CHAPTER VII
"SERAI FUM EL KHALIG,
"CAIRO.
"Salaam aleykoum! Ten days have passed, my dear Helena, since I wrote my last letter, and during that time I have learned all that is going on here, having in my assumed character of Ishmael in disguise interviewed nearly the whole of the Ulema, including that double-dyed dastard, the Grand Cadi.
"Under the wing – the rather fluttered one – of the good old Chancellor of El Azhar I saw the oily reprobate in his own house, and in his honeyed voice he made pretence of receiving me with boundless courtesy. I was his 'beloved friend in God,' 'the reformer of Islam,' called to the task of bringing men back to the Holy Koran, to the Prophet, and to eternal happiness. On the other hand, my father was 'the slave of power,' the 'evil-doer,' the 'adventurer,' and the 'great assassin,' who was led away by worldly things, and warring against God.
"More than once my hands itched to take the hypocrite from behind by the ample folds of his Turkish garments and fling him like vermin down the stairs, but I was there to hear what he was doing, so I smothered a few strong expressions which only the recording angel knows anything about, and was compelled to sit and listen.
"My dear Helena, it is even worse than I expected. Some of the double-dealing Egyptian Ministers, backed by certain of the diplomatic corps, but inspired by this Chief Judge in Islam, have armed a considerable part of the native populace, in the hope that the night when England, in the persons of her chief officials, is merry-making on the island of Ghezirah, and the greater part of the British force is away in the provinces quelling disturbances and keeping peace, the people may rise, the Egyptian army may mutiny, and Ishmael's followers may take possession of the city.
"All this and more, with many suave words about the 'enlightening help of God,' and the certainty of 'a bloodless victory,' in which the Almighty would make me glorious and the English would be driven out of Egypt, the crafty scoundrel did not hesitate to propound as a means whereby the 'true faith might be established all over Europe, Rome and London!'
"Since my interview with the Grand Cadi I have learned of a certainty, what I had already surmised, that the Consul-General has been made aware of the whole plot, and is taking his own measures to defeat it. Undoubtedly the first duty of a Government is to preserve order and to establish authority, and I know my father well enough to be sure that at any cost he will set himself to do both. But what will happen?
"Mark my word, the British army will be ordered back to the Capital – perhaps on the eve of the festival – and as surely as it enters the city on the night of the King's Birthday there will be massacre in the streets, for the Egyptian soldiers will rebel, and the people who have been provided with arms from the Secret Service money of England's enemies will rise, thinking the object of the Government is to prevent the entrance of Ishmael and his followers.
"Result – a holy war; and as that is the only kind of war that was ever yet worth waging, it will put Egypt in the right and England in the wrong.
"Does Ishmael expect this? No; he thinks he is to make a peaceful entry into Cairo when he comes to establish his World State, his millennium of universal faith and empire. Do the Ulema expect it? No; they think the Army of Occupation will be far away when their crazy scheme is carried into effect. Does my father expect it? Not for one moment, so sure is he – I know it perfectly, I have heard him say it a score of times – that the Egyptian soldier will not fight alone, and that Egyptian civilians can be scattered by a water-hose.
"Heaven help him! If ever a man was preparing to draw a sword from its scabbard it is my father at this moment, but it is only because he is played upon and deceived by this son and successor of Caiaphas the damned. I'll go and open his eyes to the Grand Cadi's duplicity. I'll say, 'Bring your oily scoundrel face to face with me, and see what I will say. If he denies it, you must choose for yourself which of us you will believe – your own son, who has nothing to gain by coming back to warn you, or this reptile who is fighting for the life of his rotten old class.'
"The thing is hateful to me, and if there were any other possible way of stopping the wretched slaughter I should not go, for I know it will end in the Consul-General handing me over to the military authorities to be court-martialled for my former offences, and, as you may say, it is horrible to put a father, with a high sense of duty, into the position of being compelled to cut off his own son.
"Meanwhile I am conscious that the police continue to watch me, and I am just as much a prisoner as if I were already within the walls of a jail. For their own purposes they are leaving me at liberty, and I believe they will go on doing so until after the night of the King's Birthday. After that, God knows what will happen.
"I am writing late, and I must turn in soon, so good-night, and God bless and preserve you, my own darling – mine, mine, mine, and nobody else's, remember that! Hafiz continues to protest that the Prophet has a love for you, and will bring out everything for the best. I think so too – I really do, so you must not be frightened about anything I have said in this letter.
"There is only one thing frightens me, and that is the damnable trick memory plays me when it rakes up all you told me of the terms of your betrothal to Ishmael. I can bear it pretty well during the day, but in that dead grey hour of the early morning, when the moonlight slinks into the dawn, before the sparrows begin to chop the air and the Arabs to rend it, I find myself thinking that though Ishmael, when he proposed marriage to you, may have been thinking of nothing but how to protect your good name, being a pure-minded man who had consecrated his life to a spiritual mission, yet the constant presence of a beautiful woman by his side must sooner or later sweep away his pledge.
"He wouldn't be a man if it didn't, and, the prophet notwithstanding, Ishmael is that to his finger-tips. But heaven help me! I daren't let my mind dwell on this subject, or I should have to fly back to you and leave my task here unfulfilled. So as often as I shut my eyes and see you trudging through the desert in Ishmael's caravan, I tell myself that Providence has something for you to do there – must have – though what the deuce it is, I don't yet see.
"No matter! D.V. I'll know some day, and meantime I'll nail my colours to the mast of your strength and courage, knowing that the bravest girl in the world belongs to me, and wherever she is, she is mine, and always will be. GORDON.
"P.S.– I am now dispatching my two letters to Assouan by Hamid Ibrahim – the second of the two Sheikhs who went with me to Alexandria – and if you find you can send me an answer, for God's sake, do! I am hungering and thirsting and starving and perishing for a letter from you – a line, a word, a syllable, the scratch of your pen on a piece of paper. Send it, for heaven's sake!
"I hear that hundreds of native boats are going up to Assouan to bring you down the Nile, so look out for my next letter when you get to Luxor – I may have something to tell you by that time."
CHAPTER VIII
I
"NUBIAN DESERT (anywhere).
"O MY GORDON, – Such startling developments! Ishmael's character has made a new manifestation. It concerns me, and I hardly know whether I ought to speak of it. Yet I must – I cannot help myself.
"I find there is something distinctly masculine in his interest in me! In Khartoum (in spite of certain evidences to the contrary) I was always fool enough to suppose that it was without sex – what milksops call Platonic – as if any such relation between a man and a woman ever was or ever will be!
"Oh, I know what you are saying! 'That foolish young woman thinks Ishmael is falling in love with her.' But wait, sir, only wait and listen.
"We left Berber at night, and rode for four hours in the moonlight. Goodness! What ghosts the desert is full of – ghosts of pyramids that loom large and then fade away. Such mysterious lights! Such spectral watch-towers standing on spectral heights! It was what the Arabs call 'a white night,' and besides the moon in its splendour there was a vast star-strewn sky. Sometimes we heard the hyena's cry, sometimes the jackal's ululation, and through the silver shimmering haze we could see the wild creatures scuttling away from us.
"Thus on and on went our weary caravan – the camels like great swans with their steady upturned heads, slithering as if in slippers along the noiseless sand, and many of the tired people asleep on them. But I could not sleep, and Ishmael, who was very much awake, rode by my side and talked to me.
"It was about love, and included one pretty story of a daughter of the Bedawee who married a Sultan – how she scorned the silken clothes he gave her and would not live in his palace – saying she was no fellaha to sleep in houses – and made him come out into the desert with her and dwell in a tent. I thought there was a certain self-reference in the story, but that was not all by any means.
"At midnight we halted by a group of wells, and while our vast army of animals was being watered my tent was set up outside the camp, so that I might rest without noise. I suppose I had been looking faint and pale, for just as I was listening to the monotonous voice of a boy who, at a fire not far away, was singing both himself and me to sleep, Ishmael came with a dish of medida, saying, 'Drink this, it will do you good.'
"Then he sat down, and, with that paralysing plainness of speech which the Easterns have, began to talk of love again, especially in relation to the duty of renunciation, quoting in that connection 'the lord of the Christians,' who had said, 'There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.'
"It was more than embarrassing from the beginning, but it became startling and almost shocking when he went on to talk about Jesus in relation to Mary Magdalene (whom he supposed to be the sister of Martha), and of the home at Bethany as the only place in which He found the solace of female society, and how He had to turn His back on the love of woman for His work's sake.
"We are so accustomed to think of Jesus's inaccessibility to human affection as if it were a merit in Him to be superior to love, that it made my skin creep to hear this person of another faith talk like that. But I shivered a good deal more when he came to closer quarters, and said that renunciation was the duty of every one on whom God had laid a great mission until his task was finished, and then … then it was just as much his duty to live as a man!
"He went away quite calmly, commending me to God, but he left me in a state of terror; and though I was nearly worn to death by the double journey, I did not sleep a wink that night for thinking of that accursed day of the betrothal, and what would happen if he ever broke his promise and came to me to claim the rights of a husband.
"The next day or two passed without any serious incident except that Ishmael, who had developed a pair of haunting, imploring eyes, was always riding his camel by its halter and nose-rein at the side of my litter, and talking constantly on the same subject. But then came an event of thrilling interest. Can I – shall I – must I tell you about it? Yes, I can, I shall, I must!
"Out here on the desert I always feel as if I were travelling in Bible lands, and if our caravan were to come upon 'Abram the Hebrew,' and Rachel and Rebecca flying away with some Bedouin Jacob, I should not be the least surprised, so it seemed natural enough that yesterday, in the country of the Bisharin Arabs, we lit upon Laban, living as a patriarch among his people.
"There were his sons and his sons' sons, big, brawny boys, strong and clean of limb, and with their loins well girt but hardly anything else covered, and there were 'the souls born of his house' in their felt skull-caps and blue galabeahs. But what most concerned me were his two splendid daughters. No corsetted women out of Bond Street, sir, but superbly fine and majestic young females, tall and straight, with big bosoms like pomegranates, ringletted black hair, clear oval faces, the olive skin of the purest Arab blood, and large black eyes that shone like gems.
"Such a woman, I thought, must Ruth have been when she lay at the feet of Boaz; but lo, it never occurred to me that the people's faith in Ishmael's 'divinity' did not forbid their ascribing to him the attributes of a man. Shall I go on? Yes, I will, for already you know that your Helena, your lady-love, is no mealy-mouthed miss – never was, and never can be.
"Well, last night, late, while I was looking at the shadowy forms of the camels coming and going in the light of the dying fires, I saw Laban, who had been pouring hospitalities upon us, leading one of his daughters, whose head was low, to Ishmael's tent. It was like something horrible out of the Old Testament, but I had to watch – I simply could not help it – and after a while I saw Laban and Rachel going away together, and then the old man's head as well as the girl's was down.
"Act One being finished last night, Act Two began to-day. We are in the middle of the Nubian desert now, and as the heat is great under the red wrath of the fiery mountains on either side, we have to rest for three hours in the middle of every day. Well, at noon to-day Ishmael came to my tent and talked of love again. It was a heavenly passion. Surely God had created it. Yet the Christians had made 'monkery,' and were thus rebuking the Almighty and claiming to be wiser than He. The union of man and woman without love was sin. That was what made so many Moslem marriages sinful. Marriage was not betrothal, not the joining of hands under a handkerchief, not the repeating of words after a Cadi; marriage was the sacrament of love, and love being present and nothing else intervening, renunciation was wrong, it was against the spirit of Islam, and no matter who he might be, a man should live as a man.
"I don't know what I said, or whether I said anything, but I do know that the blood left my heart and seemed long in making its way back again. My skin was creeping, and I had a feeling which I had never known before – a feeling of repulsion – the feeling of the white woman about the black man. Ishmael is not black by any means, but I felt exactly as if he were, for I could see quite well what was going on in his mind. He was thinking of his journey's end, of the day when his work would be finished, and he was promising himself the realisation of his love.
"That shall never, never be! No, not under any circumstances! My God, no, not for worlds of worlds! Good-night, Gordon! I may be betrothed to this man, but there is no law of nature that binds me to him. I belong to you, just as Rachel belonged to Jacob, and whatever I may be in my religion, I am no Trinitarian in my love at all events.
"Good-bye, dearest! Don't let what I have said alarm you. Oh, I know what you are now: 'That foolish young woman expects me to hear her when I am in Cairo and she is in the middle of the Nubian desert.' But you do, I am sure you do. And I hear you also. I hear your voice at this moment as clearly as I hear it when I awake in the middle of the night and it rings through my miserable tent and makes me wildly hysterical. So don't be alarmed; I can take care of myself, I tell you! My love, my love, my love!
II
"Mercy! I don't know who did it, or by whose orders it was done, but last night Ishmael's tent, which has hitherto been set up at a distance, was placed mouth to mouth with mine. More than that, the odious Arab woman, who has always afflicted me with her abominable presence, was nowhere to be seen. I was feeling by one of your 'mystic senses' that something was going to happen when late, very late, the last of the fires having died down and the camp being asleep, I heard Ishmael calling to me in a whisper —
"'Rani!'
"I did not answer – I could not have done so if I had tried, for my heart was thumping like an anvil.
"'Rani!' he whispered again, and again I did not reply. I knew he knew I was awake, and after a moment of silence that seemed eternal, he said —
"'By-and-by, then! When we come to Cairo and my mission is at an end.
"O God, what tears of anger and despair I shed when he was gone and all was quiet! And now I ask myself if I can bear this strain any longer. After all, Ishmael is only an Oriental, and perhaps in spite of himself and the pledge he gave to me, the natural man is coming to the top. Then I am his wife, and he has rights in me, according to his own view and the laws of his religion! I am in his camp too, and we are in the middle of the desert!
"How did it happen – that betrothal? Are these things ordained? Gordon, you talk about Destiny, but why don't you see that what took me to Khartoum was not really the desire to avenge my father (though I thought it was) but to avenge myself for the loss of you. So you – you – you were the real cause of my hideous error, and if you had loved me as I loved you I could never have been put to that compulsion.
"… Forgive me, dear! I am feeling wicked, but I shall soon get over it. I have not been sleeping well lately, and there are dark rims under my eyes and I am a fright in every way… I feel calm already, so good-night, dearest! We cannot be far from civilisation now, therefore there can be no need to run away from here."
III
"Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! We camped last night on the top of a stony granite hill, and this morning we can see the silver streak of the Nile with the sweet green verdure along its banks, and the great dam at Assouan with its cascades of falling water. Such joy! Such a frenzy of gladness! The people are capering about like demented children. Just so must the children of Israel have felt when God brought them out of the wilderness and they saw the promised land before them.
"Black Zogal galloped into the town at daybreak and has just galloped back, bringing a great company of Sheikhs and Notables – Egyptians, chiefly – who have come up the Nile to meet us, but many are Bedouins from the wild East country running to the Red Sea. Such fine faces and stately figures! Most of them living in tents, but all dressed like princes. They are saluting Ishmael as the 'Deliverer,' the 'Guided One,' the 'Redeemer,' and even the 'Lord Isa,' and he is not reproving them!
"But I cannot think of Ishmael now. I feel as if I were coming out of chaos and entering into the world. If anything has happened to you I shall know it soon. Shall I be able to control myself? I shall! I must!
"Oh, how my heart beats and swells! I can scarcely breathe. But you are alive, I am sure you are, and I shall hear from you presently. I shall also escape from this false position and sleep at last, as the Arabs say, with both eyes shut. I must stop. My tent has to be struck. The camp is already in movement.
* * * * *
"One word. We were plunging into Assouan, through the cool bazaars with their blazing patches of sunlight and sudden blots of shadow when I saw your Sheikh sidling up to me. He slipped your letter into my hand and is to come back in a moment for mine. I am staying at a khan. Oh, God bless and love you! El Hamdullillah! My dear, my dear, my dear!
"HELENA."
CHAPTER IX
I
"THE NILE
"(between Assouan and Luxor).
"OH, MY DEAR, DEAREST GORDON, – Mohammed's rapture when he received from the angel the 'holy Koran' was a mild emotion compared to mine when I read your letter. Perhaps I ought to be concerned about the contents of it, but I am not – not a bit of me! Having found out what the Grand Cadi is doing, you will confound his 'knavish tricks.'
"Never mind, my dear old boy, what the officials are saying. They'll soon see whether you have been a bad Englishman, and in any case you cannot compete with the descendants of all the creeping things that came out of the Ark.
"Don't worry about me either. Unparalleled as my position is, I am quite capable of taking care of myself, for I find that in the decalogue you delivered to your devoted slave on the day she saw you first, there was one firm and plain commandment, 'Thou shalt have no other love but me.' I dare say, being a woman, I am faithless to the first instinct of my sex in telling you this, but I have no time for 'female' fooleries, however delicious, and be bothered to them anyway!
"As you see, I did not run away from Ishmael's camp on reaching the railway terminus, and the reason was that you said you were writing to me again at Luxor. Hence, I was compelled to come on, for of course I would not have lost that letter, or let it go astray, for all the value of the British Empire.
"I was delighted with my day at Assouan though, with its glimpses of a green, riotous, prodigal, ungovernable Nature after the white nakedness of the wilderness: with its flashlight peep at civilised frivolities, its hotels for European visitors, its orchestras playing 'When we are mar-ried,' its Egyptian dragomans with companies of tourists tailing behind them, its dahabeahs and steam launches, and, above all, its groups of English girls, maddeningly pretty and full of the intoxication of life, yet pretending to be consumed by a fever of self-culture and devoured by curiosity about mummies and tombs.
"It's no use – these pink-white faces after the brown and black are a joy to behold, and when I came upon a bunch of them chattering and laughing like linnets ('Frocks up, children!' as they crossed a puddle made by the watermen) I could hardly help kissing them all round, they looked so sweet and so homelike.
"You were right about the boats. A whole fleet was waiting for us, which was a mercy, for the animals were utterly done up after the desert journey, and next morning we embarked under the strenuous supervision of a British Bimbashi who looked as large as if he had just won the battle of Waterloo.
"Of course the people were following Ishmael like a swarm of bees, and, much to my discomfiture, I came in for a share of reflected glory from a crowd of visitors who were evidently wondering whether I was a reincarnation of Lady Hester Stanhope or the last Circassian slave-wife of the Ameer of Afghanistan. One horrible young woman cocked her camera and snapped me – American, of course, a sort of half-countrywoman of yours, sir, shockingly stylish, good-looking and attractive, with frills and furbelows that gave a far view of Regent Street and the Rue de la Paix, and made me feel so dreadfully shabby in my Eastern dress and veil that I wanted to slap her.
"We are now two days down the river, five hundred to a thousand boat-loads of us, our peaked white sails looking like a vast flight of seagulls and our slanting bamboo masts like an immense field of ripe corn swaying in the wind. It is a wonderful sight, this flotilla of 'feluccas' going slowly down the immemorial stream, and when one thinks of it in relation to its object it is almost magnificent – a nation going up to its millennium!
"They have rigged up a sort of cabin for me in the bow of one of the high-prowed boats, with shelter and shade included, so that I still have some seclusion in which to write my 'Journal,' in spite of this pestilent Arab woman who is always watching me. In the hold outside there must be a hundred men at least, and at the stern there are a few women who bake durali cakes on a charcoal stove, making it a marvel to me that they do not set fire to the boat a dozen times a day.
"The wind being fair and the river in full flood – seven men's height above the usual level, and boiling and bubbling and tearing down like a torrent – we sail from daylight to dark, but at night we are hauled up and moored to the bank, so that the people may go ashore to sleep if they are so minded.
"Oh, these delicious mornings! Oh, these white, enchanting nights! The wide, smooth, flowing water, reflecting the tall palms, the banks, the boats themselves; in the morning a soft brown, at noon a cool green, at sunset a glowing rose, at night a pearly grey! Then the broad blue sky with its blaze of lemon and yellow and burnished gold as the sun goes down; the rolling back of the darkness as the dawn appears and the sweeping up of the crimson wings of day! If I dared only give myself up to the delight of it! But I daren't, I daren't, having something to do here, so my dear one says, though what the deuce and the dickens it is (except to stay until I receive that letter) I cannot conceive."
II
"The people are in great spirits now, all their moaning and murmuring being turned to gladness, and as we glide along they squat in the boats and sing. Strangely enough, in a country where religion counts for so much, there is hardly anything answering to sacred music, but there are war-songs in abundance, full of references to the 'filly foal' and of invocations to the God of Victory. These songs the men sing to something like three notes, accompanied by the beat of their tiny drums, and if the natives who stand on the banks to listen convey the warlike words to their Moudirs it cannot be a matter for much surprise that the Government thinks an army is coming down the Nile and that your father finds it necessary to prepare to 'establish authority.'
"As for Ishmael, he is in a state of ecstasy that is bordering on frenzy. He passes from boat to boat, teaching and preaching early and late. Of course it is always the same message – the great Hope, the Deliverer, the Redeemer, the Christ, the Kingdom or Empire that is to come, but just as he drew his lessons from the desert before so now he draws them from the Nile.
"The mighty river, mother of Egypt, numbered among the deities in olden days, born in the heights and flowing down to the ocean, rising and falling and bringing fertility, suckling the land, sustaining it, the great waterway from North to South, the highway for humanity – what is it but a symbol of the golden age so soon to begin, when all men will be gathered together as the children of one Mother, with one God one Law one Faith!
"It becomes more and more terrifying. I am sure the people are taking their teaching literally, for they are like children in their delirious joy; and when I think how surely their hopes are doomed to be crushed, I ask myself what is to happen to Ishmael when the day of their disappointment comes. They will kill him – I am sure they will!
"Gordon, I go through hell at certain moments. It was good of you to tell me I need not charge myself with everything that is happening, but I am hysterical when I think that although this hope may be only a dream, a vain dream, and I had nothing to do with creating it, it is through me that it is to be so ruthlessly destroyed.
"Then there is that masculine development in Ishmael's relation to me, and the promise he has made himself that as soon as his task is finished he will live the life of a man!
"Thank God, we are close to Luxor now, and when I get that letter I shall be free to escape. Have you seen your father, I wonder? If so, what has happened? Oh, my dear-dear! It is four years – days, I mean – since I heard from you – what an age in a time like this! My love – all, all my love! HELENA."