Donovan Pasha And Some People Of Egypt, Complete - Gilbert Parker
Dicky Donovan's conversion to a lasting belief in Mahommed Seti came a
year later.
The thing happened at a little sortie from the Nile. Fielding was chief
medical officer, and Dicky, for the moment, was unattached. When the time
came for starting, Mahommed Seti brought round Fielding's horse and also
Dicky Donovan's. Now, Mahommed Seti loved a horse as well as a Bagarra
Arab, and he had come to love Fielding's waler Bashi-Bazouk as a Farshoot
dog loves his master. And Bashi-Bazouk was worthy of Seti's love. The
sand of the desert, Seti's breath and the tail of his yelek made the coat
of Bashi-Bazouk like silk. It was the joy of the regiment, and the
regiment knew that Seti had added a new chapter to the Koran concerning
horses, in keeping with Mahomet's own famous passage--
"By the CHARGERS that pant,
And the hoofs that strike fire,
And the scourers at dawn,
Who stir up the dust with it,
And cleave through a host with it!"
But Mahomet's phrases were recited in the mosque, and Seti's, as he
rubbed Bashi-Bazouk with the tail of his yelek.
There was one thing, however, that Seti loved more than horses, or at
least as much. Life to him was one long possible Donnybrook Fair. That
was why, although he was no longer in the army, when Fielding and Dicky
mounted for the sortie he said to Fielding:
"Oh, brother of Joshua and all the fighters of Israel, I have a bobtailed
Arab. Permit me to ride with thee." And Fielding replied: "You will fight
the barn-yard fowl for dinner; get back to your stew-pots."
But Seti was not to be fobbed off. "It is written that the Lord, the
Great One, is compassionate and merciful. Wilt thou then, O saadat."
Fielding interrupted: "Go, harry the onion-field for dinner. You're a dog
of a slave, and a murderer too: you must pay the price of that
grindstone!"
But Seti hung by the skin of his teeth to the fringe of Fielding's
good-nature--Fielding's words only were sour and wrathful. So Seti
grinned and said: "For the grindstone, behold it sent Ebn Haroun to the
mercy of God. Let him rest, praise be to God!"
"You were drummed out of the army. You can't fight," said Fielding again;
but he was smiling under his long moustache.
"Is not a bobtailed nag sufficient shame? Let thy friend ride the
bobtailed nag and pay the price of the grindstone and the drum," said
Seti.
"Fall in!" rang the colonel's command, and Fielding, giving Seti a
friendly kick in the ribs, galloped away to the troop.
Seti turned to the little onion-garden. His eye harried it for a moment,
and he grinned. He turned to the doorway where a stew-pot rested, and his
mind dwelt cheerfully on the lamb he had looted for Fielding's dinner.
But last of all his eye rested upon his bobtailed Arab, the shameless
thing in an Arab country, where every horse rears his tail as a peacock
spreads his feathers, as a marching Albanian lifts his foot. The
bobtailed Arab's nose was up, his stump was high. A hundred times he had
been in battle; he was welted and scarred like a shoe-maker's apron. He
snorted his cry towards the dust rising like a surf behind the heels of
the colonel's troop.
Suddenly Seti answered the cry--he answered the cry and sprang forward.
That was how in the midst of a desperate melee twenty miles away on the
road to Dongola little Dicky Donovan saw Seti riding into the thick of
the fight armed only with a naboot of domwood, his call, "Allala-Akbar!"
rising like a hoarse-throated bugle, as it had risen many a time in the
old days on the road from Manfaloot. Seti and his bobtailed Arab, two
shameless ones, worked their way to the front. Not Seti's strong right
arm alone and his naboot were at work, but the bobtailed Arab, like an
iron-handed razor toothed shrew, struck and bit his way, his eyes
bloodred like Seti's. The superstitious Dervishes fell back before this
pair of demons; for their madness was like the madness of those who at
the Dosah throw themselves beneath the feet of the Sheikh's horse by the
mosque of El Hassan in Cairo. The bobtailed Arab's lips were drawn back
over his assaulting teeth in a horrible grin. Seti grinned too, the grin
of fury and of death.
Fielding did not know how it was that, falling wounded from his horse, he
was caught by strong arms, as Bashi-Bazouk cleared him at a bound and
broke into the desert. But Dicky Donovan, with his own horse lanced under
him, knew that Seti made him mount the bobtailed Arab with Fielding in
front of him, and that a moment later they had joined the little band
retreating to Korosko, having left sixty of their own dead on the field,
and six times that number of Dervishes.
It was Dicky Donovan who cooked Fielding's supper that night, having
harried the onion-field and fought the barn-yard fowl, as Fielding had
commanded Seti.
But next evening at sunset Mahommed Seti came into the fort, slashed and
bleeding, with Bashi-Bazouk limping heavily after him.
Fielding said that Seti's was the good old game for which V.C.'s were the
reward--to run terrible risks to save a life in the face of the enemy;
but, heretofore, it had always been the life of a man, not of a horse. To
this day the Gippies of that regiment still alive do not understand why
Seti should have stayed behind and risked his life to save a horse and
bring him wounded back to his master. But little Dicky Donovan
understood, and Fielding understood; and Fielding never afterwards
mounted Bashi-Bazouk but he remembered. It was Mahommed Seti who taught
him the cry of Mahomet:
"By the CHARGERS that pant,
And the hoofs that strike fire,
And the scourers at dawn,
Who stir up the dust with it,
And cleave through a host with it!"
And in the course of time Mahommed Seti managed to pay the price of the
grindstone and also of the drum.
THE DESERTION OF MAHOMMED SELIM
The business began during Ramadan; how it ended and where was in the
mouth of every soldier between Beni Souef and Dongola, and there was not
a mud hut or a mosque within thirty miles of Mahommed Selim's home, not a
khiassa or felucca dropping anchor for gossip and garlic below the
mudirieh, but knew the story of Soada, the daughter of Wassef the
camel-driver.
Soada was pretty and upright, with a full round breast and a slim figure.
She carried a balass of water on her head as gracefully as a princess a
tiara. This was remarked by occasional inspectors making their official
rounds, and by more than one khowagah putting in with his dahabeah where
the village maidens came to fill their water-jars. Soada's trinkets and
bracelets were perhaps no better than those of her companions, but her
one garment was of the linen of Beni Mazar, as good as that worn by the
Sheikh-Elbeled himself.
Wassef the camel-driver, being proud of Soada, gave her the advantage of
his frequent good fortune in desert loot and Nile backsheesh. But Wassef
was a hard man for all that, and he grew bitter and morose at last,
because he saw that camel-driving must suffer by the coming of the
railway. Besides, as a man gets older he likes the season of Ramadan
less, for he must fast from sunrise to sunset, though his work goes on;
and, with broken sleep, having his meals at night, it is ten to one but
he gets irritable.
So it happened that one evening just at sunset, Wassef came to his hut,
with the sun like the red rim of a huge thumb-nail in the sky behind him,
ready beyond telling for his breakfast, and found nothing. On his way
home he had seen before the houses and cafes silent Mussulmans with
cigarettes and matches in their fingers, cooks with their hands on the
lids of the cooking pots, where the dourha and onions boiled; but here
outside his own doorway there was no odour, and there was silence within.
"Now, by the beard of the Prophet," he muttered, "is it for this I have
fed the girl and clothed her with linen from Beni Mazar all these years!"
And he turned upon his heel, and kicked a yellow cur in the ribs; then he
went to the nearest cafe, and making huge rolls of forcemeat with his
fingers crammed them into his mouth, grunting like a Berkshire boar. Nor
did his anger cease thereafter, for this meal of meat had cost him five
piastres--the second meal of meat in a week.
As Wassef sat on the mastaba of the cafe sullen and angry, the village
barber whispered in his ear that Mahommed Selim and Soada had been
hunting jackals in the desert all afternoon. Hardly had the barber fled
from the anger of Wassef, when a glittering kavass of the Mouffetish at
Cairo passed by on a black errand of conscription. With a curse Wassef
felt in his vest for his purse, and called to the kavass--the being more
dreaded in Egypt than the plague.
That very night the conscription descended upon Mahommed Selim, and by
sunrise he was standing in front of the house of the Mamour with twelve
others, to begin the march to Dongola. Though the young man's father went
secretly to the Mamour, and offered him backsheesh, even to the tune of a
feddan of land, the Mamour refused to accept it. That was a very peculiar
thing, because every Egyptian official, from the Khedive down to the
ghafhr of the cane-fields, took backsheesh in the name of Allah.
Wassef the camel-driver was the cause. He was a deep man and a strong;
and it was through him the conscription descended upon Mahommed
Selim--"son of a burnt father," as he called him--who had gone shooting
jackals in the desert with his daughter, and had lost him his breakfast.
Wassef's rage was quiet but effective, for he had whispered to some
purpose in the ear of the Mamour as well as in that of the dreaded kavass
of conscription. Afterwards, he had gone home and smiled at Soada his
daughter when she lied to him about the sunset breakfast.
With a placid smile and lips that murmured, "Praise be to God," the
malignant camel-driver watched the shrieking women of the village
throwing dust on their heads and lamenting loudly for the thirteen young
men of Beni Souef who were going forth never to return--or so it seemed
to them; for of all the herd of human kine driven into the desert before
whips and swords, but a moiety ever returned, and that moiety so battered
that their mothers did not know them. Therefore, at Beni Souef that
morning women wept, and men looked sullenly upon the ground--all but
Wassef the camel-driver.
It troubled the mind of Wassef that Mahommed Selim made no outcry at his
fate. He was still more puzzled when the Mamour whispered to him that
Mahommed Selim had told the kavass and his own father that since it was
the will of God, then the will of God was his will, and he would go.
Wassef replied that the Mamour did well not to accept the backsheesh of
Mahommed Selim's father, for the Mouffetish at the palace of Ismail would
have heard of it, and there would have been an end to the Mamour. It was
quite a different matter when it was backsheesh for sending Mahommed
Selim to the Soudan.
With a shameless delight Wassef went to the door of his own home, and,
calling to Soada, told her that Mahommed Selim was among the conscripts.
He also told her that the young man was willing to go, and that the
Mamour would take no backsheesh from his father. He looked to see her
burst into tears and wailing, but she only stood and looked at him like
one stricken blind. Wassef laughed, and turned on his heel; and went out:
for what should he know of the look in a woman's face--he to whom most
women were alike, he who had taken dancing-girls with his camels into the
desert many a time? What should he know of that love which springs once
in every woman's heart, be she fellah or Pharaoh's daughter?
When he had gone, Soada groped her way blindly to the door and out into
the roadway. Her lips moved, but she only said: "Mahommed--Mahommed
Selim!" Her father's words knelled in her ear that her lover was willing
to go, and she kept saying brokenly: "Mahommed--Mahommed Selim!" As the
mist left her eyes she saw the conscripts go by, and Mahommed Selim was
in the rear rank. He saw her also, but he kept his head turned away,
taking a cigarette from young Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, as they passed
on.
Unlike the manner of her people, Soada turned and went back into her
house, and threw herself upon the mud floor, and put the folds of her
garment in her mouth lest she should cry out in her agony. A whole day
she lay there and did not stir, save to drink from the water-bottle which
old Fatima, the maker of mats, had placed by her side. For Fatima thought
of the far-off time when she loved Hassan the potter, who had been
dragged from his wheel by a kavass of conscription and lost among the
sands of the Libyan desert; and she read the girl's story.
That evening, as Wassef the camel-driver went to the mosque to pray,
Fatima cursed him, because now all the village laughed secretly at the
revenge that Wassef had taken upon the lover of his daughter. A few
laughed the harder because they knew Wassef would come to feel it had
been better to have chained Mahommed Selim to a barren fig-tree and kept
him there until he married Soada, than to let him go. He had
mischievously sent him into that furnace which eats the Fellaheen to the
bones, and these bones thereafter mark white the road of the Red Sea
caravans and the track of the Khedive's soldiers in the yellow sands.
When Fatima cursed Wassef he turned and spat at her; and she went back
and sat on the ground beside Soada, and mumbled tags from the Koran above
her for comfort. Then she ate greedily the food which Soada should have
eaten; snatching scraps of consolation in return for the sympathy she
gave.
The long night went, the next day came, and Soada got up and began to
work again. And the months went by.
II
One evening, on a day which had been almost too hot for even the seller
of liquorice-water to go by calling and clanging, Wassef the camel-driver
sat at the door of a malodorous cafe and listened to a wandering welee
chanting the Koran. Wassef was in an ill-humour: first, because the day
had been so hot; secondly, because he had sold his ten-months' camel at a
price almost within the bounds of honesty; and thirdly, because a score
of railway contractors and subs. were camped outside the town. Also,
Soada had scarcely spoken to him for three days past.
In spite of all, Soada had been the apple of his eye, although he had
sworn again and again that next to a firman of the Sultan, a ten-months'
camel was the most beautiful thing on earth. He was in a bitter humour.
This had been an intermittent disease with him almost since the day
Mahommed Selim had been swallowed up by the Soudan; for, like her mother
before her, Soada had no mind to be a mat for his feet. Was it not even
said that Soada's mother was descended from an English slave with red
hair, who in the terrible disaster at Damietta in 1805 had been carried
away into captivity on the Nile, where he married a fellah woman and died
a good Mussulman?
Soada's mother had had red-brown hair, and not black as becomes a fellah
woman; but Wassef was proud of this ancient heritage of red hair, which
belonged to a field-marshal of Great Britain--so he swore by the beard of
the Prophet. That is why he had not beaten Soada these months past when
she refused to answer him, when with cold stubbornness she gave him his
meals or withheld them at her will. He was even a little awed by her
silent force of will, and at last he had to ask her humbly for a savoury
dish which her mother had taught her to make--a dish he always ate upon
the birthday of Mahomet Ali, who had done him the honour to flog him with
his own kourbash for filching the rations of his Arab charger.
But this particular night Wassef was bitter, and watched with stolid
indifference the going down of the sun, the time when he usually said his
prayers. He was in so ill a humour that he would willingly have met his
old enemy, Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, and settled their long-standing
dispute for ever. But Yusef came not that way. He was lying drunk with
hashish outside the mosque El Hassan, with a letter from Mahommed Selim
in his green turban--for Yusef had been a pilgrimage to Mecca and might
wear the green turban.
But if Yusef came not by the cafe where Wassef sat glooming, some one
else came who quickly roused Wassef from his phlegm. It was Donovan
Pasha, the young English official, who had sat with him many a time at
the door of his but and asked him questions about Dongola and Berber and
the Soudanese. And because Dicky spoke Arabic, and was never known to
have aught to do with the women of Beni Souef, he had been welcome; and
none the less because he never frowned when an Arab told a lie.
"Nehar-ak koom said, Mahommed Wassef," said Dicky; and sat upon a bench
and drew a narghileh to him, wiping the ivory mouthpiece with his
handkerchief.
"Nehar-ak said, saadat el Pasha," answered Wassef, and touched lips,
breast, and forehead with his hand. Then they shook hands, thumbs up,
after the ancient custom. And once more, Wassef touched his breast, his
lips, and his forehead.
They sat silent too long for Wassef's pleasure, for he took pride in what
he was pleased to call his friendship with Donovan Pasha, and he could
see his watchful neighbours gathering at a little distance. It did not
suit his book that they two should not talk together.
"May Allah take them to his mercy!--A regiment was cut to pieces by the
Dervishes at Dongola last quarter of the moon," he said.
"It was not the regiment of Mahommed Selim," Dicky answered slowly, with
a curious hard note in his voice.
"All blessings do not come at once--such is the will of God!" answered
Wassef with a sneer.
"You brother of asses," said Dicky, showing his teeth a little, "you
brother of asses of Bagdad!"
"Saadat el basha!" exclaimed Wassef, angry and dumfounded.
"You had better have gone yourself, and left Mahommed Selim your camels
and your daughter," continued Dicky, his eyes straight upon Wassef's.
"God knows your meaning," said Wassef in a sudden fright; for the
Englishman's tongue was straight, as he well knew.
"They sneer at you behind your back, Mahommed Wassef. No man in the
village dare tell you, for you have no friends, but I tell you, that you
may save Soada before it is too late. Mahommed Selim lives; or lived last
quarter of the moon, so says Yusef the ghaffir. Sell your ten-months'
camel, buy the lad out, and bring him back to Soada."
"Saadat!" said Wassef, in a quick fear, and dropped the stem of the
narghileh, and got to his feet. "Saadat el basha!"
"Before the Nile falls and you may plant yonder field with onions,"
answered Dicky, jerking his head towards the flooded valley, "her time
will be come!"
Wassef's lips were drawn, like shrivelled parchment over his red gums,
the fingers of his right hand fumbled in his robe.
"There's no one to kill--keep quiet!" said Dicky, But Wassef saw near by
the faces of the villagers, and on every face he thought he read a smile,
a sneer; though in truth none sneered, for they were afraid of his
terrible anger. Mad with fury he snatched the turban from his head and
threw it on the ground. Then suddenly he gave one cry, "Allah!" a vibrant
clack like a pistol-shot, for he saw Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, coming
down the road.
Yusef heard that cry of "Allah!" and he knew that the hour had come for
settling old scores. The hashish clouds lifted from his brain, and he
gripped his naboot of the hard wood of the dom-palm, and, with a cry like
a wolf, came on.
It would have been well for Wassef the camel-driver if he had not taken
the turban from his head, for before he could reach Yusef with his
dagger, he went down, his skull cracking like the top of an egg under a
spoon.
III
Thus it was that Soada was left to fight her battle alone. She did not
weep or wail when Wassef's body was brought home and the moghassil and
hanouti came to do their offices. She did not smear her hair with mud,
nor was she moved by the wailing of the mourning women nor the chanters
of the Koran. She only said to Fatima when all was over: "It is well; he
is gone from my woe to the mercy of God! Praise be to God!" And she held
her head high in the village still, though her heart was in the dust.
She would have borne her trouble alone to the end, but that she was
bitten on the arm by one of her father's camels the day they were sold in
the marketplace. Then, helpless and suffering and fevered, she yielded to
the thrice-repeated request of Dicky Donovan, and was taken to the
hospital at Assiout, which Fielding Bey, Dicky's friend, had helped to
found.
But Soada, as her time drew near and the terror of it stirred her heart,
cast restless eyes upon the whitewashed walls and rough floors of the
hospital. She longed for the mud hut at Beni Souef, and the smell of the
river and the little field of onions she planted every year. Day by day
she grew harder of heart against those who held her in the hospital--for
to her it was but a prison. She would not look when the doctor came, and
she would not answer, but kept her eyes closed; and she did not shrink
when they dressed the arm so cruelly wounded by the camel's teeth, but
lay still and dumb.
Now, a strange thing happened, for her hair which had been so black
turned brown, and grew browner and browner till it was like the hair of
her mother, who, so the Niline folk said, was descended from the English
soldier-slave with red hair.
Fielding Bey and Dicky came to see her in hospital once before they
returned to Cairo; but Soada would not even speak to them, though she
smiled when they spoke to her; and no one else ever saw her smile during
the days she spent in that hospital with the red floor and white walls
and the lazy watchman walking up and down before the door. She kept her
eyes closed in the daytime; but at night they were always open--always.
Pictures of all she had lived and seen came back to her then--pictures of
days long before Mahommed Selim came into her life. Mahommed Selim! She
never spoke the words now, but whenever she thought them her heart shrank
in pain. Mahommed Selim had gone like a coward into the desert, leaving
her alone.
Her mind dwelt on the little mud hut and the onion field, and she saw
down by the foreshore of the river the great khiassas from Assouan and
Luxor laden with cotton or dourha or sugar-cane, their bent prows hooked
in the Nile mud. She saw again the little fires built along the shore and
atop of the piles of grain, round which sat the white, the black, and the
yellow-robed riverine folk in the crimson glare; while from the banks
came the cry: "Alla-haly, 'm alla-haly!" as stalwart young Arabs drew in
from the current to the bank some stubborn, overloaded khiassa. She heard
the snarl of the camels as they knelt down before her father's but to
rest before the journey into the yellow plains of sand beyond. She saw
the seller of sweetmeats go by calling--calling. She heard the droning of
the children in the village school behind the hut, the dull clatter of
Arabic consonants galloping through the Koran. She saw the moon--the full
moon-upon the Nile, the wide acreage of silver water before the
golden-yellow and yellow-purple of the Libyan hills behind.
She saw through her tears the sweet mirage of home, and her heart
rebelled against the prison where she lay. What should she know of
hospitals--she whose medicaments had been herbs got from the Nile valley
and the cool Nile mud? Was it not the will of God if we lived or the will
of God if we died? Did we not all lie in the great mantle of the mercy of
God, ready to be lifted up or to be set down as He willed? They had
prisoned her here; there were bars upon the windows, there were watchmen
at the door.
At last she could bear it no longer; the end of it all came. She stole
out over the bodies of the sleeping watchmen, out into the dusty road
under the palms, down to the waterside, to the Nile--the path leading
homewards. She must go down the Nile, hiding by day, travelling by
night--the homing bird with a broken wing-back to the but where she had
lived so long with Wassef the camel-driver; back where she could lie in
the dusk of her windowless home, shutting out the world from her
solitude. There she could bear the agony of her hour.
Drinking the water of the Nile, eating the crumbs of dourha bread she had
brought from the hospital, getting an onion from a field, chewing shreds
of sugarcane, hiding by day and trudging on by night, hourly growing
weaker, she struggled towards Beni Souef. Fifty--forty--thirty--ten--five
miles! Oh! the last two days, her head so hot and her brain bursting, and
a thousand fancies swimming before her eyes, her heart fluttering,
fluttering--stopping, going on--stopping, going on.
It was only the sound of the river--the Nile, Mother of Egypt, crooning
to her disordered spirit, which kept her on her feet. Five miles, four
miles, three miles, two, and then--she never quite remembered how she
came to the hut where she was born. Two miles--two hours of incredible
agony, now running, now leaning against a palm tree, now dropping to her
knees, now fighting on and on, she came at last to the one spot in the
world where she could die in peace.