The Weavers Part 36

A Hurdy-Gurdy was standing at the corner, playing with shrill insistence a medley of Scottish airs. Now "Loch Lomond" pleaded for pennies from the upper windows:

"For you'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road, And I'll be in Scotland before ye: But I and my true love will never meet again, On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond!"

The hurdy-gurdy was strident and insistent, but for a long time no response came. At last, however, as the strains of "Loch Lomond" ceased, a lady appeared on the balcony of a drawing-room, and, leaning over a little forest of flowers and plants, threw a half-crown to the sorry street-musician. She watched the grotesque thing trundle away, then entering the house again, took a 'cello from the corner of the room and tuned the instrument tenderly. It was Hylda.

Something of the peace of Hamley had followed her to London, but the poignant pain of it had come also. Like Melisande, she had looked into the quiet pool of life and had seen her own face, its story and its foreshadowings. Since then she had been "apart." She had watched life move on rather than shared in its movement. Things stood still for her.

That apathy of soul was upon her which follows the inward struggle that exhausts the throb and fret of inward emotions, leaving the mind dominant, the will in abeyance.

She had become conscious that her fate and future were suspended over a chasm, as, on the trapeze of a balloon, an adventurous aeronaut hangs uncertain over the hungry sea, waiting for the coming wind which will either blow the hazardous vessel to its doom or to safe refuge on the land.

She had not seen David after he left Hamley. Their last words had been spoken at the Meeting-house, when he gave Faith to her care. That scene came back to her now, and a flush crept slowly over her face and faded away again. She was recalling, too, the afternoon of that day when she and David had parted in the drawing-room of the Cloistered House, and Eglington had asked her to sing. She thought of the hours with Eglington that followed, first at the piano and afterwards in the laboratory, where in his long blue smock he made experiments. Had she not been conscious of something enigmatical in his gaiety that afternoon, in his cheerful yet cheerless words, she would have been deeply impressed by his appreciation of her playing, and his keen reflections on the merits of the composers; by his still keener attention to his subsequent experiments, and his amusing comments upon them. But, somehow, that very cheerless cheerfulness seemed to proclaim him superficial. Though she had no knowledge of science, she instinctively doubted his earnestness even in this work, which certainly was not pursued for effect. She had put the feeling from her, but it kept returning. She felt that in nothing did he touch the depths. Nothing could possess him wholly; nothing inherent could make him self-effacing.

Yet she wondered, too, if she was right, when she saw his fox-terrier watching him, ever watching him with his big brown eyes as he buoyantly worked, and saw him stoop to pat its head. Or was this, after all, mere animalism, mere superficial vitality, love of health and being? She shuddered, and shut her eyes, for it came home to her that to him she was just such a being of health, vitality and comeliness, on a little higher plane. She put the thought from her, but it had had its birth, and it would not down. He had immense vitality, he was tireless, and abundant in work and industry; he went from one thing to another with ease and swiftly changing eagerness. Was it all mere force--mere man and mind? Was there no soul behind it? There in the laboratory she had laid her hand on the terrier, and prayed in her heart that she might understand him for her own good, her own happiness, and his. Above all else she wanted to love him truly, and to be loved truly, and duty was to her a daily sacrifice, a constant memorial. She realised to the full that there lay before her a long race unilluminated by the sacred lamp which, lighted at the altar, should still be burning beside the grave.

Now, as she thought of him, she kept saying to herself: "We should have worked out his life together. Work together would have brought peace. He shuts me out--he shuts me out."

At last she drew the bow across the instrument, once, twice, and then she began to play, forgetful of the world. She had a contralto voice, and she sang with a depth of feeling and a delicate form worthy of a professional; on the piano she was effective and charming, but into the 'cello she poured her soul.

For quite an hour she played with scarce an interruption. At last, with a sigh, she laid the instrument against her knee and gazed out of the window. As she sat lost in her dream--a dream of the desert--a servant entered with letters. One caught her eye. It was from Egypt--from her cousin Lacey. Her heart throbbed violently, yet she opened the official-looking envelope with steady fingers. She would not admit even to her self that news from the desert could move her so. She began to read slowly, but presently, with a little cry, she hastened through the pages. It ran:

THE SOUDAN.

DEAR LADY COUSIN,

I'm still not certain how I ought to style you, but I thought I'd compromise as per above. Anyway, it's a sure thing that I haven't bothered you much with country-cousin letters. I figure, however, that you've put some money in Egypt, so to speak, and what happens to this sandy-eyed foundling of the Nile you would like to know. So I've studied the only "complete letter-writer" I could find between the tropic of Capricorn and Khartoum, and this is the contemptible result, as the dagos in Mexico say. This is a hot place by reason of the sun that s.h.i.+nes above us, and likewise it is hot because of the n.i.g.g.e.rs that swarm around us. I figure, if we get out of this portion of the African continent inside our skins, that we will have put up a pretty good bluff, and pulled off a ticklish proposition.

It's a sort of early Christian business. You see, David the Saadat is great on moral suasion--he's a master of it; and he's never failed yet--not altogether; though there have been minutes by a stop-watch when I've thought it wouldn't stand the strain. Like the Mississippi steamboat which was so weak that when the whistle blew the engines stopped! When those frozen minutes have come to us, I've tried to remember the correct religious etiquette, but I've not had much practise since I stayed with Aunt Melissa, and lived on skim-milk and early piety. When things were looking as bad as they did for Dives, "Now I lay me down to sleep," and "For what we are about to receive," was all that I could think of. But the Saadat, he's a wonder from Wondertown. With a little stick, or maybe his flute under his arm, he'll smile and string these heathen along, when you'd think they weren't waiting for anybody. A spear took off his fez yesterday. He never blinked--he's a jim-dandy at keeping cool; and when a hundred mounted heathens made a rush down on him the other day, spears sticking out like quills on a porcupine--2.5 on the sh.e.l.l-road the chargers were going--did he stir? Say, he watched 'em as if they were playing for his benefit. And sure enough, he was right. They parted either side of him when they were ten feet away, and there he was quite safe, a blessing in the storm, a little rock island in the rapids--but I couldn't remember a proper hymn of praise to say.

There's no getting away from the fact that he's got a will or something, a sort of force different from most of us, or perhaps any of us. These heathen feel it, and keep their hands off him. They say he's mad, but they've got great respect for mad people, for they think that G.o.d has got their souls above with Him, and that what's left behind on earth is sacred. He talks to'em, too, like a father in Israel; tells 'em they must stop buying and selling slaves, and that if they don't he will have to punish them! And I sit holding my sides, for we're only two white men and forty "friendlies"

altogether, and two revolvers among us; and I've got the two! And they listen to his blarneying, and say, "Aiwa, Saadat! aiwa, Saadat!" as if he had an army of fifty thousand behind him.

Sometimes I've sort of hinted that his canoe was carrying a lot of sail; but my! he believes in it all as if there wasn't a spear or a battle-axe or a rifle within a hundred miles of him. We've been at this for two months now, and a lot of ground we covered till we got here. I've ridden the gentle camel at the rate of sixty and seventy miles a day--sort of sweeping through the land, making treaties, giving presents, freeing slaves, appointing governors and sheikhs- el-beled, doing it as if we owned the continent. He mesmerised 'em, simply mesmerised 'em-till we got here. I don't know what happened then. Now we're distinctly rating low, the laugh is on us somehow.

But he--mind it? He goes about talking to the sheikhs as though we were all eating off the same corn-cob, and it seems to stupefy them; they don't grasp it. He goes on arranging for a post here and a station there, and it never occurs to him that it ain't really actual. He doesn't tell me, and I don't ask him, for I came along to wipe his stirrups, so to speak. I put my money on him, and I'm not going to worry him. He's so dead certain in what he does, and what he is, that I don't lose any sleep guessing about him. It will be funny if we do win out on this proposition--funnier than anything.

Now, there's one curious thing about it all which ought to be whispered, for I'm only guessing, and I'm not a good guesser; I guessed too much in Mexico about three railways and two silvermines.

The first two days after we came here, everything was all right.

Then there came an Egyptian, Halim Bey, with a handful of n.i.g.g.e.rs from Cairo, and letters for Claridge Pasha.

From that minute there was trouble. I figure it out this way: Halim was sent by Nahoum Pasha to bring letters that said one thing to the Saadat, and, when quite convenient, to say other things to Mustafa, the boss-sheikh of this settlement. Halim Bey has gone again, but he has left his tale behind him. I'd stake all I lost, and more than I ever expect to get out of Mexico on that, and maybe I'll get a hatful out of Mexico yet. I had some good mining propositions down there. The Saadat believes in Nahoum, and has made Nahoum what he is; and on the surface Nahoum pretends to help him; but he is running underground all the time. I'd like to help give him a villa at Fazougli. When the Saadat was in England there was a bad time in Egypt. I was in Cairo; I know. It was the same bad old game--the corvee, the kourbash, conscription, a war manufactured to fill the pockets of a few, while the poor starved and died. It didn't come off, because the Saadat wasn't gone long enough, and he stopped it when he came back. But Nahoumhe laid the blame on others, and the Saadat took his word for it, and, instead of a war, there came this expedition of his own.

Ten days later.--Things have happened. First, there's been awful sickness among the natives, and the Saadat has had his chance. His medicine-chest was loaded, he had a special camel for it--and he has fired it off. Night and day he has worked, never resting, never sleeping, curing most, burying a few. He looks like a ghost now, but it's no use saying or doing anything. He says: "Sink your own will; let it be subject to a higher, and you need take no thought."

It's eating away his life and strength, but it has given us our return tickets, I guess. They hang about him as if he was Moses in the wilderness smiting the rock. It's his luck. Just when I get scared to death, and run down and want a tonic, and it looks as if there'd be no need to put out next week's was.h.i.+ng, then his luck steps in, and we get another run. But it takes a heap out of a man, getting scared. Whenever I look on a lot of green trees and cattle and horses, and the sun, to say nothing of women and children, and listen to music, or feel a horse eating up the ground under me, 2.10 in the sand, I hate to think of leaving it, and I try to prevent it.

Besides, I don't like the proposition of going, I don't know where.

That's why I get seared. But he says that it's no more than turning down the light and turning it up again. They used to call me a dreamer in Mexico, because I kept seeing things that no one else had thought of, and laid out railways and tapped mines for the future; but I was nothing to him. I'm a high-and-dry hedge-clipper alongside. I'm betting on him all the time; but no one seems to be working to make his dreams come true, except himself. I don't count; I'm no good, no real good. I'm only fit to run the commissariat, and see that he gets enough to eat, and has a safe camel, and so on.

Why doesn't some one else help him? He's working for humanity.

Give him half a chance, and Haroun-al-Raschid won't be in it. Kaid trusts him, depends on him, stands by him, but doesn't seem to know how to help him when help would do most good. The Saadat does it all himself; and if it wasn't that the poor devil of a fellah sees what he's doing, and cottons to him, and the dervishes and Arabs feel he's right, he might as well leave. But it's just there he counts. There's something about him, something that's Quaker in him, primitive, silent, and perceptive--if that's a real word--which makes them feel that he's honest, and isn't after anything for himself. Arabs don't talk much; they make each other understand without many words. They think with all their might on one thing at a time, and they think things into happening--and so does he. He's a thousand years old, which is about as old-fas.h.i.+oned as I mean, and as wise, and as plain to read as though you'd write the letters of words as big as a date-palm. That's where he makes the running with them, and they can read their t.i.tle clear to mansions in the skies!

You should hear him talk with Ebn Ezra Bey--perhaps you don't know of Ezra? He was a friend of his Uncle Benn, and brought the news of his ma.s.sacre to England, and came back with the Saadat. Well, three days ago Ebn Ezra came, and there came with him, too, Halim Bey, the Egyptian, who had brought the letters to us from Cairo. Elm Ezra found him down the river deserted by his n.i.g.g.e.rs, and sick with this new sort of fever, which the Saadat is knocking out of time. And there he lies, the Saadat caring for him as though he was his brother. But that's his way; though, now I come to think of it, the Saadat doesn't suspect what I suspect, that Halim Bey brought word from Nahoum to our sheikhs here to keep us here, or lose us, or do away with us. Old Ebn Ezra doesn't say much himself, doesn't say anything about that; but he's guessing the same as me. And the Saadat looks as though he was ready for his grave, but keeps going, going, going. He never seems to sleep. What keeps him alive I don't know. Sometimes I feel clean knocked out myself with the little I do, but he's a travelling hospital all by his lonesome.

Later.--I had to stop writing, for things have been going on-- several. I can see that Ebn Ezra has told the Saadat things that make him want to get away to Cairo as soon as possible. That it's Nahoum Pasha and others--oh, plenty of others, of course--I'm certain; but what the particular game is I don't know. Perhaps you know over in England, for you're nearer Cairo than we are by a few miles, and you've got the telegraph. Perhaps there's a revolution, perhaps there's been a ma.s.sacre of Europeans, perhaps Turkey is kicking up a dust, perhaps Europe is interfering--all of it, all at once.

Later still.--I've found out it's a little of all, and the Saadat is ready to go. I guess he can go now pretty soon, for the worst of the fever is over. But something has happened that's upset him-- knocked him stony for a minute. Halim Bey was killed last night--by order of the sheikhs, I'm told; but the sheikhs won't give it away.

When the Saadat went to them, his eyes blazing, his face pale as a sheet, and as good as swore at them, and treated them as though he'd string them up the next minute, they only put their hands on their heads, and said they were "the fallen leaves for his foot to scatter," the "snow on the hill for his breath to melt"; but they wouldn't give him any satisfaction. So he came back and shut himself up in his tent, and he sits there like a ghost all shrivelled up for want of sleep, and his eyes like a lime-kiln burning; for now he knows this at least, that Halim Bey had brought some word from Kaid's Palace that set these Arabs against him, and nearly stopped my correspondence. You see, there's a widow in Cairo--she's a sister of the American consul, and I've promised to take her with a party camping in the Fayoum--cute as she can be, and plays the guitar. But it's all right now, except that the Saadat is running too close and fine. If he has any real friends in England among the Government people, or among those who can make the Government people sit up, and think what's coming to Egypt and to him, they'll help him now when he needs it. He'll need help real bad when he gets back to Cairo--if we get that far. It isn't yet a sure thing, for we've got to fight in the next day or two--I forgot to tell you that sooner. There's a bull-Arab on the rampage with five thousand men, and he's got a claim out on our sheikh, Mustafa, for ivory he has here, and there's going to be a scrimmage. We've got to make for a better position to-morrow, and meet Abdullah, the bull-Arab, further down the river. That's one reason why Mustafa and all our friends here are so sweet on us now. They look on the Saadat as a kind of mascot, and they think that he can wipe out the enemy with his flute, which they believe is a witch-stick to work wonders.

He's just sent for me to come, and I must stop soon. Say, he hasn't had sleep for a fortnight. It's too much; he can't stand it. I tried it, and couldn't. It wore me down. He's killing himself for others. I can't manage him; but I guess you could. I apologise, dear Lady Cousin. I'm only a hayseed, and a failure, but I guess you'll understand that I haven't thought only of myself as I wrote this letter. The higher you go in life the more you'll understand; that's your nature. I'll get this letter off by a n.i.g.g.e.r to-morrow, with those the Saadat is sending through to Cairo by some friendlies. It's only a chance; but everything's chance here now.

Anyhow, it's safer than leaving it till the scrimmage. If you get this, won't you try and make the British Government stand by the Saadat? Your husband, the lord, could pull it off, if he tried; and if you ask him, I guess he'd try. I must be off now. David Pasha will be waiting. Well, give my love to the girls!

Your affectionate cousin,

TOM LACEY.

P. S.--I've got a first-cla.s.s camel for our scrimmage day after to-morrow. Mustafa sent it to me this morning. I had a fight on mules once, down at Oaxaca, but that was child's play. This will be "slaughter in the pan," if the Saadat doesn't stop it somehow.

Perhaps he will. If I wasn't so scared I'd wish he couldn't stop it, for it will be a way-up Barbarian sc.r.a.p, the tongs and the kettle, a bully panjandrum. It gets mighty dull in the desert when you're not moving. But "it makes to think," as the French say.

Since I came out here I've had several real centre thoughts, sort of main principles-key-thoughts, that's it. What I want now is a sort of safety-ring to string 'em on and keep 'em safe; for I haven't a good memory, and I get mighty rattled sometimes. Thoughts like these are like the secret of a combination lock; they let you into the place where the gold and securities and t.i.tle-deeds of life are.

Trouble is, I haven't got a safety-ring, and I'm certain to lose them. I haven't got what you'd call an intellectual memory. Things come in flashes to me out of experiences, and pull me up short, and I say, "Yes, that's it--that's it; I understand." I see why it's so, and what it means, and where it leads, and how far it spreads.

It's five thousand years old. Adam thought it after Cain killed Abel, or Abel thought it just before he died, or Eve learned it from Lilith, or it struck Abraham when he went to sacrifice Isaac.

Sometimes things. .h.i.t me deep like that here in the desert. Then I feel I can see just over on the horizon the tents of Moab in the wilderness; that yesterday and to-day are the same; that I've crossed the prairies of the everlasting years, and am playing about with Ishmael in the wild hills, or fighting with Ahab. Then the world and time seem pretty small potatoes.

You see how it is. I never was trained to think, and I get stunned by thoughts that strike me as being dug right out of the centre.

Sometimes I'd like to write them down; but I can't write; I can only talk as I'm talking to you. If you weren't so high up, and so much cleverer than I am, and such a thinker, I'd like you to be my safety-ring, if you would. I could tell the key-thoughts to you when they came to me, before I forgot them with all their bearings; and by-and-by they'd do me a lot of good when I got away from this influence, and back into the machinery of the Western world again.

If you could come out here, if you could feel what I feel here--and you would feel a thousand times as much--I don't know what you wouldn't do.

It's pretty wonderful. The nights with the stars so white and glittering, and so near that you'd think you could reach up and hand them down; the dark, deep, blue beyond; such a width of life all round you, a sort of never-ending s.p.a.ce, that everything you ever saw or did seems little, and G.o.d so great in a kind of hovering sense like a pair of wings; and all the secrets of time coming out of it all, and sort of touching your face like a velvet wind. I expect you'll think me sentimental, a first-cla.s.s squash out of the pumpkin-garden; but it's in the desert, and it gets into you and saturates you, till you feel that this is a kind of middle s.p.a.ce between the world of cities, and factories, and railways, and tenement-houses, and the quiet world to come--a place where they think out things for the benefit of future generations, and convey them through incarnations, or through the desert. Say, your ladys.h.i.+p, I'm a chatterer, I'm a two-cent philosopher, I'm a baby; but you are too much like your grandmother, who was the daughter of a Quaker like David Pasha, to laugh at me.

I've got a suit of fine chain-armour which I bought of an Arab down by Darfur. I'm wondering if it would be too cowardly to wear it in the sc.r.a.p that's coming. I don't know, though, but what I'll wear it, I get so scared. But it will be a frightful hot thing under my clothes, and it's hot enough without that, so I'm not sure. It depends how much my teeth chatter when I see "the dawn of battle."

I've got one more thing before I stop. I'm going to send you a piece of poetry which the Saadat wrote, and tore in two, and threw away. He was working off his imagination, I guess, as you have to do out here. I collected it and copied it, and put in the punctuation--he didn't bother about that. Perhaps he can't punctuate. I don't understand quite what the poetry means, but maybe you will. Anyway, you'll see that it's a real desert piece.

Here it is:

"THE DESERT ROAD

"In the sands I lived in a hut of palm, There was never a garden to see; There was never a path through the desert calm, Nor a way through its storms for me.

"Tenant was I of a lone domain; The far pale caravans wound To the rim of the sky, and vanished again; My call in the waste was drowned.

"The vultures came and hovered and fled; And once there stole to my door A white gazelle, but its eyes were dread With the hurt of the wounds it bore.

"It pa.s.sed in the dusk with a foot of fear, And the white cold mists rolled in;

"And my heart was the heart of a stricken deer, Of a soul in the snare of sin.

"My days they withered like rootless things, And the sands rolled on, rolled wide; Like a pelican I, with broken wings, Like a drifting barque on the tide.

"But at last, in the light of a rose-red day, In the windless glow of the morn, From over the hills and from far away, You came--ah, the joy of the morn!

"And wherever your footsteps fell, there crept A path--it was fair and wide: A desert road which no sands have swept, Where never a hope has died.

"I followed you forth, and your beauty held My heart like an ancient song; By that desert road to the blossoming plains I came-and the way was long!