Donovan Pasha And Some People Of Egypt, Complete - Gilbert Parker
The three were sitting silent, having arranged certain measures, when
Norman sprang to his feet excitedly and struck the table with his hand.
"It's no use, sir," he said to Fielding, "I'll have to go. I'm no good. I
neglect my duty. I was to be back at Abdallah at five. I forgot all about
it. A most important thing. A load of fessikh was landed at Minkari, five
miles beyond Abdallah. We've prohibited fessikh. I was going to seize it.
. . . It's no good. It's all so hopeless here."
Dicky knew now that the beginning of the end had come for Norman. There
were only two things to do: get him away shooting somewhere, or humour
him here. But there was no chance for shooting till things got very much
better. The authorities in Cairo would never understand, and the babbling
social-military folk would say that they had calmly gone shooting while
pretending to stay the cholera epidemic. It wouldn't be possible to
explain that Norman was in a bad way, and that it was done to give him
half a chance of life.
Fielding also ought to have a few days clear away from this constant
pressure and fighting, and the sounds and the smells of death; but it
could not be yet. Therefore, to humour them both was the only thing, and
Norman's was the worse case. After all, they had got a system of sanitary
supervision, they had the disease by the throat, and even in Cairo the
administration was waking up a little. The crisis would soon pass
perhaps, if a riot could be stayed and the natives give up their awful
fictions of yellow handkerchiefs, poisoned sweetmeats, deadly limewash,
and all such nonsense.
So Dicky said now, "All right, Norman; come along. You'll seize that
fessikh, and I'll bring back Mustapha Kali. We'll work him as he has
never worked in his life. He'll be a living object-lesson. We'll have all
Upper Egypt on the banks of the Nile waiting to see what happens to
Mustapha."
Dicky laughed, and Fielding responded feebly; but Norman was looking at
the hospital with a look too bright for joy, too intense for despair.
"I found ten in a corner of a cane-field yesterday," he said dreamily.
"Four were dead, and the others had taken the dead men's smocks as
covering." He shuddered. "I see nothing but limewash, smell nothing but
carbolic. It's got into my head. Look here, old man, I can't stand it.
I'm no use," he added pathetically to Fielding.
"You're right enough, if you'll not take yourself so seriously," said
Dicky jauntily. "You mustn't try to say, 'Alone I did it.' Come along.
Fill your tobacco-pouch. There are the horses. I'm ready."
He turned to Fielding.
"It's going to be a stiff ride, Fielding. But I'll do it in twenty-four
hours, and bring Mustapha Kali too--for a consideration."
He paused, and Fielding said, with an attempt at playfulness: "Name your
price."
"That you play for me, when I get back, the overture of 'Tannhauser'.
Play it, mind; no tuning-up sort of thing, like last Sunday's
performance. Practise it, my son! Is it a bargain? I'm not going to work
for nothing a day."
He watched the effect of his words anxiously, for he saw how needful it
was to divert Fielding's mind in the midst of all this "plague,
pestilence, and famine." For days Fielding had not touched the piano, the
piano which Mrs. Henshaw, widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, had insisted on
his taking with him a year before, saying that it would be a cure for
loneliness when away from her. During the first of these black days
Fielding had played intermittently for a few moments at a time, and Dicky
had noticed that after playing he seemed in better spirits. But lately
the disease of a ceaseless unrest, of constant sleepless work, was on
him. He had not played for near a week, saying, in response to Dicky's
urging, that there was no time for music. And Dicky knew that presently
there would be no time to eat, and then no time to sleep; and then, the
worst!
Dicky had pinned his faith and his friendship to Fielding, and he saw no
reason why he should lose his friend because Madame Cholera was stalking
the native villages, driving the fellaheen before her like sheep to the
slaughter.
"Is it a bargain?" he added, as Fielding did not at once reply. If
Fielding would but play it would take the strain off his mind at times.
"All right, D., I'll see what I can do with it," said Fielding, and with
a nod turned to the map with the little red and white and yellow flags,
and began to study it.
He did not notice that one of his crew abaft near the wheel was watching
him closely, while creeping along the railing on the pretence of cleaning
it. Fielding was absorbed in making notes upon a piece of paper and
moving the little flags about. Now he lit a cigar and began walking up
and down the deck.
The Arab disappeared, but a few minutes afterwards returned. The deck was
empty. Fielding had ridden away to the village. The map was still on the
table. With a frightened face the Arab peered at it, then going to the
side he called down softly, and there came up from the lower deck a Copt,
the sarraf of the village, who could read English fairly. The Arab
pointed to the map, and the Copt approached cautiously. A few feet away
he tried to read what was on the map, but, unable to do so, drew closer,
pale-faced and knockkneed, and stared at the map and the little flags. An
instant after he drew back, and turned to the Arab. "May God burn his
eyes! He sends the death to the village by moving the flags. May God
change him into a dog to be beaten to death! The red is to begin, the
white flag is for more death, the yellow is for enough. See--may God cut
off his hand!--he has moved the white flag to our village." He pointed in
a trembling fear, half real, half assumed--for he was of a nation of
liars.
During the next half-hour at least a dozen Arabs came to look at the map,
but they disappeared like rats in a hole when, near midnight, Fielding's
tall form appeared on the bank above.
It was counted to him as a devil's incantation, the music that he played
that night, remembering his promise to Dicky Donovan. It was music
through which breathed the desperate, troubled, aching heart and tortured
mind of an overworked strong man. It cried to the night its trouble; but
far over in the Cholera Hospital the sick heard it and turned their faces
towards it eagerly. It pierced the apathy of the dying. It did more, for
it gave Fielding five hours' sleep that night; and though he waked to see
one of his own crew dead on the bank, he tackled the day's labour with
more hope than he had had for a fortnight.
As the day wore on, however, his spirits fell, for on every hand was
suspicion, unrest, and opposition, and his native assistants went
sluggishly about their work. It was pathetic and disheartening to see
people refusing to be protected, the sick refusing to be relieved, all
stricken with fear, yet inviting death by disobeying the Inglesi.
Kalamoun was hopeless; yet twenty-four hours earlier Fielding had fancied
there was a little light in the darkness. That night Fielding's music
gave him but two hours' sleep, and he had to begin the day on a
brandy-and-soda. Wherever he went open resistance blocked his way, hisses
and mutterings followed him, the sick were hid in all sorts of places,
and two of his assistants deserted before noon. Things looked ominous
enough, and at five o'clock he made up his mind that Egypt would be
overrun with cholera, and that he should probably have to defend himself
and the Amenhotep from rioters, for the native police would be useless.
But at five o'clock Dicky Donovan came in a boat, and with him Mustapha
Kali under a native guard of four men. The Mudir's sense of humour had
been touched, and this sense of humour probably saved the Mudir from
trouble, for it played Dicky's game for him.
Mustapha Kali had been sentenced to serve in the Cholera Hospital of
Kalamoun, that he might be cured of his unbelief. At first he had taken
his fate hardly, but Dicky had taunted him and then had suggested that a
man whose conscience was clear and convictions good would carry a high
head in trouble. Dicky challenged him to prove his libels by probing the
business to the bottom, like a true scientist. All the way from Abdallah
Dicky talked to him so, and at last the only answer Mustapha Kali would
make was, "Malaish no matter!"
Mustapha Kali pricked up his ears with hope as he saw the sullen crowds
from Kalamoun gathering on the shore to watch his deportation to the
Cholera Hospital; and, as he stepped from the khiassa, he called out
loudly:
"They are all dogs and sons of dogs, and dogs were their grandsires. No
good is in a dog the offspring of a dog. Whenever these dogs scratch the
ground the dust of poison is in the air, and we die."
"You are impolite, Mustapha Kali," said Dicky coolly, and offered him a
cigarette.
The next three days were the darkest in Dicky Donovan's career. On the
first day there came word that Norman, overwrought, had shot himself. On
the next, Mustapha Kali in a fit of anger threw a native policeman into
the river, and when his head appeared struck it with a barge-pole, and
the man sank to rise no more. The three remaining policemen, two of whom
were Soudanese, and true to Dicky, bound him and shut him up in a hut.
When that evening Fielding refused to play, Dicky knew that Norman's fate
had taken hold of him, and that he must watch his friend every
minute--that awful vigilance which kills the watcher in the end. Dicky
said to himself more than once that day:
"Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's woe!"
But it was not Dicky who saved Fielding. On the third day the
long-deferred riot broke out. The Copt and the Arab had spread the report
that Fielding brought death to the villages by moving the little flags on
his map. The populace rose.
Fielding was busy with the map at the dreaded moment that hundreds of the
villagers appeared upon the bank and rushed the Amenhotep. Fielding and
Dicky were both armed, but Fielding would not fire until he saw that his
own crew had joined the rioters on the bank. Then, amid a shower of
missiles, he shot the Arab who had first spread the report about the map
and the flags.
Now Dicky and he were joined by Holgate, the Yorkshire engineer of the
Amenhotep, and together the three tried to hold the boat. Every native
had left them. They were obliged to retreat aft to the deckcabin. Placing
their backs against it, they prepared to die hard. No one could reach
them from behind, at least.
It was an unequal fight. All three had received slight wounds, but the
blood-letting did them all good. Fielding was once more himself; nervous
anxiety, unrest, had gone from him. He was as cool as a cucumber. He
would not go shipwreck now "on the reef of Norman's woe." Here was a
better sort of death. No men ever faced it with quieter minds than did
the three. Every instant brought it nearer.
All at once there was a cry and a stampede in the rear of the attacking
natives. The crowd suddenly parted like two waves, and retreated; and
Mustapha Kali, almost naked, and supported by a stolid Soudanese, stood
before the three. He was pallid, his hands and brow were dripping sweat,
and there was a look of death in his eyes.
"I have cholera, effendi!" he cried. "Take me to Abdallah to die, that I
may be buried with my people and from mine own house."
"Is it not poison?" asked Fielding grimly, yet seeing now a ray of hope
in the sickening business.
"It is cholera, effendi. Take me home to die."
"Very well. Tell the people so, and I will take you home, and I will bury
you with your fathers," said Fielding.
Mustapha Kali turned slowly. "I am sick of cholera," he said as loudly as
he could to the awe-stricken crowd. "May God not cool my resting-place if
it be not so!"
"Tell the people to go to their homes and obey us," said Dicky, putting
away his pistol.
"These be good men, I have seen with mine own eyes," said Mustapha
hoarsely to the crowd. "It is for your good they do all. Have I not seen?
Let God fill both my hands with dust if it be not so! God hath stricken
me, and behold I give myself into the hands of the Inglesi, for I
believe!"
He would have fallen to the ground, but Dicky and the Soudanese caught
him and carried him down to the bank, while the crowd scuttled from the
boat, and Fielding made ready to bear the dying man to Abdallah--a race
against death.
Fielding brought Mustapha Kali to Abdallah in time to die there, and
buried him with his fathers; and Dicky stayed behind to cleanse Kalamoun
with perchloride and limewash.
The story went abroad and travelled fast, and the words of Mustapha Kali,
oft repeated, became as the speech of a holy man; and the people no
longer hid their dead, but brought them to the Amenhotep.
This was the beginning of better things; the disease was stayed.
And for all the things that these men did--Fielding Bey and Donovan
Pasha--they got naught but an Egyptian ribbon to wear on the breast and a
laboured censure from the Administration for overrunning the budget
allowance.
Dicky, however, seemed satisfied, for Fielding's little barque of life
had not gone down "On the reef of Norman's woe." Mrs. Henshaw felt so
also when she was told all, and she disconcerted Dicky by bursting into
tears.
"Why those tears?" said Dicky to Fielding afterwards; "I wasn't
eloquent."
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A look too bright for joy, too intense for despair
His gift for lying was inexpressible
One favour is always the promise of another
DONOVAN PASHA AND SOME PEOPLE OF EGYPT
By Gilbert Parker
Volume 2.
FIELDING HAD AN ORDERLY
THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE
A TREATY OF PEACE
AT THE MERCY OF TIBERIUS
ALL THE WORLD'S MAD
FIELDING HAD AN ORDERLY
His legs were like pipe-stems, his body was like a board, but he was
straight enough, not unsoldierly, nor so bad to look at when his back was
on you; but when he showed his face you had little pleasure in him. It
seemed made of brown putty, the nose was like india-rubber, and the eyes
had that dull, sullen look of a mongrel got of a fox-terrier and a
bull-dog. Like this sort of mongrel also his eyes turned a brownish-red
when he was excited.
You could always tell when something had gone wrong with Ibrahim the
Orderly, by that curious dull glare in his eyes. Selamlik Pasha said to
Fielding that it was hashish; Fielding said it was a cross breed of
Soudanese and fellah. But little Dicky Donovan said it was something
else, and he kept his eye upon Ibrahim. And Dicky, with all his faults,
could screw his way from the front of a thing to the back thereof like no
other civilised man you ever knew. But he did not press his opinions upon
Fielding, who was an able administrator and a very clever fellow also,
with a genial habit of believing in people who served him: and that is
bad in the Orient.
As an orderly Ibrahim was like a clock: stiff in his gait as a pendulum,
regular as a minute. He had no tongue for gossip either, so far as
Fielding knew. Also, five times a day he said his prayers--an unusual
thing for a Gippy soldier-servant; for as the Gippy's rank increases he
soils his knees and puts his forehead in the dust with discretion. This
was another reason why Dicky suspected him.
It was supposed that Ibrahim could not speak a word of English; and he
seemed so stupid, he looked so blank, when English was spoken, that
Fielding had no doubt the English language was a Tablet of Abydos to him.
But Dicky was more wary, and waited. He could be very patient and simple,
and his delicate face seemed as innocent as a girl's when he said to
Ibrahim one morning: "Ibrahim, brother of scorpions, I'm going to teach
you English!" and, squatting like a Turk on the deck of the Amenhotep,
the stern-wheeled tub which Fielding called a steamer, he began to teach
Ibrahim.
"Say 'Good-morning, kind sir,'" he drawled.
No tongue was ever so thick, no throat so guttural, as Ibrahim's when he
obeyed this command. That was why suspicion grew the more in the mind of
Dicky. But he made the Gippy say: "Good-morning, kind sir," over and over
again. Now, it was a peculiar thing that Ibrahim's pronunciation grew
worse every time; which goes to show that a combination of Soudanese and
fellah doesn't make a really clever villain. Twice, three times, Dicky
gave him other words and phrases to say, and practice made Ibrahim more
perfect in error.
Dicky suddenly enlarged the vocabulary thus: "An old man had three sons:
one was a thief, another a rogue, and the worst of them all was a
soldier. But the soldier died first!"
As he said these words he kept his eyes fixed on Ibrahim in a smiling,
juvenile sort of way; and he saw the colour--the brownish-red
colour--creep slowly into Ibrahim's eyes. For Ibrahim's father had three
sons: and certainly one was a thief, for he had been a tax-gatherer; and
one was a rogue, for he had been the servant of a Greek money-lender; and
Ibrahim was a soldier!
Ibrahim was made to say these words over and over again, and the red fire
in his eyes deepened as Dicky's face lighted up with what seemed a mere
mocking pleasure, a sort of impish delight in teasing, like that of a
madcap girl with a yokel. Each time Ibrahim said the words he jumbled
them worse than before. Then Dicky asked him if he knew what an old man
was, and Ibrahim said no. Dicky said softly in Arabic that the old man
was a fool to have three such sons--a thief and a rogue and a soldier.
With a tender patience he explained what a thief and a rogue were, and
his voice was curiously soft when he added, in Arabic: "And the third son
was like you, Mahommed--and he died first."
Ibrahim's eyes gloomed under the raillery--under what he thought the
cackle of a detested Inglesi with a face like a girl, of an infidel who
had a tongue that handed you honey on the point of a two-edged sword. In
his heart he hated this slim small exquisite as he had never hated
Fielding. His eyes became like little pots of simmering blood, and he
showed his teeth in a hateful way, because he was sure he should glut his
hatred before the moon came full.
Little Dicky Donovan knew, as he sleepily told Ibrahim to go, that for
months the Orderly had listened to the wholesome but scathing talk of
Fielding and himself on the Egyptian Government, and had reported it to
those whose tool and spy he was.
That night, the stern-wheeled tub, the Amenhotep, lurched like a turtle
on its back into the sands by Beni Hassan. Of all the villages of Upper
Egypt, from the time of Rameses, none has been so bad as Beni Hassan.
Every ruler of Egypt, at one time or another, has raided it and razed it
to the ground. It was not for pleasure that Fielding sojourned there.
This day, and for three days past, Fielding had been abed in his cabin
with a touch of Nilotic fever. His heart was sick for Cairo, for he had
been three months on the river; and Mrs. Henshaw was in Cairo--Mrs.
Henshaw, the widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, who lived with her brother, a
stone's-throw from the Esbekieh Gardens. Fielding longed for Cairo, but
Beni Hassan intervened. The little man who worried Ibrahim urged him the
way his private inclinations ran, but he was obdurate: duty must be done.
Dicky Donovan had reasons other than private ones for making haste to
Cairo. During the last three days they had stopped at five villages on
the Nile, and in each place Dicky, who had done Fielding's work of
inspection for him, had been met with unusual insolence from the Arabs
and fellaheen, officials and others; and the prompt chastisement he
rendered with his riding-whip in return did not tend to ease his mind,
though it soothed his feelings. There had been flying up the river
strange rumours of trouble down in Cairo, black threats of rebellion--of
a seditious army in the palm of one man's hand. At the cafes on the Nile,
Dicky himself had seen strange gatherings, which dispersed as he came on
them. For, somehow, his smile had the same effect as other men's frowns.
This evening he added a whistle to his smile as he made his inspection of
the engine-room and the galley and every corner of the Amenhotep,
according to his custom. What he whistled no man knew, not even himself.
It was ready-made. It might have been a medley, but, as things happened,
it was an overture; and by the eyes, the red-litten windows of the mind
of Mahommed Ibrahim, who squatted beside the Yorkshire engineer at the
wheel, playing mankalah, he knew it was an overture.
As he went to his cabin he murmured to himself "There's the devil to pay:
now I wonder who pays?" Because he was planning things of moment, he took
a native drum down to Fielding's cabin, and made Fielding play it, native
fashion, as he thrummed his own banjo and sang the airy ballad, "The
Dragoons of Enniskillen." Yet Dicky was thinking hard all the time.
Now there was in Beni Hassan a ghdzeeyeh, a dancing-woman of the Ghawazee
tribe, of whom, in the phrase of the moralists, the less said the better.
What her name was does not matter. She was well-to-do. She had a husband
who played the kemengeh for her dancing. She had as good a house as the
Omdah, and she had two female slaves.
Dicky Donovan was of that rare type of man who has the keenest desire to
know all things, good or evil, though he was fastidious when it came to
doing them. He had a gift of keeping his own commandments. If he had been
a six-footer and riding eighteen stone--if he hadn't been, as Fielding
often said, so "damned finicky," he might easily have come a cropper.
For, being absolutely without fear, he did what he listed and went where
he listed. An insatiable curiosity was his strongest point, save one. If
he had had a headache--though he never had--he would at once have made an
inquiry into the various kinds of headache possible to mortal man, with
pungent deductions from his demonstrations. So it was that when he first
saw a dancing-girl in the streets of Cairo he could not rest until by
circuitous routes he had traced the history of dancing-girls back through
the ages, through Greece and the ruby East, even to the days when the
beautiful bad ones were invited to the feasts of the mighty, to charm the
eyes of King Seti or Queen Hatsu.
He was an authority on the tribe of the Ghawazee, proving, to their
satisfaction and his own, their descent from the household of Haroon al
Rashid. He was, therefore, welcome among them. But he had found also, as
many another wise man has found in "furrin parts," that your greatest
safety lies in bringing tobacco to the men and leaving the women alone.
For, in those distant lands, a man may sell you his nuptial bed, but he
will pin the price of it to your back one day with the point of a lance
or the wedge of a hatchet.
Herebefore will be found the reason why Dicky Donovan--twenty-five and no
moustache, pink-cheeked and rosy-hearted, and "no white spots on his
liver"--went straight, that particular night, to the house of the chief
dancing-girl of Beni Hassan for help in his trouble. From her he had
learned to dance the dance of the Ghawazee. He had learned it so that,
with his insatiable curiosity, his archaeological instinct, he should be
able to compare it with the Nautch dance of India, the Hula-Hula of the
Sandwich Islanders, the Siva of the Samoans.
A half-hour from the time he set his foot in Beni Hassan two
dancing-girls issued from the house of the ghdzeeyeh, dressed in
shintiydn and muslin tarah, anklets and bracelets, with gold coins about
the forehead--and one was Dicky Donovan. He had done the rare thing: he
had trusted absolutely that class of woman who is called a "rag" in that
far country, and a "drab" in ours. But he was a judge of human nature,
and judges of human nature know you are pretty safe to trust a woman who
never trusts, no matter how bad she is, if she has no influence over you.
He used to say that the better you are and the worse she is, the more you
can trust her. Other men may talk, but Dicky Donovan knows.
What Dicky's aunt, the Dowager Lady Carmichael, would have said to have
seen Dicky flaunting it in the clothes of a dancing-girl through the
streets of vile Beni Hassan, must not be considered. None would have
believed that his pink-and-white face and slim hands and staringly white
ankles could have been made to look so boldly handsome, so impeachable.
But henna in itself seems to have certain qualities of viciousness in its
brownish-red stain, and Dicky looked sufficiently abandoned. The risk was
great, however, for his Arabic was too good and he had to depend upon the
ghdzeeyeh's adroitness, on the peculiar advantage of being under the
protection of the mistress of the house as large as the Omdah's.
From one cafe to another they went. Here a snakecharmer gathered a meagre
crowd about him; there an 'A'l'meh, or singing-girl, lilted a ribald
song; elsewhere hashish-smokers stretched out gaunt, loathsome fingers
towards them; and a Sha'er recited the romance of Aboo Zeyd. But Dicky
noticed that none of the sheikhs, none of the great men of the village,
were at these cafes; only the very young, the useless, the licentious, or
the decrepit. But by flickering fires under the palm-trees were groups of
men talking and gesticulating; and now and then an Arab galloped through
the street, the point of his long lance shining. Dicky felt a secret,
like a troubled wind, stirring through the place, a movement not
explainable by his own inner tremulousness.