Chapter VII

He was not in the waiting car before the guarded entrance to the Hospital, as Katharine and Lady Wastwood gave the pass to the sentry, and stepped forth upon the dusty metalled road.

The car proved a large, white-enamelled Clement-Talbot of some 22 h.p., luxuriously appointed and finished exquisitely as a gun. The chauffeur was a mahogany-skinned, almond-eyed Egyptian, in a crimson felt _tarbûsh_ and snow-white silver-braided native livery. The attendant, a grave, middle-aged man, with long curling side-locks and olive aquiline features,--who stood by the car door, imperturbably waiting the arrival of the ladies, wore the plain black _kaftan_ and high black felt cap distinctive of many middle-class Jews in the East.

The machine ran like oil along the seventeen miles of dusty metalled roads lying between the green foliage and verdure of Montana and the great fortified Egyptian seaport,--in its environs of palm-groves and fig-gardens, tennis-lawns and golf-grounds; its streets (roaring with motor-lorries; grid-ironed with tram-lines; rattling with hack-_gharis_ and _arabâyis_ full of English, French or Italians, their drivers kept from running people over by the red-fezzed mahogany-hued Military Police)--traversed by swinging processions of laden camels, strings of tiny overladen donkeys, Arab hawkers, stately veiled women with clashing silver anklets, Anglo-Egyptian ladies in last season's Paris fashions; soldiers of the Egyptian Army, sherbet and sweetmeat and coffee-sellers; gangs of blue-uniformed Turkish prisoners; working-parties of the indefatigable little men of the Egyptian Labour Corps; portly native stockbrokers or merchants in the red _tarbûsh_ and single-breasted blue frock-coat; _saisis_, vendors of antiques made yesterday, Dagoes and Bedwân chiefs; verminous and crazy beggars; impish native youths and urchins pressing copies of the _Alexandrian Post_, and the _Egyptian Mail_, _John Bull_, _La Bourse_, the _Messagéro_, the _Sydney Bulletin_ and the _Palestine Gazette_, upon tall Australians in slouched felt hats, New Zealanders in red-banded smashers, lean, bearded Indian Lancers, little Ghurka Riflemen, and newly-arrived Tommies with comparatively pink-and-white faces; respectfully lavish of drinks and sticky native sweetmeats to veterans bronzed to the colour of their own khaki by the suns and dust-winds of the Desert and Palestine....

A huge, endless, living screen-picture, various and polyglot, backed and reinforced by an infinite variety of smells.... Colours of all imaginable hues; scents and reeks, stinks and fragrances. The hiss and purr, the nasal whine of Oriental tongues, mingled with the Western click and rattle, and the clang and ring of the dominating North.... Pierced by the all-pervading yell, for backsheesh, Backsheesh, BACKSHEESH!--the never-ceasing slogan of the dominated East.

Beyond the crossing where the Road of the Rosetta Gate debouches into the Rue Sherif Pasha,--whither Trixie's inward being yearned because of the cream-puffs, pink-melon ices, and Persian tea to be had at Groppi's Restaurant,--the big white car swirled into the Rue el Farad, past the beautiful tree-adorned and well-kept grounds of the Armenian Church and School.

The thoroughfare occupies the ancient site of the Street of the Four Winds, south of where used to be the quadruple marble gate, the Tetrapylon, turning off the ancient Street of the Moon. No asphalte was here, but pavement of huge blocks of ancient flagstone, not all cemented together, on which the traffic of the city, the motor-lorries, hack-_gharis_, country-carts and trains of laden small-hoofed donkeys, made an atrocious sound.... Tall palms, overtopping the roofs of the houses set at intervals on either side of the thoroughfare, spoke of garden-grounds behind them.... Here and there, built into a courtyard-wall, some chipped and broken column, or capital of Græco-Roman carving, some incised stele of yellowish limestone-marble, black basalt or the red granite of Assouan, incised with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the symbols of the Sun, and Moon Mother, spoke to the remoteness of the city's antiquity....

Midway of a courtyard-wall, forbiddingly high and thickly whitewashed, before a high closed portico having a deep square depression on the right-hand as though a sculptured slab or plaque had been removed from beside the entrance, the Clement-Talbot stopped. The heavy, green-painted door bore, in its central compartment of white, red Hebrew lettering instead of an Arabic inscription; the Roman numerals VII. were on a small brass plate above the heavy metal ring surmounting the huge clumsy lock, a lock straight out of _The Arabian Nights_....

The grave attendant got down and opened the car. Alighting, Katharine and her companion passed in, over a square of ancient mosaic, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a chain attached to a scarlet collar, and displaying a formidable mouthful of teeth.

The vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was of yellowish Numidian marble, yet stained a faded red in places, and showing traces of having been divided into panels by a slender incised ornament, partly obliterated, but recognisable as a black caduceus wreathed with a black vine.

And the vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was long rather than wide, and ventilated by horizontal apertures below the roof, filled in with metal lattice-work. Through a similar but larger opening overhead poured the golden sunshine of the November noonday,--making a thick black strip of shadow beneath the long wooden bench that ran along the right-hand wall. The air of the place was cool and sweet,--in spite of an array of native shoes,--of all grades and descriptions from jaunty red morocco with pointed turned-up toes, and heels with sharp rims of brass or steel for the killing of snakes and scorpions,--to venerable footgear of soiled buff or yellow leather,--and the clumsy hide sandals commonly worn by peasants,--ranged along the left-hand wall. Even as she observed the rows of shoes, Katharine's keen ears were greeted by a curious deep-toned humming--as though innumerable, invisible bees, of Brobdingnagian proportions--were gathering honey from conjectural flowers in the near neighbourhood....

The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to the ladies; displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.

Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard the car snort and move away as the metal bolts scrooped in their ancient grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the imperturbable attendant in the black _kaftan_ waved them forward to where another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume, waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal _repoussée_, with an oval piece of glass inset--something like a human eye. And the big invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:

"_Bz'zz'z! .... Bzz'z! ... Bzz m' m'm! ..._"

Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which,--though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had opened doors,--the rows of shoes along the wall, the figure of Trixie at her side--the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black _tarbûshes_ and _kaftans_ had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked big.... He was there,--beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish secretary--on the farther side of the torrent of boiling amber sunshine pouring through a central opening in the roof of the inner hall that succeeded the vestibule of the mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet in length, paved with squares of black and yellow marble, with an oblong pool in the midst of it--upon whose still, crystal surface pink and crimson petals of roses had been strewn in patterns,--and in the centre of which a triple-jetted fountain played....

"_Bzz' zz m'm! ..._"

The humming of the unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway in the wall upon Katharine's right hand.... A wall of black polished marble, decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and red and pale green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not hide what lay beyond the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched, whitewashed room, cooled by big wooden electric fans working under the ceiling, and traversed by avenues of creamy-white Chinese matting, running between rows of low native desks; before each of which squatted--on naked or cotton-sock-covered heels, or sat cross-legged upon a square native chintz cushion, a coffee-coloured, almond-eyed young Copt, in a black or blue cotton nightgown, topped with the _tarbûsh_ of black felt or a dingy-white or olive-brown muslin turban; murmuring softly to himself as he made entries, from right to left, in a huge limp-covered ledger, or deftly fingered the balls of coloured clay strung on the wires of the abacus at his side.

"Oh! ... Wonderful! I'm so glad you brought me!"

Lady Wastwood's emphatic exclamation of pleasure in her surroundings brought cessation in the humming,--caused a swivelling of capped or turbaned heads all down the length of three avenues,--evoked a simultaneous flash of black Oriental eyes, and white teeth in dusky faces lifted or turned.... Then at the upper end of the long counting-house, where three wide glassless windows looked on a sanded palm-garden (and the leather-topped knee-hole tables, roll-top desks, copying ink presses, mahogany revolving-chairs, telephone installations, willow-paper baskets, pewter inkstands and Post Office Directories suggested Cornhill and Cheapside rather than the Orient)--one of the olive-faced Jewish head-clerks in _kaftans_ and side-curls coughed,--and as though he had pulled a string controlling all the observant faces,--every tooth was hidden and every eye discreetly bent on the big limp ledgers again....

All the Coptic bees were humming sonorously in unison as Katharine went forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to receive her the master of the hive....

The light being behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but he seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed skull; and his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and long-chinned,--with a humorous quirk at the corners of the heavy-lipped mouth that redeemed its sensuousness--was lighted by eyes of the intensest black, burning under heavy beetle-brows. His khaki uniform, though of fine material and admirable cut, was that of a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours over the heart, and the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung,--intimated to Lady Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already served with some degree of distinction,--and had been wounded in the War.

As he advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence save hers, Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering head, and sweep his right arm out and down, with slow Oriental stateliness, bringing back the supple hand to touch breast, lips and brow. Whether or not he had raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to his lips and kissed it, Lady Wastwood could not definitely determine. She was left with the impression that he had done this thing. And--as he rose up from the deep obeisance, there sounded in her ears these words of salutation spoken in English by a deep voice, with the timbre and volume of an Arab war-drum:

"_Hail! Lady of the noble house of Philoremus Fabius. Be welcome to this dwelling, the cradle of your race. Mine to-day as my forefathers' through bygone centuries, since your footstep crossed the threshold, we are stewards, and you are Queen!_"