Chapter III

To Katharine Forbis, some seven weeks subsequently to her arrival at the Red Cross Hospital of Montana, an Egyptian Red Cross orderly brought a scrap of paper bearing a pencilled scrawl:

"_Am back from the Front Palestine for ten days leave. Can you see me? Important yours faithfully John Hazel._"

No more. But enough to call back the carnation bloom to cheeks paled by the sub-tropical heats of Egypt, and self-forgetful labours in the interests of wounded men....

Morning duty, consisting in the conveyance of a motor-car packed with convalescents on an expedition to Ramleh and back,--was over. Miss Forbis had just returned, and was free for the afternoon. In her well-cut white drill uniform-skirt and coat with its shoulder-titles, Special Service badges, and scraps of medal-ribbon, her white blouse with its polo collar and natty black silk tie; her brown silk stockings and tan brogue shoes bearing the unmistakable cachet of Bond Street, setting off the workmanlike ensemble, and her handsome head crowned by a soft white Panama hat of the uniform shape, with the Society's ribbon and badge,--she made a gallant, gracious figure, bringing a mist before the eyes of the big, battered-looking, sun-blackened man,--bristlier than ever about the cheeks and chin, and arrayed in battle-soiled and much-patched khaki drill,--who got out of his cane chair in the wide white marble hall with pleased alacrity, knocking over with a bandaged, sling-suspended left arm, the soiled and dusty regulation sun-helmet he had put down on a little table of inlaid Egyptian work.

And as he saluted her in his Eastern way, now familiar to Katharine, swift strangling emotion caught her by the throat. For a moment she could not find voice. For John Hazel brought the panelled parlour at Kerr's Arbour with him; and set it like a scene between the white marble pillars where whirred the electric fans, between the gilt and friezed and painted walls, and under the fretted ceilings of the Egyptian despot's palace, built on the rocky height at the foot of which break the milk-warm surges of the Mediterranean. And once again the old pain at her heart,--dulled by long months without news; by change of scene and change of work, to an aching sense of emptiness,--woke up and cried for all that she had lost.

She said with her wide heartening smile, as his huge hand swallowed hers, still wearing its tan gauntlet:

"You look wonderfully fit, though you're wearing a sling."

"Fit's the word!" He grinned the big toothy grin so well remembered.... "A walking testimony to the nutritive qualities of Maconochie, tinned salmon, Prynn's Baked Beans, Army brickbats, sticky flycatcher dates and chlorinated Nile water.... For we've travelled a long way since the imbecilities of the Crimea," he said, with his black eyes drinking her in.

"Thank God, we have!" Katharine flushed a little under his strange scrutiny, painfully conscious of the unrelaxing grip of his huge, hard, blackened hand. For John Hazel stood, oblivious of its crushing pressure, drinking in the joy of her near presence, inhaling the rare sweetness of her fair, wholesome womanhood; the fragrance of her hair and breath, and garments, coming to him mingled with the perfume of the half-opened red rose--still dewy in the heart of it--that she had stuck in the buttonhole of her uniform jacket that morning, and forgotten to take out again.

And Katharine upon her side was conscious of a strange environing atmosphere; a virile, heady compound of exhalations from the desert, the march, the bivouac and the battlefield, emanating from the garments and the person of the man. The sun-baked blackness of his skin seemed its natural tinting. Whiffs of the wormwood of desolate places mingled with the aroma of thyme, clover and strong tobacco,--the smell of horses and tanned leather; the sharp tang of melinite, and the penetrating odour of sweating human flesh.

A moment more and he released the hand he held, giving a dismayed exclamation, and taking a long backward step.

"Hold on! What have I been thinking of!" Concern was in his voice. "I'm not fit to touch you! Do you know it's a fortnight since I washed last!" His fleshy mouth twisted in disgust, as he surveyed his martial griminess, continuing: "We've been short of water lately. Only allowed a pint _per diem_. Strictly for internal irrigation, nothing allowed for the outer man! And when Essenian Pasha dropped me at the Alex. Air Station--and thundering good of him too!--I'd only time to grab a bite of breakfast at the N.C.O.'s Mess Tent--swallow a mug of coffee--tumble into a car--borrowed from the R.F.C. men!--and just chuffle along. Why I was in such a cast-iron hurry--that's what I've got to explain to you. And when I saw you I clean forgot what a beastly sweep I am! I couldn't--" The deep, rough breath he drew added quite plainly, "I couldn't think of anything but you!"

"Don't you imagine, if you and other brave men can put up with Dirt for Duty's sake--that we women--even those of us who don't wear this uniform--can put up with you men? And you can have a hot bath here at any moment, Mr. Hazel." Katharine's full tones were tinged with laughter as she added: "And a second breakfast,--unless you don't mind waiting the half-hour, which will make it the official noonday meal. Now which will you do? Have that bath--or stay and talk to me on, the lawn or in here until the Staff lunch?--at which meal your picturesque battle-grime will make you the admired of all?"

"It's simply first-class here!--a kind of mix-up of the Alhambra at Granada and an Egypto-Grecian temple," he said to her, gratefully sensing the breezes from the whirring electric fans. "And that little fountain, splashing and gurgling--makes a man who was in the Syrian Desert east of Gaza, up to the evening of day before yesterday, marching and swotting Turks on a pint of doctored Nile water _per diem_--want to stick his blooming head in the basin and drink it all up."

"I--think I'm beginning to comprehend!" Miss Forbis's fine eyebrows relaxed their tension, and the puzzled expression left her face. "You fogged me rather, a minute back--about being in the Desert near Gaza up to the evening of the day before yesterday.... But now--"

"Now you're clear that it isn't a case of bats in the belfry. Haw--haw!" He broke out into the big noisy laugh that had once set Katharine's teeth on edge. "Of course it'd have taken three days if I'd come by the Woggler from Railhead. The Woggler, I ought to tell you, is the Desert Express. Trucks roofed with packing-cases nailed together--nail-ends up--to accommodate the troops. Pullmans,--seats faked with American cloth over a thin film of tibbin,--specially reserved for Officer Sahibs. Not that the Army ain't proud of the Woggler! In its way, it's an epoch-marking, eye-opening Thing. But I happened to be in a dithering hurry. And a chance turned up of getting here by the Air Route, do you see? ... Safe as houses, for we followed the coast and had no scraps--the Turks are very short of fliers!--and we only came down once, for petrol, at a seaplane station near the Rest Camp at El Arish."

The gesture of his blackened hand made light of fatigue, risks, perils and privations attending the long flight from Palestine.... Katharine admired the simplicity with which he spoke, as she said with a touch of reproachfulness:

"It seems very long since you came to me at Kerr's Arbour, Mr. Hazel. And all these months you have never once written--although you promised!"

"I said I would not fail to write--if I had any news for you!"

That deep voice, and the simple words that meant so much to Katharine.... The white marble pillars of the hall appeared to sway and totter. The jewelled plume of a fountain playing in a fretted basin seemed to leap to the patterned roof and then shrink small again....

"Have you news--at last?"

"Some!" he said briefly.

"What?--"

The sudden dilation and darkening of her lovely eyes betrayed the desperate hunger gnawing in her. The eyes fastened avidly on Hazel's blackened face. She held her breath for his answer. It came as he slewed his head,--looking through the triple arch of the Palace vestibule to the green, carefully nurtured lawn, the glory of Montana--whence the smack of racquet upon tennis-ball came, and the sound of cheerful voices, telling of relaxations on the part of the Medical Staff, the Nurses and V.A.D's.

"This--that Colonel Yaill is alive and well. I have seen him!"

"Thank God!" Katharine said, "O--thank God! ..."

She put out her hand to the back of a chair and gripped it to steady herself. When her leaping heart had quieted she addressed herself to a colossal back-view, so shorn of martial dignity by patches of Army sacking, that Katharine's voice wavered between laughter and tears:

"And God bless you, John Hazel, for bringing word to me!"

"I have better than a word!" He wheeled about and faced her. "I have a letter from him for you! ..."

As he drew it from a baggy front pocket of his tunic, the radiance that broke over her was fairly dazzling to the man's eyes.... He trembled as she stretched out both her hands to him, entreating:

"Give me his letter, dear John Hazel! ... Let me hold it while you tell me where you met with him! ..."

The object that caused such turmoil in Miss Forbis's bosom was a single sheet of coarse yellow Levantine paper, folded to oblong shape, stuck in three places along the edge and at either end, with a mixture of white clay and beeswax, and sealed with a ring given to Yaill eight years previously. How well the giver of the old love-token remembered that hexagonal sard, deeply cut in old Roman capitals with the name: "KATHARINE." How dear and familiar the small neat handwriting of the pencilled address: 'Miss K. M. Forbis, Kerr's Arbour, Near Cauldstanes, Tweedshire, N.B.' ...

"The morning after Sheria--before it was daylight"--how she hung upon John Hazel's utterance, watching the movements of his fleshy lips, drinking in every word--"we were cleaning out enemy trenches, and blowing up ammunition-dumps and testing wells for poison, and burying dead Turks--and so forth!--I was passing the Intelligence Officer's tent--quite a toney fit-up on the top of a mound--with a native string-bed, and a camp chair, and a sugar-box table, and lighted candles on that,--for the thermometer was climbing up into the seventies and the front fly was up--for the sake of fresh air.... When I tell you that the I.O. was questioning Turkish prisoners--under a guard of Military Police,--and putting Syrian and Arab scouts through their paces, and interviewing village patriarchs--you'll understand that the atmosphere was--well!--"

"I can imagine! ... But, do please go on!" All unconsciously she cuddled the precious letter to her bosom, holding it with both hands and smiling over it at John....

"Well--as I was passing by and happened to glance in--an Arab dressed much the same as the others--a thin, tallish, sinewy Bedawi in a flowing black camel-cloth mantle, and silk head-veil trimmed with tufts of coloured gimp--and topped by the usual ring of twisted camel's hair,--rose up and made obeisance to the Intelligence Officer sitting at the sugar-box table,--and came out, followed by a brace of others--not quite so well got up. Walking as Arabs have the knack of doing--as if the round world and all that therein is--including the Desert--was hardly good enough to be trampled under the notched iron heels that they wear for killing snakes."

She drank in the words that were heavenly music, bending her high head the better to concentrate her gaze upon the speaker's face.

"And--?"

"Well, the three Arabs--two of 'em not particularly interesting, and the one who'd been talking to the Intelligence Officer--no end posh in a necklace of gold-mounted lion's-teeth, and with strings of blue and red seed-pearls twined in his long side-locks,--the three Arabs were going to where their hairies were picketed--munching tibbin and sesame off a spread saddle-cloth--ragged looking yellowish-grey brutes with ewe-necks, and queerly-sloped cruppers; and high-peaked wooden saddles and big-bitted bridles, jingling with silver amulets and jewellery of sorts.... One Arab had a kind of cage-basket strapped on behind the saddle, with live birds stirring about in it--I thought falcons trained for sport--until they started cooing.... Well then!--in the sudden way it happens in this East of ours,--Day jumped over the Hills of Judea--and the Arabs got their prayer-rugs from behind their saddles, and made ready to say their prayers...."

His black eyes seemed to look past Katharine into the scene that he described. He drew breath:

"I was sitting on a sack of Turkish ration-biscuits--not half bad if you've nothing else to eat!--smoking an Army Issue Woodbine--and though the place was stiff with praying Moslems, I watched these--or rather this one! He washed in the sand--laid his praying-rug diagonally in the line for Mecca, knelt down, and went through the whole programme--praying with his forehead to the ground--praying with his hands to the sides of his head--praying with his body straight, resting on the knees, in the regular Mohammedan way. An uncommonly swanky Arab too!--the stock of his long-barrelled gun inlaid with bits of turquoise and mother o' pearl, a curved nine-inch dagger in a gilded sheath stuck in the front of his girdle--and a long silver-plated ivory-stocked revolver--about 44 calibre I judge--on the other side. I was to left of him: so when he slewed his head over his right shoulder to smile at his Good Angel, I saw the back of it--and when he twirled it back again to scowl at the Counsellor of Evil, I found him staring full into my face and scowling at me!"

"And you knew him!--it was Edward!" Her voice was a song of joy!