Chapter V

"_A Camp In The North Syrian Desert,
--th November--the Month of Asphodel._
"KATHARINE, MY SWEET WOMAN, MY DEAR LOST LOVE."

So wild a surge of memories came over her that her eyes were momentarily blinded. He dated from his camp in the Desert, as a pearler on some plunging lugger in the Indian Ocean may top his home-destined scribble: "The Open Sea...."

She dried her eyes, and the lines were clear again. Something that the folded sheet had contained had dropped out. A white flower scarcely yet withered, and a little string of beads of some sort. She thrust them in the envelope--and the envelope in her bosom--and went on to read.... And the page exhaled the wild strange odour of the acrid dust of the Desert, mingled with the scent of horses and camels, of saffron and resin, tobacco and thyme and myrrh....

"Twice I have seen your advertisements, my beloved. In a Greek gazette in a _café_ at Constantinople. Again, in an issue of the _Lisân-el-Arab_, a vernacular paper published at Damascus; once again on a torn scrap of a captured Turkish news-sheet, on the floor of the _maktab_ of the Governor of Akaba--the seaport at the head of the Gulf, where the Fleet of King Solomon unloaded their freights of ivory and ebony, gold and spices and apes and peacocks, close on three thousand years ago.

"How did I come there? do you ask me, Katharine. What was I doing in the hall where the Governor gives audience to the Bringers of News from the Desert--sitting on the Carpet of Interrogation, smoking the _argili_ that aids thought? Because I was one of them--am one of them!--a petty chief of the Hejaz Bedwân, able to speak a little English--a spy set to supervise the doings of the spies.

"Well, I picked up the paper, as became a scrupulous Mohammedan. Who knew that it did not bear the letters of The Sacred Name! And I kissed it, and burned it on the charcoal of the brazier, under sharp eyes that had not glittered on the message it brought to me. Though the Governor of Akaba is one of those few men who share my secret. Had One great man not known it from the first, it would not have been possible to have vanished into thin air with such celerity.

"You never doubted for a single moment, sweet friend, dear comrade! that I had gone to look for Julian. Had I believed you would think otherwise, I would have managed to write to you.... But not to write was wiser--and the plan matured so suddenly.... When I took my last kiss from you, and went out of the chapel at Kerr's Arbour, I was uncertain what to do.

"Then through the jungle of my thoughts I saw a way blazed for me. I went to my room, and took from the press an old tweed shooting-suit, and hung the things on my arm, under my waterproof trench-coat. I took my stick, and shook hands with Whishaw, and said Good-bye to him. His old eyes were red with tears, and my grip thanked him for them. Then I climbed the private road, and turned at the brae-top to take my farewell look of Kerr's Arbour. And oddly enough, the refrain from 'Loch Lomond' kept droning in my head. You were taking the high-road of Duty and Honour--and I was taking the road of subterfuge and concealment. But not, God knew! for any base end of mine! He Whose Hand has torn us apart--two lovers married in heart and soul--if ever lovers were,--my Katharine!--He must be just to me! Harsh though I knew him,--yet even then I saw He had tempered His harshness with mercy. For you, O my dearest--you had believed in me!

"So I took initiative from that, and followed the plan I had thought of. I changed in the plantation opposite, but rather below, the gate of Kerr's Arbour private road. Then--seeing no one but a child--I came out of the plantation, having buried my khaki kit in a biggish badger's burrow. Cauldstanes people knew my face--so I struck across country for Stotts Junction, some twenty miles farther South, where--as of course you know--the Carlisle-bound trains stop. I got in at midnight--the time most favourable--as a troop-train of dingy second-class carriages and the usual string of cattle-trucks lumbered in.

"Troops were entraining, the --th Lowland Territorials, bound for Havre, Marseilles and the East. In the seething turmoil of my mind, some vague idea of enlisting as a ranker had been uppermost. I dismissed it as I sat waiting for the next Carlisle-bound train.

"My twenty-mile tramp to the Junction had cleared away the brainstorm. I realised that I had acted without reflection, like a savage, or a child. Stuffing away the khaki husk of Edward Yaill in a red-hot hurry,--changing into the old tweeds, and launching back into the world as an unobtrusive civilian, was, in a country in a state of War, and under Martial Law, about the crudest and riskiest mode of escape I could have chosen.

"But I got to London safely without being asked for papers, and slept at a coffee-house in the King's Cross Road. Next day, quite early, I saw Sir Arthur Ely, told him my plans (which he did not approve of), left in his care my keys and private papers; and by an ante-dated cheque which he passed through his bankers--obtained sufficient ready cash to carry on for a couple of years.

"And then I telegraphed in Code to a man I loved and honoured. You know him. He showed me much friendship when I was in the East. He wired back, appointing a place and an hour. The straight, piercing look of his full eyes under their thick lids--the grip of his hand, and the sound of his deep voice, rolled back the years--they always did--and made me a boy again. For I was little more when, eighteen years ago, I brought a despatch from my Colonel to his Headquarters at Fort Atbara. I was a lieutenant on his Staff when from the hill-top behind Kerreri--he--the Sirdar--swept Omdurman with his binoculars. A mud-walled Mohammedan city--I have been back there since I left you, Katharine!--with a great host of white-robed Darweeshes in battle-array before it--and the whitewashed dome of the Mahdi's tomb all gleaming in the sun.

"He is dead--and in him England has lost much more than a great War Minister. She has lost her truest friend. He heard my story out and believed me,--even as you believed, my true love! He was ready to help, upon condition that I followed up definite lines....

"Arab co-operation being essential for the crushing of the Red Crescent, and the liberation of Northern Palestine and Syria--a door lay open towards the East for a man such as I was--such as I am! who does not greatly fear peril, having no great use for existence. To whom hardship signifies little, comfort and pleasure not being for him. Who welcomes loneliness because denied the one companion with whom life would be Life indeed.

"So I got my Mission from my Chief of old,--he being willing that my six months of Home leave, and the indefinite period of Home duty destined to follow it,--should be merged, for an equally indefinite period, in a Mission connected with the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain in the East. Now you know why I was sitting in the audience-hall of the Governor of Akaba when I saw that torn fragment of the Turkish news-sheet lying, and picked it up and read, for the second time, your message to me.

"Twice then I have seen your message, and once I have seen You. You were driving a Red Cross Daimler car, full of Hospital convalescents, six weeks ago near the ruins of Canopus, by Aboukir. I was not an Arab of the Hejaz on that never-to-be-forgotten morning. Perhaps I was that coffee-coloured Copt--in the blue cotton _galabiyeh_ of the Egyptian Labour Corps--squatting on a sandheap near a gang of others busy at excavation.... Or I may have been the Australian Dinkum who leaned against a Ptolemaic pillar smoking a cigarette.... You remember that his felt hat was slouched so as to hide his eyes!

"I do not smile, though I write cheerfully. Imagine what it would feel like to have a farrier thrust his steel pincers into your breast and twist your live heart round? Well, that is what I felt that day when I saw you at Aboukir. And yet I did not yield to the desire to speak to you--or try to see you, or communicate with you in any way. For to do that might have balked me of reaching my end,--prevented me from doing what I am more than ever bent on.... Had not Hazel recognised me that day near Sheria, I swear to you I would have resisted--until the finish. Perhaps I have drunk in a belief in Destiny from the Arabs. But I feel that man John Hazel is linked up with my Fate!

"So I write: and this will be conveyed to him through the officer representing --th Division, British Secret Intelligence, who firmly believed me,--until I disillusioned him--to be the Emir Fadl Anga, a pigeon-fancying petty Arab chief of the tag-rag-and-bob-tail of the Sherif of Mecca. Fortunately for my peace of mind! For the time is ripe.... I have traced a leakage of information from Headquarters in Egypt to its source in a native officer who holds the confidence of the British Government--and now move to the centre where the spy's activities are manifested. On the completeness of disguise--not only the garb of the outer man,--and the technical proprieties of speech and bearing--but the mentality distinguishing an Arab nomad from a city-inhabiting European--hang the two issues:--that a traitor should meet the fate he richly merits,--and that out of the barren desert of my life I may gather a joy for Katharine.

"For Julian is alive!--sweet friend, lost sweetheart! He sends you the Rosary that comes with this. He has been shifted four times since the Turks took him prisoner on the Scimitar. From Gallipoli to a War Hospital staffed by German surgeons, and Bulgarian and German nurses of the Red Crescent, at Constantinople. From Hospital to a filthy Prison Camp near Smyrna. From Smyrna to Belemeki, a small and even filthier station in the Taurus Mountains--the headquarters for labour-gangs of prisoners working on the uncompleted tunnels of the Adana and Constantinople rail. From thence to Beersheba and Shechem. He is now at Shechem. In such misery and under such privations that to describe them would harrow you uselessly.... I do not mean to try.... But this you may know: that the starved and vermin-ridden mob of tatterdemalions,--British Yeomanry, Regulars, Australians, Indians, Jews, Frenchmen and Roumanians--who swelter and starve and toil at Shechem under the loaded Turkish hide-whips would be in infinitely worse case, but for the self-effacing tenderness of the priest whom even the Turkish guards have learned to respect. Recent negotiations between the Allied Governments and the Porte have brought about a movement towards the release or exchange of many of these prisoners.... But for some reason,--the name of Father Julian Forbis has been omitted from the official lists of those selected for exchange. His physical sufferings, I have learned, would have been lessened if he would have consented to be removed from the mud barrack-prison, and quartered in the huts of the Wired Enclosure east of the town with the officers,--who receive less villainous treatment--and are more decently housed than the men.... It was like the Julian whom we know, not to desert his charges; knowing his presence to be some check upon the inhumanity of Turkish officials, and the brutality of Turkish guards. Pray for your living brother, my beloved,--for it may be God will hear you! and for me who am no better than dead though living,--being cut off hopelessly from you.... If in dreams I kiss your eyes, and your sweet mouth,--and the soft little place under your chin, you cannot be angry.... For I have nothing left on earth but my one hope of rescuing Julian, and my dreams!--and they come every night, Katharine!--such cruelly-sweet,--vivid dreams of you and you, and You.... E.A.Y."

There was a postscript above a rough ink outline that suggested something familiar to Katharine:

"I picked the flower I enclose with the Rosary a day or so back at your Tower of Kir Saba, little thinking how soon I should be sending it to you! The Turks holding Jaffa have fortified the Tower on the E. and S.:--fixed an aërial for Wireless on the top of it--driven their trenches through the gardens and vineyards--cut down the olive-groves covering the hillside N,--and used the vaults as dumps for the storage of cartridges, H.E. shell, bombs and hand-grenades.... There is something of Kerr's Arbour about the place, despite the second, smaller Tower to the W, the round bastion at the middle of the eastward wall, and the absence of the buildings later reared against the keep.... So there, my Katharine, stands your ancient heritage, its feet deep in blossoming asphodel, and tapestries of grape-vines--now laden with ripe fruit--draping its Time-worn stone...."

The withered flower the envelope had contained was the snapped-off top of a slender green stem, bearing white blossoms in branching clusters; lily-shaped, and exhaling a delicate fragrance, recalling the scent of freesia to Katharine.

The Rosary was a hempen string, with brown-black shiny seeds of the oval type of _canna Indica_, arranged in the familiar decades--with black lupin-beans for Paternosters--ending in a Crucifix rudely hacked from palm-wood--fruit of hours of secret labour with the prisoner's pocket-knife....

Katharine knew that Julian must have blessed it, before sending it to Edward. Thenceforth in daily prayers to the Mother of Consolation, for her dear ones living and dead, she would use instead of her own Rosary this:--made even more sacred by the sorrow of the sender and the maker's martyrdom.