Chapter XIII

Drifting down a sluggish stream of drowsy after-dinner reflections; brooding between a bellyful of varied meats, and a brain addled with wine;--lost to the guiding, dominant idea of the Big Old Men, ranged one behind the other like a sculptured procession of Assyrian planet-gods, reaching back to the Beginning of Actualities whence looked down the Biggest Old Man of All--John Hazel had been recalled as suddenly as though a 5.9 shell had exploded in the Club courtyard, and starting to his feet, upset the chair he had sat on; its fall--with the crash of a breaking glass--making the men at other tables look round.

"_In peril such as this, and you sit here drowsing!_"

It rang in Hazel's singing ears--the voice of the worshipped woman. And in a moment the gorged Sybarite was gone. With a curt apology he resumed the chair the Club attendant had picked up and now replaced for him. A cool, resourceful man, instinct with force and energy, sat looking at Essenian across the rose-filled bowl.

"If things are as desperate as you've said, why not have told me? Let's thrash this out, Essenian Pasha, please!"

"With pleasure, but I must first know how Miss Forbis discovered that her brother was living. For that she knows, in spite of her very remarkable reticence,--was plain to me to-day. Was it you who broke that news to her? ..."

"No ... She told me! ..."

"When? ..."

"This afternoon! ..."

"That is curious! ..." The tone was incredulous.... "Through whom did she learn the fact?"

"Couldn't enlighten you! ..."

"How long has she known? ..."

"I'm unable to say! ..."

Scrutinising his guest between narrowed eyelids, sifting the unwilling replies with inquisitorial care, it was patent to Essenian that John knew, but would not tell. He tried again with no better result.

"Has Miss Forbis by any unlucky chance, embarked--any other person--in an effort to rescue her brother from the prison at Shechem?"

This time John flatly lied:

"No! ..."

"That is well. I should certainly withdraw from the attempt if its success were to be so handicapped."

"Handicap or none, whether you withdraw or not, I'm entered for the running!"

"I did not say that I withdrew. On the contrary!"

"Good egg you! Now--"

John poured out a brimming glass of iced mineral water, emptied it, and finished as he set down the empty glass:

"How far is Shechem from Ismailia?"

"Following the old Pilgrim's route overland--a distance of about 232 English miles. As the crow flies--or as I shall fly"--Essenian smiled--"about 195 miles...."

"Thanks. When can we start? ..."

"For Shechem? ..."

"For Shechem! ..."

"That depends!" said Essenian with his titter, as John glanced at his wrist-watch, and then at the elaborate clock,--mounted in captured German gun-metal--that occupied a bracket over the door of the dining-room: "That depends on your readiness to accept my conditions! ..."

"'Conditions'? You wait till now to talk of conditions!"

The black eyes were full on Essenian, and they had an angry stare.

"I have purposely waited until now! ..."

The cool, sinister strength that lay behind Essenian's veneer of finical affectation, came home to Hazel as it had not previously. This was the Essenian of his French observer-mechanic, the man who had flown with a broken wing-stay, and a leaking petrol-tank, through the hellish Austro-German fire in the battle of the Vulkan Pass.

"To push an advantage, consolidate a position and advance to a point beyond is the science of warfare, and the secret of social influence. Shall we discuss these conditions in my private room upstairs--or would you prefer to stay here?"

John, looking round, saw no occupied table in their near vicinity, and grunted surlily:

"Here's good enough for me! ..."

"My own experience supports your view.... Here is quite good enough.... For the arrangement of the details of a plot, for the carrying-out of a delicate and dangerous discussion, the ideal place is--under the electric lights in the middle of a drawing-room, in the stalls at a theatre--in the dining-room of a Club or restaurant, or in the Throne Room at a Royal Levée...."

"Then let us get to biz. You've sprung a surprise on me--at the last minute...." John added, fixing his heavy black stare on the gleaming green eyes of the tiger-snake ambushed behind the roses; "Still,--trot out your conditions! ... How much do you want in cash? ..."

"You are rude, Mr. Hazel.... But the young are always insolent!" Essenian gave the little bleating laugh. "I want no money of you.... Rather I am what the British merchant would call a warmer man than you are, in spite of the fact that you inherited from your grandfather more than three hundred and eighty thousand pounds...."

"Upon conditions, Pasha! upon conditions!" jeered John, grinning over the table; and roused to sudden venomous wrath, Essenian hissed at him--leaning over the crimson flower-hedge until his fierce breath beat on the other's face:

"Do I not know you have accepted those conditions? ... Are you not living--in some degree--in your grandfather's house as a Jew? ... Have you not the letter 'J' instead of 'Nil' on your identification-disc? ... Do you not wear upon a chain about your neck an enamelled Shield of David? If you die, or are killed--will they not bury you, if anything be left of you to bury--under the Mogen David as they bury a Jew?"

The sudden transformation of the languid, smiling oval into a face of bitter fury evoked a sudden flash of intuition that made Hazel say:

"You seem to know something about it.... Do you happen to be Hebrew yourself by any chance? ..."

"You are perspicuous." The face was bland again. "I am in fact descended from an ancient Israelitish family of Elephantis. Not all the sons of the Tribes followed the Law-giver out of Egypt. Many had grown to love the land and--its many gods were good to them.... So they stayed and prayed to the many, instead of following the One...."

"I know. Lots of shirkers stopped behind to make bricks for Pharaoh, and to-day their descendants are laying sleepers, or digging trenches, or piling shells for the good old British Government."

"You have perfectly mastered the shibboleth of loyalty, Mr. Hazel...." The dark lips curled contemptuously. "I congratulate you! But it is hardly necessary to maintain the pose. There is no third person present, and I speak as an Asiatic to an Asiatic, as a Hebrew to a Jew.... For many years I have served the British Government in our East. These," he touched the rows of ribbons on his tunic, "testify to the truth of what I say. While Britain's aims and my own interests are synonymous, I shall continue to serve her...."

"I should jolly well hope so! It's a cleaner job than plotting for the Kaiser's dirty pay."

"And a more profitable--for Germany is finished. A burst bladder, like her sister State with whom she hoped to dominate the world. The sun of Russia sets in a morass of blood and mire and filth unutterable.... Britain and France have reached their apogee of greatness, and must now inevitably decline. The Ottoman Empire fights to her fall. From the Farther East the Power will arise that will sweep armies like straws before it--and entangle the necks of the Northern nations within its weighted throwing-net! But of this another time. Let us come to my conditions.... Do not interrupt me until I have said my say! ... I am no Spiritualist--I laugh at those who bear the name as babes, who try to peep behind the curtain when the showman is admitted to the courtyard of the _harîm_ to amuse them with his Shadow Play of the puppet Kharaguz. But in Spiritism I believe.... Is it not the corner-stone of all revealed religions, that deep conviction of the existence of a World Unseen! ... I have myself made efforts--and not all unrewarded! to lift the border of the Veil that hides the Future--to pierce through the thick mists that screen the terrors of the Abyss Beyond...."

Artificial as were ordinarily the speaker's tone and bearing, he spoke now, and looked like a man stirred to the very depths. His hands vibrated, Hazel thought, like the limbs of a weaving spider. He breathed quickly,--and a hundred lines, furrows and crowsfeet previously unnoticed, appeared crossing, re-crossing and puckering the dark skin of his agitated face....

"Mediums and clairvoyants in the European capitals--have I not seen and heard them? With what result? This, that a few threads of truth, undeniable and genuine,--were woven into a tissue of lies! Seers and Descryers here in our East--with them I have fared better. They only practise for the Initiate--they scorn to prostitute their mystic gifts to the uses of the common herd. But by the greatest--one day you shall meet them!--never have I known done what you did to-day in my presence.... I mean--when you so marvellously supplied the context of that cuneiform letter, filling up with a bridge of Truth the gap between the Known and the Unknown.... How strange that Eli Hazaël never dreamed of your astonishing faculty! How wonderful, the combination in your person of the temperament of the clairvoyant with the physique of the athlete! ..."

"Why keep on calling me a medium and clairvoyant when I'm nothing of the sort! When I tell you I've never dabbled in that sort of thing. And what is it--about the letter? Do you mean your translation of the wedge-writing on the tile in the cabinet, that you reeled off this afternoon? ..."

The Egyptian's eyes stabbed at John's face out of deep caves that had suddenly hollowed about them. But he could not doubt the look and tone of absolute sincerity. He blinked and muttered:

"You do not deceive.... You are speaking truth! ... By the Fire that burns without Heat or Smoke!--you are an extraordinary young man! ..."

The room had gradually emptied about them: they sat in a desert of unoccupied tables, from whose cloths soft-footed Levantine and native waiters were clearing wineglasses, coffee-cups and empty liqueur-bottles,--decanters, fruit-dishes, plates, and ash-trays full of burned matches, and the stubs of cigars and cigarettes....

"You have not sought the terrible Gift--yet it has come to you. You are not of the Baal Obh, who evoke the voices of departed spirits from corpses and mummies--or of the Yideoni, who utter oracles and prophesy, by putting into their mouths a dead man's bone. You are a Teraph--a living Teraph--not the head of a first-born of a first-born--prepared with salt and spices, having under the tongue a gold plate on which magical formulas have been engraven.... And it is she, the handsome Englishwoman, who controls the Man and the Power! Who says to your mind, as the Chinese fisherman says to the tamed cormorant: 'Dive!' ... And at the command you vanish into the Unguessable!--you return, carrying in your pouch a fish from the Sea on which swims the Serpent that bears up the Throne...."

He drew towards him an unused plate, reached with a shaking hand for the part-emptied port-bottle, poured a little into a glass, and dipping in a finger, rapidly traced in thick red wine upon the shining white porcelain a square, divided into nine smaller by horizontal and perpendicular lines....

"Dastûr. By your Permission, ye Blessed Ones!" John heard him mutter, as he scattered a drop or two of wine at each corner of the figure and filled in the squares with numerals.

"What are you up to, Essenian Pasha?" John leaned across interestedly. "Looks to me like hanky-panky of the Egyptian Hall kind."

"It is the Budûh of el Gazzali, a figure much used in our East. Only instead of letters I am using numerals. Tell me, my friend--for of course you are acquainted with it--what is the month, and the day, and the hour, of the English lady's birth? ..."

"Damned if I know! ..."

"How can I believe you do not know, when she is so intimate a friend that she wears a facsimile of the onyx gem that is on your hand now? ..."

"Why she has it I couldn't say.... It's an heirloom in her family.... Now cough up your conditions, for I've waited long enough. What do you want me to do in return for taking me somewhere near the Prison Camp at Shechem, dropping me and picking me up--at a given hour--with another man in tow? ..."

"Consent to be again--for me--as you were in the Rue el Farad." The Egyptian obliterated the figure on the plate with a sweep of three fingers, pushed the plate contemptuously from him and sat erect in his chair. "Use your power--pass behind the Veil as you did this afternoon. Here as you sit at this table--it can easily be managed. For one half-hour!--" He pointed to the round-faced gun-metal timepiece solemnly ticking over the dining-room door. "A quarter even--calculated by that clock...."

"But haven't I already told you that's all tosh about my being clairvoyant? ... Can't--"

"_Muakkad_! Yes, you have told me, but I have eyes and ears.... Think, O man! ..." Both supple hands darted at John over the roses.... "Lord of the Daystar! cannot you understand? Would it be no help to the success of this expedition if I were able to send you in advance to the Camp at Shechem? A spy no sentry can arrest--no walls keep out, no bullet silence.... Who hears--sees all and remains invisible as the Afrit who flies by noonday, or the Angel who witnesses sin!"

"But you.... Where do you come in? What's your particular little stunt, Essenian Pasha?" The voice was heavily, oppressively surcharged with suspicion and doubt....

"I will tell you, you who suspect one who has served you and eaten and drunk with you. This is the year of Fate for me, this of the Hejira 1335--by the Kalendars of the Ifranjis 1917. This coming First of Safar--their November Sixteenth--is the beginning of the month of my dread.... All may yet be well with me--for who knows his danger is armed against it. And to have lived as I have is to have learned to value Life! Only a few years more to wait until great chemists have grown wiser.... A little, little span of years,--and Man, created but to perish, will have done away with Sickness and abolished Old Age,--and finally conquered the Enemy, Death.... Listen! ... I cannot be killed whilst flying--the Signs are all against it. But in a year that has its birth in el Dali and el Jadi--in a month that has the signs Akrab, and of the planets Mirih,--I am in danger from a man and a woman. Peril had threatened me the other day, when I dropped down in the midst of your lines--and its source had been removed and my breast was broadened.... But the Shadow still broods--the Finger points--and I must know who these Two are--the people who menace me!"

"What happened before you landed in our lines, Essenian Pasha?" John's interest had been prodded into life by the previous reference. "Three days ago--or about--when the Turkish Anti-Aircraft guns peppered you over--Hebron, wasn't it?--and Captain Usborn was killed.... You see, I've been wanting to ask you about that poor bloke. How did he get his gruel? ..."

"How?" The crouching khaki figure sat erect and the snaky eyes glittered angrily. "You saw the corpse.... You handled it. A shrapnel bullet killed him. And it was not at Hebron it happened,--but at Shechem."

"That's odd! ... You said Shechem at first.... And--it wasn't a shrapper! ..."

"What do you mean? ..." The voice was a snarl.

"Well, you see, I've got the bullet...."

"Where? ..."

"Here.... In my pocket.... And--the queer thing is--it's a revolver-bullet. Not a German--it isn't nickel-coated. Might have come from an English Webley of ordinary Army size."

"Show it me!"

John produced and handed over the little blunted cone of metal. The deadly cold of the dry finger-tips that touched his in taking it reminded him uncomfortably of the contact of a snake. He watched as they turned the bullet about, and then held out his hand for it.

"You want this back again?" the harsh voice asked.

"Rather, if you don't mind!--" John grinned. "It's my latest mascot." He took back the bullet, avoiding the other's touch, and dropped it in his pocket again.

"How did you get it?" Avidly the sharp glance had followed the action. "How can you be certain--that it is the bullet that killed the man?"

"I helped to lift--the body--out of the observer's cockpit, and mine was the head end...."

"_Th' h h!_ ..."

It was a sound like the hiss of a snake, betraying desperate interest.

"He--Usborn--had been shot through the head.... There was a scorch on the left temple. On the right--a clot of brains and blood. And--when I took hold of his head the bullet came away with that, and dropped into my hand. That's curious, now I come to think of it ..."

"What is curious?"

"That burn on his left temple...."

"Perhaps the bullet was incendiary. The Germans use such things."

"You forget! I've got it--and it isn't!"

"Ah!" The voice had recovered its suavity. "I am now able to account for its being a revolver-bullet. There were German officers on the defence-works at Shechem--that they have strengthened since the evacuation of Beersheba. And as they directed the gunners--we circling the while and reconnoitring--Usborn also photographing--they potted at us with their revolvers now and then...."

"How high were you flying?"

"A mile. I remember I looked at the indicator the moment before--it happened."

"You're kidding, Essenian Pasha.... You know lots better than I do that the range of a revolver taking a bullet of this calibre would be barely 1,550 yards...."

"_Wannebi!_" Foam stood on the writhing lips, and the veins on the back of the clenched hand that shook at John across the roses stood out against the bronze skin like knotted blue cords. "By the Prophet! though I am no son of his,--you, Hazel, tax my patience.... Usborn is dead, and buried two marches from Sheria. Let us discuss the cause of his death when we have time to lose. Aid me to gain enlightenment as only you can aid me!--and I help you to rescue this Christian priest--this tonsured Franghi dervish--from the barbed-wire cage at the Prison Camp of Shechem. Is it agreed? Speak, for suspense devours my liver!"

"All right." John glanced round at the clock over the door of the dining-room. "Nine-fifteen. I'm at your disposal till the long hand marks the half-past."

"Give me time to get something I shall need from my room, and swallow a draught of stimulant." Essenian beckoned one of the Levantine waiters, gave a rapid order in his fluent French and clapped his hands for his own man.

"_Saiyad_, I am here!" The Mohammedan body-servant who had waited, erect and immovable in the background appeared at his master's elbow. "What does my lord command?"

"Go to the room where I sleep, and bring me the velvet case from the table at my bedside."

"My lord has said," the man quavered, paling under his coffee-coloured skin, "that the low-born may not lay a hand upon the Eye of Radiance, but at peril of blasting as by fire from the skies!"

"Unless thou art commanded. Go, and return in safety!"

The servant vanished and Essenian commented, with his little contemptuous shrug:

"Even as the beasts are the rough and unlettered. What says Shaikh Saadi in _The Garden of Roses_? I would quote the original,--but it may be you do not know Arabic sufficiently well to appreciate the pun."

"Some play upon _wahish_ and _wahsh_, I suppose?" Hazel suggested, unexpectedly, as the servants stripped the table and fenced it round with screens. "What's your poison this time? Something extra special?" he inquired, as Essenian, with a shaking hand, drew his little case of medicines again from his pocket and half-filled a liqueur-glass from another of the vials it held.

"Something I seldom need to take, my King of Damascus. Unless after severe physical exertion,--or unusual mental strain. To your health! _Sirrak!_"

He swallowed the colourless, scentless contents of the liqueur-glass; drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders,--and under the surprised stare of John, became the man he had been....

"That is good! Now we get to what you call 'biz.' ..." He was smiling again suavely as he took a shabby green velvet case from the willing hands of his servant, banished the man beyond the enclosure of the screens with a look and a brief order couched in the vernacular,--and placed the case carefully on the cleared table-cloth before his guest.

"Fine stone! What is it?" John asked curiously.

"A beryl, merely. Do not touch it with your finger lest the contact dim its brightness."

Essenian had opened the case out flat upon the smooth white linen surface, disclosing a sphere of radiance, resting on the slender base of a little metal stand.

"Sit easily in your chair," he went on; "rest your hands on either side of it.... Ah, I had forgotten! Where are those _mallâhe_?" He took a pile of common native glass salt-cellars from a corner of the table, where a demure-faced Levantine waiter had just placed them. "Raise yourself on the chair a little. So! Now sit down again." John complied, finding the seat rather higher than it had been before. "Now I place one of the _mallâhe_ under each leg of the table...." The table kicked four times gently. "Now the Earth-currents cannot deviate astral--or Other Influences--and the table is not too low. You are comfortable?"

"Fairly cushy, thanks! ..."

Dentists had asked John a similar question.

"You are not nervous, Mr. Hazel? ..."

"Why on earth should I be? ..."

"There is no reason. Look at the beryl, and do not remove your eyes."

"All right, I'm on! ... Mind! From the word 'Go!' fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes.... Look steadily in the beryl. Now give the word!"

"Go! ..."

* * * * * * *

Resting a hand lightly on the table, on each side of the little cup-topped pedestal supporting the gleaming, spherical stone, John leaned forwards, steadily looking in it,--and the fold between his beetling eyebrows smoothed, and the spark of excitement that had kindled in his black eyes slowly smouldered out....

He had gone much further than he meant to have done, but there had been no help for it. Katharine's desperate need of help, the more desperate need of Julian, had thrust him over the edge of this pit the astute Egyptian had dug. But whether Essenian were a wizard or a charlatan--and at moments John was inclined to the wizard idea--he had struck a bargain with the man, and he meant to stick to it. So he held himself motionless, breathing easily, letting his mind range whither it would, as he stared in the depths of the stone....

He had thought it shallow, and it was unfathomably deep; clear, and it was opaquely green as sea-water.... And yet translucent as sea-water can be,--with smooth swirls and rounded folds below the jewelled surface--suggesting veils wrapped on veils, hiding some mystery....

He checked an inclination to yawn. He was feeling sleepy and stoggy. To keep awake he clung to the details of a certain September evening in 1914. News had come that day to the office of the death of young Dannahill,--and he, John, had returned by taxi to the family roof-tree, to break to his mother and his brother Maurice--Maurice who was now piloting a Handley-Page bomb-carrier 'plane on the Western Front--the news that he, J.B.H.,--the John of the "Tubs" Club in Werkeley Street, the John who was a votary of "Tango" and Progressive Bridge; who talked knowingly of Russian Ballet, Musical Comedy and smart Revues; the John whose cherished ambition was to make a pile big enough to buy Covent Garden and turn it into a Pleasure City to be run on American lines--was going to the Front.

He--the said J.B.H., had dined, and was comfortably full, after the lean weeks of bully beef and rubber-tough Palestine mutton.... And he had had a deuce of a lot of hock, of Heidseick Dry Monopole, and three, or was it five Benedictines with coffee, to take away the bitterness of that over-lauded Arab stuff....

Enough, perhaps, to make an ordinary man squiffy, but J.B. Hazel was no ordinary man.... In fact, going by what Essenian Pasha said,--was that Essenian Pasha talking? ... Or whose was that voice, mumbling, mumbling.... Not in Arabic, of which John had a smattering, or in Hebrew--he knew a little Hebrew--

In whatever language the voice was talking it was trying to push John over the brink of Things Normal, into the abyss of Things that are Not.

The launch of a battleship at Portsmouth Dockyard, witnessed years previously, now came vividly back to the protagonist; a picture thrown by the passing moment upon the screen of Memory. As Royalty with mallet and chisel had severed the cord supporting the bow--weights, whose fall knocked away the last dog-shores propping the Dreadnaught, her vast steel hull had shuddered visibly.... The thin wind keening through her glassless upper port holes and along her vast unfitted decks--gaily beflagged, and speckled with adventurous human pigmies--had sounded as though she wept.... Then a hand had touched an electric stud--a bottle in a ribboned net had crashed against the cliff-like bows of grey-painted steel, figured with Roman numerals--and the giant, vibrating from stem to stern, had begun to slide down the well-greased slipway,--towards the oily-looking expanse of chill green water, speckled with floating chips and orange-peel--smoking with little drab-white curls of clammy Solent fog....

And John Hazel was the ship ... the sinister, relentless will that thrust him down must be resisted.... He would not go! ... Had he not promised somebody called Katharine...

Who was Katharine? ... He was rushing to the dreadful brink.... Without the anticipated shock or jar, he glided smoothly over....

* * * * * * *

"The big Inglizi soldier is very drunk," a Levantine waiter--one of a silent group gathered near the dining-room door, whispered to a comrade behind the shoulder of Essenian's Mohammedan body-servant. "Hark, how he snores behind the screens!"

"_I_ do not think the _tomi_ drunk," whispered a countryman of the Levantine's, speaking the same bastard Turkish-Egyptian dialect. "For when the Effendim called for sealing-wax I peeped between the screens, slily, and the Inglizi seemed to me more like one drugged with the smoke of henbane sprinkled on the embers of a charcoal fire.... Thus did he sit, with open eyes, staring into that thing that shines so.... And--and the eyes were empty as the eyes of a dead man--it was not good to look in them!"

"O son of a Maghribi dog! What is that to thee?" Essenian's Mohammedan body-servant, who had overheard, hissed fiercely at the offender. "Since when hast thou found it good for thee or thy like to speak of the doings in this house! My lord and his guest confer together upon matters too high for thee. What has it to do with thee if they practise the _es Semiya?_ Do not persons of known probity work magic both White and Black--and cast nativities! Cudgel thy stupid wits and tell me how long since thou didst stop the clock there? ... 'An hour-and-a-half....' Watch now for the signal! ... When my lord's hand flickers between the screens, the weight is to be set a-wagging.... Have the _ôtomôbilyâ_ ready at the door--the Effendim travels with the Englishman this night to Ismailia--I, Yakub Ali, sitting in front with the _wûgâkgi_ who drives,--running on the solid earth made by Allah for the sons of Adam--instead of flying in the air like a Jinni of the Jann."

_Book the Fourth:_ THE PASSING