Chapter IV (3)

Hopeless of hammering American ethics into the brain of an Oriental, Kirby set off at a new angle. He explained the loss of prestige and position which he himself would suffer. He would be discharged--probably by cable--for allowing the mine's bourgeoning prosperity to go to pieces in such fashion. Another and less lenient and understanding manager would be sent out to take his place. A manager whose first official act would probably be the discharging of Najib as the cause of the whole trouble.

Najib listened to this with a new interest, but with no great conviction.

Even Kirby's declaration that the ridiculous strike be a failure, and that the government would assuredly punish any damage done to the Cabell property, did not serve to impress him. Najib was a Syrian. An idea once firm-rooted in his mind, was loathe to let itself be torn thence by mere words. Kirby waxed desperate.

"You have wrecked this whole thing!" he stormed. "You got an idiotically wrong slant on what I told you about strikes to-day; and you have ruined us all. Even if you should go down there to the quarters this minute and tell the men that you were mistaken and that the strike is off--you know they wouldn't believe you. And you know they would go straight ahead with the thing. That's the Oriental of it. They'd refuse to go on working. And our shipments wouldn't be delivered. None of the ore for the next shipments would be mined. The men would just hang about, peacefully waiting for the double pay and the half time that you've promised them."

"Of an assuredly, that is true, howadji," conceded Najib. "They would--"

"They _will_!" corrected Kirby with grim hopelessness.

"But soon Cabell Effendi will reply to your letter," went on Najib. "And then the double paying--"

"To my letter!" mocked the raging Kirby.

Then he paused, a sudden inspiration smiting him.

"Najib," he continued after a minute of concentrated thought, "you have sense enough to know one thing: You have sense enough to know you people can't get that extra pay till I write to Mr. Cabell and demand it for you. There's not another one of you who can write English. There's no one here but yourself who can speak or understand it or make shift to spell out a few English words in print And Mr. Cabell doesn't know a word of Arabic--let alone the Arabic script. And your own two years at Coney Island must have shown you that no New Yorkers would know how to read an Arabic letter to him. Now I swear to you, by every Christian and Moslem oath, that _I_ shan't write such a letter! So how are you going to get word to him that you people are on strike and that you won't do another lick of work till you get double pay and half time? How are you going to do that?"

Najib's solid face went blank. Here at last was an argument that struck home. He had known Kirby for years, long enough to know that the American was most emphatically a man of his word. If Kirby swore he would not act as the men's intermediary with the company, then decisively Kirby would keep his oath. And Najib realized the futility of getting any one else to write such a letter in any language which the Cabell Smelting Company's home office would decipher.

He peered up at Kirby with disconsolate astonishment. Quick to take advantage of the change, the manager hurried on:

"Now, the men are on strike. That's understood. Well what are you and they going to do about it? When the draft for the monthly pay roll comes to the bank, at Jerusalem as usual, I shall refuse to indorse it. I give you my oath on that, too. I am not going to distribute the company's cash among a bunch of strikers. Without my signature, the bank won't cash the draft. You know that. Well, how are you going to live, all of you, on nothing a month? When the present stock of provisions gives out I'm not going to order them renewed. And the provision people in Jerusalem won't honour any one's order for them but mine. This is the only concern in Syria to-day that pays within forty per cent, of the wages you chaps are getting. With no pay and no food you're due to find your strike rather costly. For when the mine shuts down I'm going back to America. There'll be nothing to keep me here. I'll be ruined, in any case. You people will find yourself without money or provisions. And if you go elsewhere for work it will be at a pay that is only a little more than half what you are getting now. Your lookout isn't cheery, my striking friend!"

He made as though to go into his tent. After a brief pause of horror, Najib pattered hurriedly and beseechingly in his wake.

"Howadji!" pleaded the Syrian shakily. _"Howadji!_ You would not, in the untamefulness of your mad, desertion us like that? Not _me_, at anyhow? Not me, who have loved you as Daoud the Emir loved Jonathan of old! You would not forsook me, to starve myself! _Aie! Ohé!_"

"Shut up that ungodly racket!" snapped Kirby, entering his tent and lighting his lamp, as the first piercing notes of the traditional mourner chant exploded through the unhappy Najib's wide-flung jaws. "Shut up! You'll start every hyena and jackal in the mountains to howling! It's bad enough as it is without adding a native concert to the rest of the mess."

"But, howadji!" pleaded Najib.

_"Tamán!"_ growled Kirby, summarily speaking the age-hallowed Arabic word for the ending of all interviews.

"But I shall be beruinated, howadji!" tearfully insisted Najib.

Covertly the American watched his henchman while pretending to make ready for bed. If he had fully and permanently scared Najib into a conviction that the strike would spell ruin for the Syrian himself, then the little man's brain might possibly be jarred into one of its rare intervals of uncanny craftiness; and Najib might hit upon some way of persuading the fellaheen that the strike was off.

This was Kirby's sole hope. And he knew it. Unless the fellaheen could be so convinced, it meant the strike would continue until it should break the mine as well as the mine's manager. Kirby knew of no way to persuade the men. The same arguments which had crushed Najib would mean nothing to them. All their brains could master at one time, without the aid of some uprooting shock, was that henceforth they were to get double pay and half labour.

A calm fatalism of hopelessness, bred perhaps of his long residence in the homeland of fatalism began to creep over Kirby. In one hour his golden ambitions for the mine and for himself had been smashed. At best he saw no hope of getting the obsessed mine crew to work soon enough to save his present contracts. He would be lucky if, on non-receipt of their demanded increase, they did not follow Najib's muddled preachments to the point of sabotage.

The more he thought of it, the less possible did it seem to Kirby that Najib could undo the damage he had so blithely done. Ordering the blubbering little fellow out of the tent and refusing to speak or listen further, Kirby went to bed.

Oddly enough, he slept. There was nothing to worry about. When a man's job or fortune are imperilled sleep vanishes. But after the catastrophe what sense is there in lying awake? Depression and nervous fatigue threw Kirby into a troubled slumber. Only once in the night was he roused.

Perhaps two hours before dawn he started up at sound of a humble scratching at the open door flap of his tent. On the threshold cowered Najib.

"Furthermore, howadji," came the Syrian's woe-begone voice through the gloom, "could I borrow me a book if I shall use it with much carefulness?"

Too drowsy to heed the absurdity of such a plea at such an hour, Kirby grumbled a surly assent, and dozed again as he heard Najib rumbling, in the dark, among the shelves of the packing-box bookcase in a far corner of the tent. Here were stored nearly a hundred old volumes which had once been a part of the missionary library belonging to Kirby's father at Nablous. A few years earlier, at the moving of the mission, the dead missionary's scanty library had been shipped across country to his son.

Kirby awoke at greyest daylight. Through force of habit he woke at this hour; in spite of the workless day which he knew confronted him. It was his custom to get up and take his bath in the rain cistern at this time, and to finish dressing just as the men piled out for the morning's work.

Yet now the first sounds that smote his ears as he opened his eyes were the rhythmic creak of the mine windlass and equally rhythmic, if less tuneful, chant of the men who were working it;

_"All-ah sa-eed!--Ne-bi sa-eed! Ohé! Sa-eed! Sa-eed! Sa-EED!"_

In the distance, dying away, he heard the plodding hoofs of a string of pack mules. From the direction of the mine came the hoodlum racket which betokens, in Syria, the efforts of a number of honest labourers to perform their daily tasks in an efficient and orderly way.

Kirby, in sleepy amaze, looked at his watch in the dim dawn light. He saw it was still a full half hour before the men were due to begin work. And by the sounds he judged that the day's labour was evidently well under way. Yes, and to-day there was to have been no work done!

Kirby jumped out of bed and strode dazedly to his tent door. At the mine below him his fellaheen were as busy as so many dirty and gaudy bees. Even the lordly lazy Turkish soldiers were lending a hand at windlass and crane. Over the nick of the pass, leading toward Jerusalem, the last animal of a mule train was vanishing. Najib, who had as usual escorted the departing shipment of ore to the opening in the pass, was trotting back toward camp.

At sight of Kirby in the tent door the little superintendent veered from his course toward the mine and increased his pace to a run as he bore down upon the American. Najib's swart face was aglow. But his eyes were those of a man who has neglected to sleep. His cheeks still bore flecks of the dust he had thrown on his head when Kirby had explained the wreck of his scheme and of his future. There, in all likelihood, the dust smears would remain until the next rain should wash them off. But, beyond these tokens of recent mental strife, Najib's visage shone like a full moon that is streaked by dun dust clouds.

"Furthermore, howadji!" he hailed his chief as soon as he was within earshot, "the shipment for Alexandretta is on its wayward--over than an hour earlier than it was due to bestart itself. And those poor hell-selected fellaheen are betoiling themselfs grand. Have I done well, oh, howadji?"

"Najib!" stammered Kirby, still dazed.

"And here is that most sweet book of great worthiness and wit, which I borrowed me of you in the night, howadji," pursued Najib, taking from the soiled folds of his abieh a large old volume, bound in stout leather, after the manner of religious or scientific books of a half-century ago. On the brown back a scratched gold lettering proclaimed the gruesome title:

"Martyrs of Ancient and Modern Error."

Well did Kirby know the tome. Hundreds of times, as a child, had he sat on the stone floor of his father's cell-like mission study at Nablous, and had pored in shuddering fascination over its highly coloured illustrations. The book was a compilation--chiefly in the form of multichrome pictures with accompanying borders of text--of all the grisly scenes of martyrdom which the publishers had been able to scrape together from such classics as "Fox's Book of Martyrs" and the like. Twice this past year he had surprised Najib scanning the gruesome pages in frank delight.

"I betook the book to their campfire, howadji, and I smote upon my breast and I bewept me and I wailed aloud and I would not make comfort. Till at last they all awoken and they came out of their huts and they reviled at me for disturbing them as they slept themselfs so happily. Then I spake much to them. And all the time I teared with my eyes and moaned aloudly.

"But," put in Kirby, "I don't see what this--"

"In a presently you shall, howadji. Yesterday I begot your goat. To-day I shall make you to frisk with peacefulness of heart. Those fellaheen cannot read. They are not of an education, as I am. And they know my wiseness in reading. For over than a trillion times I have told them. And they believe. Pictures also they believe. Just as men of an education believe the printed word; knowing full well it could not be printed if it were not Allah's own truth. Well, these folk believe a picture, if it be in a book. So I showed them pictures. And I read the law which was beneath the pictures. They heard me read. And they saw the pictures with their own eyesight. So what could they do but believe? And they did. Behold, howadji!"

Opening the volume with respectful care, Najib thumbed the yellowing pages. Presently he paused at a picture which represented in glaring detail a stricken battlefield strewn with dead and dying Orientals of vivid costume. In the middle distance a regiment of prisoners was being slaughtered in a singularly bloodthirsty fashion. The caption, above the cut, read:

_"Destruction of Sennacherib's Assyrian Hosts, by the People of Israel."_

"While yet they gazed joyingly on this noble picture," remarked Najib, "I read to them the words of the law about it. I read aloudly, thus: 'This shall be the way of punishing all folk who make strike hereafter this date.' Then," continued Najib, "I showed to them another pretty and splendid picture. See!"

_"Martyrdom of John Rogers, His Wife and Their Nine Children."_

"And," proclaimed Najib, "of this sweet portrait I read thus the law: 'So shall the wifes and the offsprungs of all strike-makers be put to death; and those wicked strike-makers themselfs along with them.' By the time I had shown them six or fifteen of such pictures and read them the law for each of them, those miserable fellaheen and guards were beweeping themselfs harder and louder and sadder than I had seemed to. Why, howadji, it was with a difficultness that I kept them from running away and enhiding themselfs in the mountains, lest the soldiers of the pasha come upon them at once and punish them for trying to make strike! But I said I would intercede with you to make you merciful of heart toward them, to spare them and not to tell the law what they had so sinsomely planned to do I said I would do this, for mine own sake as well as for theirs, and that I knew I could wake you to pity. But I said it would perchancely soften your heart toward them, if all should work harder to atone themselfs for the sin they had beplotted. Wherefore, howadji, they would consent to sleep no more; but they ran henceforthly and at once to the mine. They have been onto the job ever since. And, howadji, they are jobbing harder than ever I have seen men bejob themselfs. Am I forgiven, howadji?" he finished timidly.

"Forgiven!" yelled Kirby, when he could speak. "Why, you eternal little liar, you're a genius! My hat is off to you! This ought to be worth a fifty-mejidie bonus. And--"

"Instead of the bonus, howadji," ventured Najib, scared at his own audacity, yet seeking to take full advantage of this moment of expansiveness, "could I have this pleasing book as a baksheesh gift?"

"Take it!" vouchsafed Kirby. "The thing gives me bad dreams. Take it!"

"May the houris make soft your bed in the Paradise of the Prophet!" jabbered Najib, in a frenzy of gratitude, as he hugged the treasured gift to his breast. "And--and, howadji, there be more pictures I did not show. They will be of a nice convenience, if ever again it be needsome to make a new law for the mine."

"But--"

"Oh, happy and pretty decent hour!" chortled the little man, petting his beloved volume as if it were a loved child and executing a shuffling and improvised step-dance of unalloyed rapture. "This book has been donationed to me because I was brave enough to request for it while yet your heart was warm at me, howadji. It is even as your sainted feringhee proverb says: 'Never put off till to-morrow the--the--man who may be done, to-day!'"

THE ELEPHANT REMEMBERS

By EDISON MARSHALL

From _Everybody's Magazine_

An elephant is old on the day he is born, say the natives of Burma, and no white man is ever quite sure just what they mean. Perhaps they refer to his pink, old-gentleman's skin and his droll, fumbling, old-man ways and his squeaking treble voice. And maybe they mean he is born with a wisdom such as usually belongs only to age. And it is true that if any animal in the world has had a chance to acquire knowledge it is the elephant, for his breed are the oldest residents of this old world.

They are so old that they don't seem to belong to the twentieth century at all. Their long trunks, their huge shapes, all seem part of the remote past. They are just the remnants of a breed that once was great.

Long and long ago, when the world was very young indeed, when the mountains were new, and before the descent of the great glaciers taught the meaning of cold, they were the rulers of the earth, but they have been conquered in the struggle for existence. Their great cousins, the mastodon and the mammoth, are completely gone, and their own tribe can now be numbered by thousands.

But because they have been so long upon the earth, because they have wealth of experience beyond all other creatures, they seem like venerable sages in a world of children. They are like the last veterans of an old war, who can remember scenes and faces that all others have forgotten.

Far in a remote section of British India, in a strange, wild province called Burma, Muztagh was born. And although he was born in captivity, the property of a mahout, in his first hour he heard the far-off call of the wild elephants in the jungle.

The Burmans, just like the other people of India, always watch the first hour of a baby's life very closely. They know that always some incident will occur that will point, as a weather-vane points in the wind, to the baby's future. Often they have to call a man versed in magic to interpret, but sometimes the prophecy is quite self-evident. No one knows whether or not it works the same with baby elephants, but certainly this wild, far-carrying call, not to be imitated by any living voice, did seem a token and an omen in the life of Muztagh. And it is a curious fact that the little baby lifted his ears at the sound and rocked back and forth on his pillar legs.

Of all the places in the great world, only a few remain wherein a captive elephant hears the call of his wild brethren at birth. Muztagh's birthplace lies around the corner of the Bay of Bengal, not far from the watershed of the Irawadi, almost north of Java. It is strange and wild and dark beyond the power of words to tell. There are great dark forests, unknown, slow-moving rivers, and jungles silent and dark and impenetrable.

Little Muztagh weighed a flat two hundred pounds at birth. But this was not the queerest thing about him. Elephant babies, although usually weighing not more than one hundred and eighty, often touch two hundred. The queerest thing was a peculiarity that probably was completely overlooked by his mother. If she saw it out of her dull eyes, she took no notice of it. It was not definitely discovered until the mahout came out of his hut with a lighted fagot for a first inspection.

He had been wakened by the sound of the mother's pain. "_Hai!_" he had exclaimed to his wife. "Who has ever heard a cow bawl so loud in labour? The little one that to-morrow you will see beneath her belly must weigh more than you!"

This was rather a compliment to his plump wife. She was not offended at all. Burman women love to be well-rounded. But the mahout was not weighing the effect of his words. He was busy lighting his firebrand, and his features seemed sharp and intent when the beams came out. Rather he was already weighing the profits of little Muztagh. He was an elephant-catcher by trade, in the employ of the great white Dugan Sahib, and the cow that was at this moment bringing a son into the world was his own property. If the baby should be of the Kumiria--

The mahout knew elephants from head to tail, and he was very well acquainted with the three grades that compose the breed. The least valuable of all are the Mierga--a light, small-headed, thin-skinned, weak-trunked and unintelligent variety that are often found in the best elephant herds. They are often born of the most noble parents, and they are as big a problem to elephant men as razor-backs to hog-breeders. Then there is a second variety, the Dwasala, that compose the great bulk of the herd--a good, substantial, strong, intelligent grade of elephant. But the Kumiria is the best of all; and when one is born in a captive herd it is a time for rejoicing. He is the perfect elephant--heavy, symmetrical, trustworthy and fearless--fitted for the pageantry of kings.

He hurried out to the lines, for now he knew that the baby was born. The mother's cries had ceased. The jungle, dark and savage beyond ever the power of man to tame, lay just beyond. He could feel its heavy air, its smells; its silence was an essence. And as he stood, lifting the fagot high, he heard the wild elephants trumpeting from the hills.

He turned his head in amazement. A Burman, and particularly one who chases the wild elephants in their jungles, is intensely superstitious, and for an instant it seemed to him that the wild trumpeting must have some secret meaning, it was so loud and triumphant and prolonged. It was greatly like the far-famed elephant salute--ever one of the mysteries of those most mysterious of animals--that the great creatures utter at certain occasions and times.

"Are you saluting this little one?" he cried. "He is not a wild tusker like you. He is not a wild pig of the jungle. He is born in bonds, such as you will wear too, after the next drive!"

They trumpeted again, as if in scorn of his words. Their great strength was given them to rule the jungle, not to haul logs and pull chains! The man turned back to the lines and lifted higher his light.

Yes--the little elephant in the light-glow was of the Kumiria. Never had there been a more perfect calf. The light of greed sprang again in his eyes. And as he held the fagot nearer so that the beams played in the elephant's eyes and on his coat, the mahout sat down and was still, lest the gods observe his good luck, and, being jealous, turn it into evil.

The coat was not pinky dark, as is usual in baby elephants. It was distinctly light-coloured--only a few degrees darker than white.

The man understood at once. In the elephants, as well as in all other breeds, an albino is sometimes born. A perfectly white elephant, up to a few years ago, had never been seen, but on rare occasions elephants are born with light-coloured or clouded hides. Such creatures are bought at fabulous prices by the Malay and Siamese princes, to whom a white elephant is the greatest treasure that a king can possess.

Muztagh was a long way from being an albino, yet a tendency in that direction had bleached his hide. And the man knew that on the morrow Dugan Sahib would pay him a lifetime's earnings for the little wabbly calf, whose welcome had been the wild cries of the tuskers in the jungle.