Turkish ammunition-lorry had broken down...."

"Go on! ..."

"For long after we had passed we heard bombs bursting. There seemed to be any amount of fighting going on at that point on the road. Then there was an explosion--the lorry had blown up sky-high. We learned that the day after, when a British scouting-'plane came back from reconnaissance in the neighbourhood. There were--human _débris_ upon the road--and several dead horses. If Hazel is dead--and I fear he is--he died as a man should die...."

"But if he is not dead?" Her great eyes held his: "If he were imprisoned in--a wooden hut, chained down upon a native bed--"

"What do you mean?" Yaill started. "Have you dreamed you saw him so? There was a wooden hut in the War Prisoners' Wired Enclosure at Shechem. Julian was there when we found him--chained as you describe!"

"It was not Julian whom I saw--somewhere between midnight and two o'clock this morning--but John Hazel...." She shuddered, "John Hazel, so brutally ill-used--so frightfully disfigured, that the thing chained to the _anghareb_ was like anything but a man.... Yet I knew him. You cannot mistake his eyes, once you have seen them. He is alive--and a prisoner. O Edward, it was no dream!--I tell you that I saw!--"

"Since you feel like that," Yaill caught fire at the flame of her intense conviction, "I'll go back--in another skin--and fine-comb the Front for him."

"Dear, dear Edward! That would be great of you!"

"Not it. I am the man's debtor. He brought me word of you at Sheria, and afterwards at Shechem. Shall I ever forget the thrill it gave--the sight of that envelope with your handwriting!"

"Ah, but there were two letters...." Remembrance flooded her. "Didn't you read the other? I don't believe you have!"

"Frankly, there was no time. But I have it here upon me."

He felt in a baggy side-pocket of his khaki Service jacket, pulled out a crumpled buff envelope, and held it out to her.

"Read it now, Edward! O Edward, read it! ..."

He looked at her whimsically, and opened Nurse Pidge's letter. When he began to read, Katharine was standing. When he looked round, she was seated in a chair. He crossed the floor and knelt by her, and her yearning arms went out to him, and drew him home from exile, to the shelter of her breast.

XVIII

Towards dawn, following the bomb-fight on the Jaffa Road, those masses of sulphurous cumulo-nimbus, piled over the Hills of Gilead, move without the push of a wind behind towards the damp rain-clouds rolling inland from the Mediterranean, and there is a great thunderstorm over Shechem. Forked lightning strikes and splits the rocks, the echoes of Nebo and Gerizim bellow in answer to the rattling volleys of cloud-artillery. Wadis and passes became foaming cataracts, field-bivouacs are flooded--men and guns are bogged in the foot-deep mud of the hill-roads--and supply-columns of British A.S.C. hopelessly held up in the vast cotton-soil morass that was yesterday the Maritime Plain.

By noon of the next day the sun regains sway, and the smells of Shechem their wonted potency. Save for one Turkish sentry at the gate, the guard has been removed from the Wired Enclosure. In its littered desolation an offence to the eye--in its neglected filth an outrage to the adjacent organ, it lies and steams and festers under the baking rays; and all the winged legions of Baal Zebub seem there to be holding revel--especially in the neighbourhood of the wooden hut.

A couple of hours after noon the Enclosure is visited by the Bey. The _posta_ at the gate stiffens to the salute as Hamid passes in with the gauze-spectacled Medical Officer and his bilious-looking secretary, his nondescript Greek interpreter, and his usual following of big-bearded, red-fezzed _zabtiehs_, armed with German Service revolvers, and repeating Winchesters.

The fog of flies about the wooden hut thins a little as the visitors approach its entrance. The heavy door--broken now--stands as wide as though no prisoner were within worth keeping. The odour of corruption fills the place. The Bey spits, the Turkish Medical Officer in the black gauze spectacles furtively sucks a formamint lozenge, and conveys one to the interpreter--the Secretary holds his nose....

The wooden bed has been dragged aside from the patch of ground it covered, where shows the mouth of the tunnel, which has been hastily filled up with brickbats, sand, and gravel. Flies rise in a roaring cloud from the bedstead as the visitors enter, and the Bey, with a pale twinkle in his oblique sandy eyes--the inevitable cigarette poised between his thick gloved fingers--perpetrates one of his inimitable jests:

"Come, see a greedy dog we have in here--a Yahudi of the Yahud, who has eaten stick till his belly burst, and now can eat no more! ..."

At which display of wit the fat, goggled surgeon squirms with laughter, the secretary and the interpreter, faint with mirth, retire to the threshold, and even the flies buzz as though they too appreciated the jest....

The Thing that lies upon the bed looks as though it, too, joined in the merriment, for its teeth are set, and the swollen lips drawn back--the Medical Officer learnedly explains--in the rigor of the early stages of tetanus, so that it grins from ear to ear. A mountainous bulk of bloody flesh, clothed in a garment of feasting flies, and bound about with an iron chain that is padlocked under the _anghareb_--he is no more than the caricature of what was once a man.

A man who has suffered the extremest punishment of the _falagy_. Who has been beaten by the lithe green rods on the feet and legs, on the belly and breast, on the loins and thighs and face.... Beaten to kill by relays of men, skilled in the use of the _asayisi_, and yet, for a wonder, is not dead....

Labouring breaths issue from the bloated lips, and puff from the split nostrils. In the glazed eyes staring from their bleeding orbits, black fire smoulders still.... He is even capable of a croaking sound, which he reiterates at intervals, with his bleeding eyes begging at the faces of those beside his bed....

"_So' ûk sû! ... So' ûk sû! ..._"

All the Turkish the sufferer knows: "Cold Water!--cold water! ..."

"O Jew! you will get no cold water between here and Hell. But stick--plenty more stick, if you are noisy." Thus the Bey, illustrating the humour of the words with eloquent pantomime.

"Do not beat me any more!" the wretched being on the bed stutters in broken Arabic: "Do not call the soldiers--beg the Bey to be merciful!" Bright red blood jets between the clenched teeth--his cracked tongue being moistened with this, his utterance becomes clearer: "Tell Hamid Bey if he will let me go, I can pay--I can pay him well! ..."

"Thou canst pay? That is speaking Osmanli sense." A flat pasty face with oblique, pale, lashless eyes, and sandy eyebrows, replaces the spectacled surgeon's. "How canst thou pay?"

"By--telling--but I will tell no one but the Bey--where the money has been hidden away! ..."

"Hidden money--and where!" Sharp greed wakens in the pale eyes. They dig in the smouldering black ones as if treasure lay behind them: "I who speak am Hamid Bey. Now, Jew--out with it!--where is the money?"

"I will tell--I will tell, but only to the Bey," moans the voice between the clenched teeth. "Send away thy people.... Fasten the door lest they creep back and overhear. There was a whole bag of English gold! I brought it to buy the freedom of the Nazrâni priest--and coveting the money, buried it--where I will tell thee...."

"_Peki_! Very good,--all right!" The Bey turns upon his men, and dismisses them with an injunction to keep well out of earshot, then kicks-to the broken door and returns to the side of the _anghareb_.

The fear of desire thwarted grips him now, for the face is contorted in a ghastly grin, and the black eyes are rolling in their bloody sockets. He stoops over and shouts in the bloated ear, "Wake, dog! Tell now--or I call back the soldiers. Tell of the hidden gold! ..."

"I will tell! ..." The mountainous body heaves, the flayed muscles stand out on the huge arms like thick blue cordage.... "Stoop lower! Bend thine ear close! I buried--I buried it--"

"Where? ..." The thick yellow-pale ear approaches the grinning teeth. "Where didst thou bury it? _Ai--y!_ ..."

The beginning of a shriek of pain is choked in the Turk's fat throat, even as the big, white teeth sink into a bulging fold of it--between the ear and the collar. Their owner growls as a savage dog might do--and with an effort that rends the tattered flesh, drags an arm from under the chain that binds him down--and with a second wrench, releases the other....

Now both big hands are gripped round the Bey's throat, and his pale eyes bulge, and his pasty face is blackening. No sound escapes his gaping mouth, from which the saliva streams. And the blood from the great artery, bitten through; like a torrent of warm and sticky rain deluges the face and breast of his enemy.

"I buried the gold," the voice croaks in the now discoloured ear, "in Esther's tomb. Dost thou hear me well, O Hamid? But I have brought thee a gift instead--the gift that many have had of thee. Even Death at these hands of mine--murderer, fornicator, lecher! Another twist yet for thy fat neck. For Jacob! ... This for Esther!--this for Julian Forbis! ... And this last of all for John Hazaël--who takes the head of the dog! ..."

The strength is ebbing from the great hands.... The fingers relax their hold upon the throat of the dead body.... Now with the head bent under it at a suggestive, ugly angle, it drops with a dull, heavy thud, upon the blood-slimed floor.

XIX

The sun of a day in the second week of December, 1917, rose on the last day of Ottoman dominion in the City that, since fifteen hundred years before the Birth of the Saviour at Bethlehem, has been, at regular intervals, the storm-centre of the world.

Panic followed on the arrival of some disintegrated units of a Turkish transport-column with the news that the British occupied Hebron; that their Advance held the Railway, and would soon be within sight. "No lie," as ancient Fuller says, for the London Division was at Lifta.

Hence general stampede ensued, and Turkish _postas_ of infantry, indifferent alike to the loaded whips and the curses of their officers, shed packs, bandoliers and rifles, and fled incontinent. There was a running to and fro of Jewish and native Syrian citizens. Wives and daughters called to husbands and sons, and brothers--long hidden in underground vaults, or unsuspected attics, "The Turks are running! Deliverance has come! ..."

By two o'clock noon Turkish troops, mounted and afoot, muddy, weary and thoroughly disgruntled,--Field batteries, machine-gun companies, baggage-lorries and ambulances of the Red Crescent--poured through the Jaffa Gate from the west and south-west.

"_Gitmeya mejburûz_--we have to go!" the _postas_ called to wounded comrades leaning from the Hospital windows, and the muddy torrent rolled through the streets of the Holy City, and out at St. Stephen's Gate upon the eastern side.

Towards dark, the Governor Izzet Bey went to the telegraph-office, discharged the staff of trembling Turks, smashed the Morse instruments with a hammer, and leaving in charge of the nervous Mayor a letter of surrender--borrowed the Cape cart and team of an American resident, and left for Jericho.... And by seven a.m. on the anniversary of the day of the recapture of the Temple from Pagan Seleucids by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C. the Ottoman inundation had drained away into the sombre depths of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, over the ancient Roman bridges of the Jordan--and cowed and bullied citizens who had been beaten, dragooned and plundered--were mustering courage to plunder in their turn.

The eagles of the R.F.C. wheeled in the azure overhead, but no pageantry of any kind marred the entry of the Conqueror.

For years the gathering of more than three persons together in one place had been punished by the Turkish police with fines, imprisonment and beatings. Now the Turk had been thrust out, but Fear lingered still. For, as the British Commander-in-Chief--preceded by his _aides_ and Staff, and accompanied by distinguished representatives of the Allied Nations,--passed through the Jaffa Gate on foot, the huge concourse of pale and hollow-eyed residents and townsfolk mustered on the roofs and gathered in the streets--witnessed the thing almost in silence. Dumb, for the most part, pallid, immobile, like people carved of stone. Only, when from the Gateway before the Tower whose foundations were laid by David--and whose walls were reared by Suleiman the Magnificent--the Proclamation of Religious Freedom was read in the Four Languages, a sob like the breaking of a great wave broke from innumerable breasts, and eyes that had been dry for years were wet with tears at last....

The work was done. By strategical pressure, without the graze of a bullet on her sacred walls, the Holy City had surrendered. He did not linger after the reading of the Proclamation. He received in the square behind the Citadel the civil and religious notables of the City--the Mayor of Jerusalem, the Shaykhs in charge of the Mosque of Omar and Aksa, the Rabbis of the Spanish, German and Syrian Synagogues, the Fathers Representative of the Syrian, Greek, Abyssinian, Armenian and Latin Catholic Churches (their Patriarchs having by the Turks been forcibly deported)--the Anglican Bishop, the American Episcopalian--and Dissenting Ministers....

The brief ceremony over, he passed away as he had come, with his following, through the Gate of Jaffa; his soldierly tread sounding over the deep-buried threshold crossed in past ages by the war-horses of David, the chariot-wheels of Solomon and Nebuchadnezzar--the slave-borne litters of the Pharaohs, the tyrant-Kings of old Assyria--as by the golden-studded white bull's hide sandals of Alexander of Macedon, and from thenceonward how many conquerors more....