Chapter II: "Sirr!"

"You, Govan? ..." The priest glances back as he passes out of the sunshine and smells of the courtyard into the squalor and reek of the fetid passage, and the guard, kicking out a palm-wood stool from behind the heavy wooden-locked door, squats down upon it to crack and eat nuts....

"Ay, Sirr.... It is a' ower? ..."

The priest gravely bends his head, and the red light in Govan's eyes is momentarily quenched in bitter waters, as he goes on, gulping his agony down:

"I weel kent that was sae, or ye wad no' have left him. Did he no' speyk ane worr'd o' his mither, puir cratur!--or o' the lass he bude to marry--or o' me, his frien'--before he passed?"

"He spoke of one Friend--just at the last--even a better one than you were," says Father Forbis, gently touching the man's clenched hand. "He Who was scourged by Roman rods for poor Ullathorne and you, and all of us. Who died that we might live with Him for all eternity. Where Death cannot come--or cruelty--or suffering...."

"Ay, Sirr.... Ye are verra gude. We a' ken that o' ye!"

"And God is good," says the priest, "though Man may make men doubt it. Where are you going? ..."

"I am ganging back to Ullathorne. He maun be washed an' straikit an' berrit dacently. He maunna be pitched intil a hole like a doug!"

The priest shudders and his face contracts painfully.

"Very well. You shall have what little linen I can find, and all the help I can spare.... I must finish my rounds among the sick men now.... But, Govan! ..."

"Ay! ..."

"In the name of the old friendly days--" The thin but powerful white hand goes out and rests on the other's shoulder,--"when you and I--two long-legged lads--tickled trout in the Rushet and went rabbiting on the high moors--and made toffee over the stove in the harness-room at Kerr's Arbour--and for your own sake and the sakes of all here!--let me beg you not to provoke the evil man who has us in his power, by a rash display of the wrath and scorn that can do no good--to him!"

"Meanin' Ullathorne! I hear ye, Sirr." A strange smile shows on the grimly-set mouth, and the dour grey eyes sullenly shun the appeal of the blue ones. "Wi' your leave I will be ganging back to him the now.... He aye likit me to make queer sangs to sooth to him in the lang hoors when we lay in the trenches at Gallipoli. An' I hae a sang--the queerest ane o' a'--he wad fell like to hear! Guid day to ye, Sirr!"

He salutes, with the strange smile fixed upon his face, wheels about, and strides out of the fetid passage-way back into the sunshine, and the priest's heart sinks within him as he goes. Fresh furrows line his high, white brow, and anxiety deepens the caves about his eyes, as he says--speaking in Arabic to the bowed figure waiting humbly as a dog at the bottom of the broken staircase:

"He is mad with grief. God pity him! ... Follow, and give what aid thou canst, O Mother of Kindness!"

"If the Sidi would graciously--not call me by that name...."

The timid whisper barely reaches the ear it was meant for. They have moved farther down the murky, fetid passage-way, blocked at its entrance by the burly body of the nut-cracking Turkish guard. Father Forbis asks in surprise:

"Why not, when thou dost merit it? ..." And she answers:

"Sidi, in ugliness there is Protection! Could a woman--with two eyes and a whole face--instead of a half-one--dwell in this evil place one hour--and fare forth unharmed? ..." She makes as though to pull aside her veil with her dusky, slender fingers, but does not, and goes on in the same swift cautious undertone:

"True, there are British soldiers here, and nearly all that I have met were respecters of decent women! But when even the British soldiers are beaten and tortured--made the sport of devils in forms of men!--what can avail a woman better than to be hideous? Sidi,--if a Turk thrust forth a hand to pluck aside my veil, he--he!" she chuckles with a dry, clacking, mirthlessness, "see you--he retches and spits and curses--and does not do it again! _Shâf--Shâf!_ ... See, O see!"

She pulls the veil ruthlessly from the left side of her hidden face and shows to the priest's pitying eyes the ruin it has concealed. The scar of an old burn puckers the olive-tinted temple and cheek that have caved where the bone has been shattered--the blinded eye has vanished under ridged folds of skin. The bridge of the nose--enough left of it to show that the feature has been of the curved Semitic type--has been ruthlessly shattered;--the upper lip, torn partly away, has healed into shapelessness.... He does not see the other side of the face--and the woman evinces no desire to show it. But the little ear, daintily formed and shaded by hair that is yet jet-black and silken--shows that the Mother of Ugliness may once have been beautiful....

"A gunshot wound--and a terrible one." He says it to himself ponderingly.

"Nay, Sidi. The weapon was a revolver."

"What say you? ..."

The priest starts. He has spoken his thought in his English tongue, and this Syrian woman has answered in her own. And it is the Arabic of the cultured classes, not the peasants' primitive speech. He looks at her, and she draws her veil over the poor ruined face that may once have been lovely and goes on speaking in her cultured Arabic:

"Verily, Sidi! A revolver-shot, fired so near that the muzzle touched the skin. There was little time--" She gives her dry, rustling chuckle. "Little time, and he wished to make sure. He did not mean to miss! ..."

"A heartless crime, O woman! But thou dost forgive the doer?"

"He was not mine enemy!" she says with her mirthless laugh.

"Thy lover.... And jealous.... Forgive him all the more for that having loved--he hurt thee in his frenzy. This was" (of course, the woman is old) "done many years ago?"

"Ay, Sidi! When I was young." Her laugh is like the crackling of burning brush.... "Three years ago--no longer! And he who did the thing was my brother, not my lover," says the flat, toneless voice from within the folds of the veil. "And jealous truly--but for his sister's honour. He dared not slay mine enemy--a _Zabit_ of the _Osmanli_,--for that would have brought sword and fire and destruction upon our house. My lord understands? ..."

"Surely!"

"Therefore he gave me the wound thou seest--and thinking he had killed me,--he shot himself to escape death by torture and degradation. May God reward him a thousand-fold in the bosom of Abraham! ..."

The priest starts slightly:

"Thou art a Jewess?"

She is silent....

"Or perhaps a Samaritaness, like that woman of this city, who near two thousand years ago held drink to the parched lips of a Traveller beside Jacob's Well?"

"What I once was does not matter, but I am no Samaritaness!" There is something like resentment in the faded, toneless voice.

"Thou art Charity's very daughter to the sick ones in this prison. For one para that they give thee, they get ten piastres back. Dost thou think that I am blind?" Smiling, he shakes his finger at the Mother of Ugliness. She bows her head and answers, trembling like a reed in the wind:

"Nay, Sidi.... I have feared not! ... But for the love of Him Whom thou dost serve--seem to be blind a little longer! There is" (another spasm of trembling passes through her)--"There is no medicine for the wretched like helping Wretchedness! Here I am somewhat.... They do not shrink from me. Me whom the children in the streets hoot and run from!--at whose hidden face the women in the doorways spit and point their amulets, lest its influence blight before birth the unborn babe in the womb! And--were I driven from this place--" The faint voice is silent:

"Be it so, O Mother of Ugliness! Henceforth I am dumb as to thy virtues, and blind to the beauty of--thy deeds! Come--and I will give thee some linen for the swathing of that poor broken body that was a live man yesterday. What ails Thee, O woman? What dost thou fear? ..."

For the bowed figure crouches down, shaking as though with ague, a mere heap of sordid clothes on the filthy floor at his feet. A stifled voice falters out:

"Didst thou not hear the bugle? ... The gates--the gates are opening! ..."

They are, indeed, with a clanking of rusty iron bolts in stone groovings; with a turning out of the slovenly guard from the bare rooms flanking the high archway of the gate. With a stiff uprising of the lolling, nut-cracking _posta_ at the doorway--a susurrous of fierce whispers--a nameless commotion of hate and fear and loathing unutterable--amongst the packed bodies of the prisoners squatting, standing, or lying on the beaten mud pavement of the prison courtyard....

"The Bey!" The thick whisper reaches the priest and the woman, flung over the shoulder of the Turk as he stands at attention in the doorway: "Hamid Bey Mutasarrif comes, bringing a Mushir of the Almanis to inspect the prisoners...." He adds, under his hurried breath: "Allah and the Prophet of Allah be with me, Hasan Ali--and deliver me from smitings this unpropitious day!"

The guard have turned out. They raggedly present arms, and Hasan Ali, and such others of his fellows as are on duty in the courtyard--or posted at the portals of the mud Barrack-buildings--shoulder their Sniders or more modern Remingtons with the smartness engendered of fear; as a squat, sandy officer of Turkish gendarmerie--topped with the ugly khaki compromise between the turban and the helmet--patented by Envey Bey in 1912--and adorned as to the epaulettes with the two stars, and as to the cuffs with the four longitudinal gold lace bands and the three diagonal gold bars of a Turkish Lieutenant General--walks with a tall, brick-faced--very much decorated German Staff officer, in amongst the stenches of the crowded prison-yard.

Several persons succeed these. Two German Staff officers of inferior rank to the first, evidently his _aide_, and a secretary, come swaggering and chatting behind their Chief. A bearded Turkish Surgeon Major, fat and apoplectic, in black gauze spectacles, waddles after--with a nondescript Greek person, evidently of the interpreter-class. And a half-company of Turkish mounted gendarmerie troop after, rather stragglingly. The big bushy-bearded, red-fezzed men, uniformed in old-time dark blue Hussar tunics, with orange and black facings, braided pantaloons and long shiny thigh-boots, are all well-armed with Winchester repeating-rifles, and carry big German Service revolvers in holsters at their belts.

There is a dull shuffling sound, mingled with thuds and stifled swearing, as the Turkish guards, with assiduous kicks, and blows of the rifle-butt, assist sitting or lying War prisoners to assume a perpendicular position; and herd their charges into rank right and left, leaving a central avenue down which the Bey and the visitors may pass. Holding his breath in an agony of suspense as he peers into the crowded courtyard over the broad shoulder of the soldier blocking the passage, the priest scans the faces that he knows for signs of coming storm. As the squat, pale-eyed, bow-legged Asiatic, uniformed in greenish khaki-drill, wearing with clownish awkwardness the wide-thighed riding-breeches, the belts, pouches, and gauntlets of russet leather, and the polished riding boots with silver spurs, that set off the tall soldierly figures of the Germans, steps with them across the threshold of the prison courtyard it seems to every prisoner that the very sunshine fails of its warmth, and the faint hot breeze blows cold....

The Bey looks about him with a pale oblique slyness, his cigarette elaborately poised between his thick gloved fingers, and says, speaking in Turkish, (which language the priest, held for months in durance vile at Constantinople and at Smyrna, has relieved the tedium of prison-life by studying, and fairly understands):

"Good-morning, my children!"

"Good-morning, O Bey! ... May Allah favour your Excellency," lustily chorus the _postas_. But at the sound of the hated voice the faces of the prisoners have darkened threateningly, and the silence that falls on the tainted enclosure is heavy as a pall.

"Your Excellency wished to inspect the British men before seeing the British officers. These guests of our Empire"--Hamid's leering smile and the glitter in his pale flat eyes show the Bey's enjoyment of his own sarcasm, and the stiff faces of the German general and his _aides-de-camp_ and secretary exhibit a faint grin as he continues: "--these guests of our Empire are not at work to-day.... It is a holiday for them. They sit and chat and eat fruit," (his sharp glance has lighted on the scattered nutshells and orange-peel), "and smoke tobacco about the well in their courtyard. Your Excellency sees!--a capital well! ... Praise be to Allah for the blessing of pure water! Show the well to his Excellency.... Make room, O you there! ..."

A gap being made in the ragged ranks by _postas_ with the rifle-butt, the brick-faced German general stalks to the low parapet of the sky-reflecting eye of clear water, and pronounces it in Turkish of the Prussian brand, to be an exceedingly good well. The Bey, pretending to look at it too, enriches the water with his chewed cigarette-end; and spits in it slyly behind the back of the German general--to the chuckling delight of his immediate following--and the more controlled amusement of the German _aide-de-camp_ and secretary. As for the Greek interpreter and the fat be-goggled Surgeon Major, whose pharmacopæia is limited to Epsom Salts, pills of a rending nature, sulphur and iodine; who knows no disinfectant beyond chloride of lime, and never heard of sterilisation; whose surgical equipment is limited to a saw or two, some needles, a scalpel--all beyond words unclean!--lint made by Turkish ladies in secluded harems; sticking-plaster of the most adhesive kind, splints and First Aid bandages, these two parasites fairly wallow in enjoyment.

The dirty bit of buffoonery is such a success that Hamid Bey is about to repeat it, when a heavy blow upon some dense, non-reverberating surface arrests him in the act. He starts, and looks round for the offender. So do the German officers, though their hard eyes are expressionless, and their sunburned faces as blank as brown tiles. So do the parasites, so do the military police of the Bey's escort, and the _postas_ of the guard. Then as the dull, pounding blow is repeated on the sill of a second-floor window of the mud wing facing the entrance-gates of the courtyard, every eye rolls up to there expectantly and men hold their breath.

Crash! ... The weapon falls again.... It is the leg of a wooden stool, gripped in a fist that is strong and hairy ... and a face--unmistakably a madman's now!--appears at the window above. And in the hush that falls upon the parched courtyard, a crazy voice begins to sing--the leg of the stool coming down with a terrific crash at the end of every line:

"Say, ye Deid that hae gane before us!
(Mithers too, that conceived an' bore us,
Prayin' at hame an' greetin' for us--)
_What for the Hound wi' the jaws that tore us?--
What for the Turkish Hound?_

What for the beast that killed Tom Warren?
Nichols, Greenbough, Smith and Beeching,
Austin, Frenchard, Lark and Mansur--
_Hear ye no their voices answer--
'Hell to the Turkish Hound!'_"

The storm has broken with a vengeance. But even the white-faced priest, peering over the unsteady shoulder of the scared Turkish soldier, is carried away by the tingling excitement of the thing. Knowing that the gates of Terror are burst open--and that Vengeance shall issue forth....

Upon the wild, discoloured face with the glaring eyes, all other eyes are glued expectantly, as through the rictus of a dreadful laugh that is stamped upon it by Insanity, it sings to the wild droning tune--to the accompaniment of the wooden club upon the crumbling window-sill--its rhymeless hymn of hate. Faces nearly as ghastly as the singer's appear at and crowd the windows of the Barracks. And in time to the crazy chant; the crazy buildings, the mud-walled and paved courtyard begin to shake with the measured stamping of the prisoners naked feet:

"What for the Man that made of Arthur,
Thomas, Chauncey, Dee, O'Brien;
Brown and Somers, Davys, Brenon,
Custance, Trevor, Ricketts, Blanchard;
Foltringham, Bellayse and Bidmead;
Jones and Kirby, Evans, Foljambe--
_Meat for a Turkish Hound?_"

The place is thick with dust now; men's lungs are choked and oppressed by it.... They stamp--nothing can stop them stamping in time to the blows of the stool-leg on the window-sill of the room where lies the shapeless body of the comrade whom the _asâyisi_ have beaten into pulp.

"What for the deil that killed Ted Ullathorne--"

* * * * * * *

The wild song breaks off here, as the madman ducks below the level of the window-sill--and a cry of rage goes up from a hundred throats as he rises again, with the disfigured body in his arms, its head lolling helplessly beneath his own.... Then--a German Army revolver cracks--and with blood pouring over the face that is still laughing dreadfully, Govan, with his awful burden, reels back into the room....