Donovan Pasha, and Some People of Egypt Part 7

"Here's to you, Mr. Norman!" said d.i.c.ky, with a little laugh. "What does the Mudir do?"

"Doesn't know what to do. He tells Norman to say to me that if he puts the fellow in prison there'll be a riot, for they'll make a martyr of him. If he fines him it won't improve matters. So he asks me to name a punishment which'll suit our case. He promises to give it 'his most distinguished consideration.'"

"And what's your particular poison for him?" asked d.i.c.ky, with his eyes on the Cholera Hospital a few hundred yards away.

"I don't know. If he's punished in the ordinary way it will only make matters worse, as the Mudir says. Something's needed that will play our game and turn the tables on the reptile too."

"A sort of bite himself with his own fangs, eh?" d.i.c.ky seemed only idly watching the moving figures by the hospital.

"Yes, but what is it? I can't inoculate him with bacilli. That's what'd do the work, I fancy."

"Pocket your fancy, Fielding," answered d.i.c.ky. "Let me have a throw."

"Go on. If you can't hit it off, it's no good, for my head doesn't think these days: it only sees, and hears, and burns."

d.i.c.ky eyed Fielding keenly, and then, pouring out some whiskey for himself, put the bottle on the floor beside him, casually as it were.

Then he said, with his girlish laugh, not quite so girlish these days: "I've got his sentence pat--it'll meet the case, or you may say, 'Ca.s.sio, never more be officer of mine.'"

He drew over a piece of paper lying on the piano--for there was a piano on the Amenhotep, and with what seemed an audacious levity Fielding played in those rare moments when they were not working or sleeping; and Fielding could really play! As d.i.c.ky wrote he read aloud in a kind of legal monotone:

The citizen Mustapha Kali having a.s.serted that there is no cholera, and circulated various false statements concerning the treatment of patients, is hereby appointed as hospital-a.s.sistant for three months, in the Cholera Hospital of Kalamoun, that he may have opportunity of correcting his opinions.

--Signed Ebn ben Hari, Mudir of Abdallah.

Fielding lay back and laughed--the first laugh on his lips for a fortnight. He laughed till his dry, fevered lips took on a natural moisture, and he said at last: "You've pulled it off, D. That's masterly. You and Norman have the only brains in this show. I get worse every day; I do--upon my soul!"

There was a curious anxious look in d.i.c.ky's eyes, but he only said: "You like it? Think it fills the bill, eh?"

"If the Mudir doesn't pa.s.s the sentence I'll shut up shop." He leaned over anxiously to d.i.c.ky and gripped his arm. "I tell you this pressure of opposition has got to be removed, or we'll never get this beast of an epidemic under, but we'll go under instead, my boy."

"Oh, we're doing all right," d.i.c.ky answered, with only apparent carelessness. "We've got inspection of the trains, we've got some sort of command of the foresh.o.r.es, we've got the water changed in the mosques, we've closed the fountains, we've stopped the markets, we've put Sublimate Pasha and Limewash Effendi on the war-path, and--"

"And the natives believe in lighted tar-barrels and a cordon sanitaire!

No, D., things must take a turn, or the game's lost and we'll go with it. Success is the only thing that'll save their lives--and ours: we couldn't stand failure in this. A man can walk to the gates of h.e.l.l to do the hardest trick, and he'll come back one great blister and live, if he's done the thing he set out for; but if he doesn't do it, he falls into the furnace. He never comes back. d.i.c.ky, things must be pulled our way, or we go to deep d.a.m.nation."

d.i.c.ky turned a little pale, for there was high nervous excitement in Fielding's words; and for a moment he found it hard to speak. He was about to say something, however, when Fielding continued.

"Norman there,"--he pointed to the deck-cabin, "Norman's the same.

He says it's do or die; and he looks it. It isn't like a few fellows besieged by a host. For in that case you wait to die, and you fight to the last, and you only have your own lives. But this is different. We're fighting to save these people from themselves; and this slow, quiet, deadly work, day in, day out, in the sickening sun and smell-faugh! the awful smell in the air--it kills in the end, if you don't pull your game off. You know it's true."

His eyes had an eager, almost prayerful look; he was like a child in his simple earnestness. His fingers moved over the maps on the table, in which were little red and white and yellow flags, the white flags to mark the towns and villages where they had mastered the disease, the red flags to mark the new ones attacked, the yellow to indicate those where the disease was raging. His fingers touched one of the flags, and he looked down.

"See, D. Here are two new places attacked to-day.

"I must ride over to Abdallah when Norman goes. It's all so hopeless!"

"Things will take a turn," rejoined d.i.c.ky, with a forced gaiety. "You needn't ride over to Abdallah. I'll go with Norman, and what's more I'll come back here with Mustapha Kali."

"You'll go to the Mudir?" asked Fielding eagerly. He seemed to set so much store by this particular business.

"I'll bring the Mudir too, if there's any trouble," said d.i.c.ky grimly; though it is possible he did not mean what he said.

Two hours later Fielding, d.i.c.ky, and Norman were in conference, extending their plans of campaign. Fielding and Norman were eager and nervous, and their hands and faces seemed to have taken on the arid nature of the desert. Before they sat down d.i.c.ky had put the bottle of whiskey out of easy reach; for Fielding, under ordinary circ.u.mstances the most abstemious of men, had lately, in his great fatigue and overstrain, unconsciously emptied his gla.s.s more often than was wise for a campaign of long endurance. d.i.c.ky noticed now, as they sat round the table, that Norman's hand went to the coffee-pot as Fielding's had gone to his gla.s.s. What struck him as odd also was that Fielding seemed to have caught something of Norman's manner. There was the same fever in the eyes, though Norman's face was more worn and the eyes more sunken.

He looked like a man that was haunted. There was, too, a certain air of helplessness about him, a primitive intensity almost painful. d.i.c.ky saw Fielding respond to this in a curious way--it was the kind of fever that pa.s.ses quickly from brain to brain when there is not sound bodily health commanded by a cool intelligence to insulate it. Fielding had done the work of four men for over two months, and, like most large men, his nerves had given in before d.i.c.ky's, who had done six men's work at least, and, by his power of organisation and his labour-saving intelligence, conserved the work of another fifty.

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."

d.i.c.ky 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 pa.s.s 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 d.i.c.ky 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."

d.i.c.ky 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 d.i.c.ky 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 d.i.c.ky 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 d.i.c.ky's urging, that there was no time for music. And d.i.c.ky knew that presently there would be no time to eat, and then no time to sleep; and then, the worst!

d.i.c.ky had pinned his faith and his friends.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d burn his eyes! He sends the death to the village by moving the flags. May G.o.d 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 G.o.d cut off his hand!--he has moved the white flag to our village." He pointed in a trembling fear, half real, half a.s.sumed--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 d.i.c.ky 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.