When It Was Dark Part 41

All these events happened with appalling _swiftness_.

In the remote Cornish village Hands moved as in a dream. His eyes saw nothing of his surroundings, his face was pallid under the brown of his skin. Sometimes, as he sat alone on the moors or by the sea, he laughed loudly. Once a pa.s.sing coast-guard heard him. The man told of it among the fishermen, and they regarded their silent visitor with something of awe, with the Celtic compa.s.sion for those mentally afflicted.

On the first Sunday of his arrival Hands heard the deep singing of hymns coming from the little white chapel on the cliff. He entered in time for the sermon, which was preached by a minister who had walked over from Penzance.

Here all the turmoil of the world beyond was ignored. It seemed as though nothing had ever been heard of the thing that was shaking the world. The pastor preached and prayed, the men and women answered with deep, groaning "Amens." It all mattered nothing to them. They heeded it no more than the wailing wind in the cove. The voice of Christ was not stilled in the hearts of this little congregation of the Faithful.

This chilled the recluse. He could find no meaning or comfort in it.

That evening he heard the daughter of the coast-guard with whom he lodged singing. It was a wild night, and Hands was sitting by the fire in his little sitting-room. Outside the wind and rain and waves were shouting furiously in the dark.

The girl was playing a few simple chords on the harmonium and singing to them.

"For ever with the Lord."

An untuneful voice, louder than need be, but with what conviction!

Hands tried to fix his attention on the newspaper which he held.

He read that in Rhodesia the mine capitalists were moving for slavery pure and simple. It was proposed openly that slavery should be the penalty for law-breaking for natives. This was the only way, it a.s.serted, by which the labour problem in South Africa could be solved.

"Life from the dead is in that word, 'Tis immortality."

It seemed that there was small opposition to this proposal. It would be the best thing for the Kaffir, perhaps, this wise and kindly discipline.

So the proposal was wrapped up.

"And nightly pitch my moving tent A day's march nearer home."

Hands saw that, quite suddenly, the _old horror of slavery had disappeared_.

This, too, was coming, then? This old horror which Christians had banished from the world?

"So when my latest breath Shall rend the veil in twain."

Hands started. His thoughts came back to the house in which he sat. The girl's voice touched him immeasurably. He heard it clearly in a lull of the storm. Then another tremendous gust of wind drowned it.

Two great tears rolled down his cheeks.

It was midnight, and all the people in the house were long since asleep, when Hands picked up the last of his newspapers.

It was Sat.u.r.day's edition of the _London Daily Mercury_, the powerful rival of the _Wire_. A woman who had been to Penzance market had brought it home for him, otherwise he would have had to wait for it until the Monday morning.

He gazed wearily round the homely room.

Weariness, that was what lay heavy over mind and body--an utter weariness.

The firelight played upon the crude pictures, the simple ornaments, the s.h.i.+p worked in worsted when the coast-guard was a boy in the Navy, the sh.e.l.ls from a Pacific island, a model gun under a gla.s.s shade. But his thoughts were not prisoned by these humble walls and the humble room in which he sat. He heard the groaning of the peoples of the world, the tramp of armies, the bitter cry of souls from whom hope had been plucked for ever.

He remembered the fair morning in Jerusalem when, with the earliest light of dawn, he had gone to work with his Arab boys before the heat of the day.

From the Mosque of Omar he had heard the sonorous chant of the muezzin.

"THE NIGHT HAS GONE WITH THE DARKNESS, AND THE DAY APPROACHES WITH LIGHT AND BRIGHTNESS!

"PRAISE G.o.d FOR SECURING HIS FAVOUR AND KINDNESS!

"G.o.d IS MOST GREAT! G.o.d IS MOST GREAT! I TESTIFY THAT THERE IS NO G.o.d BUT G.o.d!

"I TESTIFY THAT MOHAMMED IS THE APOSTLE OF G.o.d!

"COME TO PRAYER!

"COME TO SECURITY!

"PRAYER IS BETTER THAN SLEEP!

"G.o.d IS MOST GREAT!

"THERE IS NO G.o.d BUT G.o.d!

"ARISE, MAKE MORNING, AND TO G.o.d BE THE PRAISE!"

He had heard the magnificent chant as he pa.s.sed by, almost kneeling with his Arabs. So short a time ago! Hardly three months--he had kept no count of time lately, but it could hardly be four months.

How utterly unconscious he had been on that radiant morning outside the Damascus Gate! He had seen the men at work, and was sitting under his sun-tent writing on his pad; he was just lighting a cigarette, he remembered, when Ionides, the foreman, had come running up to him, his shrewd, brown face wrinkled with excitement.

And now, even as he sat there on that stormy midnight, far from the world, even now the whole globe was echoing and reverberating with his discovery. He had opened the little rock chambers, and it seemed that the blows of the picks had set free a troop of ruinous spirits, who were devastating mankind.

Pandora's box--that legend fitted what he had done, but with a deadly difference.

He could not find that Hope remained. It would have been better a thousand times if the hot Eastern sun had struck him down that distant morning on his way through the city.

The awful weight, the initial responsibility rested with _him_.

_He_ alone had been the means by which the world was being shaken with horrors--horrors growing daily, and that seemed as if the end would be unutterable night.

How the wind shrieked and wailed!

??? ??s?f ? ?p? ???a?e?a?.

The words were written in fire on his mind!

The wind was shrieking louder and louder.

The Atlantic boomed in one continuous burst of sound.

He looked once more at the leading article in the paper.

It was that article which was long afterwards remembered as the "Simple Statement" article.

The writer had spoken the thought that was by this time trembling for utterance on the lips and in the brains of all Englishmen--the thought which had never been so squarely faced, so frankly stated before.

Here and there pa.s.sages started out more vividly than the rest. The words seemed to start out and stab him.

"--So much for INDIA, where, sprung from the same Cause, the indications are impossible to mistake.