Chapter XI

A huge Arab, mounted on a very little ass, ambling along the stony roads while a woman trudges in the dust behind him, is so common a spectacle in Palestine as to occasion no remark. Were the positions reversed,--did the woman ride the donkey and the man tramp after, then by so unprecedented a breach of etiquette, popular comment would naturally be provoked.

After the fashion indicated above, Ummshni, conjuring the little beast from some source unknown, has conveyed her man to Fadl Anga's appointed meeting-place, a mile west of Shechem, where the road of the Wady Azzun, switchbacking down to Jaffa--or more properly Gilgal--turns southward, running down a steep-sided defile among the hills. There, where the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry stands by the roadside, she has left him, taking with her a cherished asset he has carried hidden about him, in the shape of a pair of insulated wire-cutters. Her parting words still sound in his ears:

"Thou art the Head of our House, my cousin. Bless me before I go! ..."

Now John tingles with a scalding sense of her worth, and his own unworthiness, as he remembers how he put his heavy hand on the small veiled head, and muttered some incoherent words. Then she turned, and went from him so quietly that he has barely realised the risk that she is taking. Now that she has gone, it comes sharply home to him, and salt stinging moisture gathers under his eyelids, and a lump is in his throat.

The little donkey, hobbled by Ummshni before she went, to prevent its straying, grazes contentedly by the roadside, where rich green weeds, and grass and brake, and clumps of late-flowering asphodel betray the presence of moisture in the soil....

The sides of the hill-pass opening here, are chocolate-brown where the soil shows bare, as those of any cliff at home in Devon or Somerset, and trickling with little streams, thick-fringed with maidenhair.... Snapdragons of many hues, cyclamen white, and violet, and pink, spring in the crannies of the rocks, with the purple amaryllis, and a smell suggesting violets is sweet upon the air.

It is close upon the hour of sunset now. There is a great view here, from the top of the stiff up-gradient that climbs up from Shechem to plunge in a long series of downward curves, westward towards Jaffa, until, Gilgal reached--it turns at an acute southward angle and leaps the Cana Road. Nobody comes, though Turkish cavalry patrol the wadys at irregular intervals, and there are outposts with machine guns among the hills. Save for the thudding of those restless guns south-west and east, it would be even sweet and peaceful. For the air is divinely spiced with that rare perfume that is so like the smell of violets; the orange-winged Syrian blackbird pipes out his good-night song; and every thorn, or wild-olive, or mulberry-tree of all that mantle the sides of the defile, seems to accommodate its pair of bulbuls, warbling and jug-jugging in the very rage of ecstasy--sometimes breaking off to mew--after the provoking habit of nightingales. And John Hazel lights another strong Arab cigarette, swings himself to the driver's seat of the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry, and for a brief space, listens and smokes, and thinks....

He recalls the great experiences of War, forgetting War's miseries and discomforts. The social joys of the camp-fire, the long, confidential talks of the bivouac, the short, hard hand-grip pals exchange before going into action; the parting kiss that a soldier may set on the lips of a dead or dying friend. Men have seen men's souls face to face in the midst of hideous slaughter--in the pauses between horrible explosions--and until the heavens are rolled up as a scroll, and the sea is dry from shore to shore--and the Earth stops spinning between her poles, they will not forget these things.... Perhaps not even then....

And then John's thought goes back, as it has not done for long, to the thriving Firm of Dannahill, Lee-Levyson and Hazel, Insurance Brokers, of London City; and Beryl Lee-Levyson, John's former love--Muriel, Beryl's sister, and his brother Maurice--now piloting a Handley-Page bombing 'plane on the Western Front, Old Mendel, and Miss Birdie Bright, pass in imagined rotation over a stage, oddly backed by a composite drop, in part representing the Underwriting Room at Lloyds, the Office in Cornhill, and John's bedroom at Campden Hill....

Dannahill, still haggard from the shock of his grandson's death, (the wire had only come from the War Office that September morning) and Lee-Levyson and Copples the Senior Clerk, are shaking the Junior Partner's hands, as he comes out of his stuffy little office with his working coat in a brown paper parcel, containing a lot of odds and ends, some pipes, and Beryl's tinted photograph in a flamboyant silver frame. John is in a full suit of pink-striped silk pyjamas, and there too is Mrs. Hazel, John's mother, handsome in her pale blue _crêpe_ dressing-gown, with her still abundant auburn hair in a thick plait down her back. To her John hears himself saying in his acquired British accent:

"Anyway, if the Pater was a Syrian Jew, your governor was British enough, anyway! Symes sounds like a good old English name."

And the answer comes like a douche of cold water on his secret hopes--like a crunch on the pill deftly concealed in the middle of a spoonful of jelly:

"That was why your grandmother adopted it. After your grandfather's death, of course. His name was Simonoff.... A Russian Jew from Moscow...."

The chill of the cold water, the bitterness of the pill. How John Hazel has shivered at the one and grimaced over the other. Some shock! to learn that between the Jew of Palestine and the Jew of Greater Russia he has been wrought all Jewish. That not one globule of British blood mingles with the strong Semitic tide that gallops through his veins....

And now--though his big body sits still and smokes, his spirit is abroad to-night on these hills of Samaria. He snuffs the sweet wild November breeze with wide, distended nostrils, and shows his big white teeth in a silent laugh.

This Hither Asian land of Syria.... How he has despised and belittled it--this Garden of Miracles from whose teeming soil--burrowed by a nation of cave-dwellers and idol-worshippers, and tracked by the footprints of nomadic shepherds--prophets, sages, seers, philosophers, poets, musicians, artists, architects--leaped into birth at the Divine Bidding, while as yet the world was a jungle of ferocious human beasts.... This Palestine, no bigger than the County of Middlesex, in Religion, History, Science, Law, hygiene and moral teaching--has she not ever led the way and pointed to the zenith? What if her star, after long eclipse, should now be in the ascendant? Strange, strange, if after all the centuries of war, exile and oppression, Christian hands are to give back Palestine to the Jews! ...

He hugs himself, muttering:

"A hell of a country to get hold of you, and no mistake about it. But she is IT, this little old Palestine! She's got it in her to whack the globe--given the men and the money. I'm one of her men.... I've got some money. And it's going to be spent with lots more to set her going again. Golden blood pumped into her veins to set her heart beating--and make her buried splendours, her Temple with its golden dome, her matchless Holy City--her towns, and gardens, and hippodromes and palaces jump out of her yellow soil as quick as mustard-and-cress." He chuckles. "I'm a bit potty! ... 'Fey,' a Scotchman'd call it.... I feel as if all my Big Old Men--those dead old Hazaëls--right away down from the Kings of Damascus who laid siege to Ahab, King of Israel, and afterwards joined up with him against the Assyrians!--were alive and swarming over these hills of Samaria to-night...."

Perhaps the man, in his normal state, is oblivious of the postscript he supplied to the story of the inscription on the tablet. He may not know the blood of the Hazaëls is tinctured with the Israelite blood of Istâr the Princess, daughter of Jezebel of Tyre and Ahab of Samaria. Half a mile north of where he sits on the lorry,--parallel with the road to Gilgal, runs the great seaward-going road of the Wady-es Sha'ir, forking off at Anebta, past the Watch Tower hill of Omri, to Carmel and the sea.

From her nest of purple cushions in the high balcony-window of her ivory palace at Samaria, Jezebel, Ahab's Queen, daughter of King Ethbal of Sidon, looked--when her people's god, red as though dyed with the blood of the murdered prophets--was blotted out of sight by the rising curve of the earth.... Famine withered the rainless land, and beasts and men were perishing, as the Prophet of the Most High lay prostrate on the summit of Mount Carmel, pressing his face against the sod....

"_And while he turned himself this way and that,_" as a worm might writhe in anguish, the little cloud rose out of the sea. And the troubler of Israel rose up and sent word to King Ahab:

"_Prepare thy chariot and go down, lest the rain prevent thee!_"

Over this broad Road of the Wady-es Sha'ir, the fleet horses of Ahab's jewelled ivory chariot thundered, as "the heavens grew dark with clouds and wind, and there fell a great rain." And the King raced down to Samaria before the pelting storm, while the lean prophet, the swift Hound of God, scoured fleetly on before....

And Elias, being threatened with the vengeance of Jezebel, because he had killed the priests of her golden temple of Baal Zebub, fled south to Beersheba, and being miraculously fed, journeyed to Horeb, and lived in a cave. And after the Vision on the Mountain, returned by the Divine Command through the desert to Damascus, and anointed Hazaël of Damascus to be King of Syria....

Now John, lineal descendant of the race,--inhales the rank smoke of his Arab cigarette, and pursues his train of thought. Sitting on the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry, with knees drawn up to his long chin, and his long arms hugging them; with his Arab head-cloth pushed awry, and prickly burrs tangled in his coarse black hair, that is powdered with limestone-dust like his mahogany skin--the huge man with the great nose and the fierce black eyes that blaze under their bushy, knotted eyebrows, is an awesome spectacle--having much more in common with the lean and dusty Prophet than with his own remote ancestor the Baal-worshipping King.

He is engaged, as he sits there, in a death-struggle with the strongest and most ruthlessly selfish of all human passions. That smell of violets brings Katharine back--dwarfing as great artists will--every other player on the stage of his mental theatre. He sees her on a certain February day, standing in the chintz-hung drawing-room looking on the terrace at Kerr's Arbour, with a bunch of greenhouse violets in her beloved hand....

"I was going to take him these.... Perhaps you would like to?" she had said, giving the violets to John.... Then he followed her up the little aisle of the chapel, and stood with her beside the General's long coffin, looking down at the grand old face, and the rigid clasped hands....

"Father, dear, this is a friend of ours, whom you have wished to see!"

Again he hears her, speaking as though the old man were not dead but in a quiet slumber. She touched his hand in showing him how to place the violets under the rigid fingers, that held a Crucifix and had a Rosary threaded between....

On that first day she seemed to John, older, graver, sterner than afterwards, when Edward Yaill came upon the scene. He remembers how their eyes met, and she kindled into beauty. He recalls his brief, stern interview with Yaill, and that parting "Carry on...."

He conjures up the Funeral, and Katharine veiled and draped in black--offering him in a silver shell some earth from Palestine to sprinkle on the coffin. He recalls her summoning telegram, and the finding of the khaki kit of the "Missing British Officer" hidden away in the fox-earth in the wood. He glows again with joy as she comes to greet him at the Hospital, beautiful, strong and womanly, in her uniform of cool white drill. He welcomes her to the cradle-house of her Roman race, the House of Philoremus Fabius, on the ancient Street of the Four Winds, now lost in the Rue el Farad. Again he waits for her outside the Chapel of the Shrine, again they sit on the granite seat under the moss-cup oak. And once more he thrills exquisitely at the velvet touch of her warm, sweet mouth upon his clumsy hand.

It was a cruel thing to do, but she had no thought of coquetry. He knows that the kiss was a belated tribute from a woman of her race, to the last male Hazaël but one. That she looked past the recipient of the kiss to the huge, swart, bearded ancestor, who first held the onyx ring in trust, guarded the Title Deeds, and preserved the house at Alexandria--and the Tower of Kir Saba in Palestine, to be handed down, a sacred charge--by his children's children, and their children, down to the present day.... A tribute of gratitude and respect, that kiss, and nothing further. But it was set by a woman's mouth upon the hand of a man....

He knows that there is no hope for him, this ungainly worshipper of Katharine, even though her lover should never be free to marry her--though the tie that binds Yaill to Lucy Burtonshaw should endure for both their lives. He, John, has hated Yaill with the virile strength of jealousy. He has conquered that baseness in himself.... He hates the man no more.... He has risked and borne much to carry Yaill her letter. He has been even warmed and heartened by his enemy's gratitude:

"Tell him that I have received the packet, and that as earnestly as man ever thanked man, I thank him for what he has done! ..."

But even with Yaill's message fresh in mind, John is not cured of hoping. He hopes--and sets his huge foot upon the neck of his hope--while yearning over it as a man may yearn over his first-born. For this that has come to him is the knowledge of true Love, and even as Jacob in old days wrestled with the Angel,--John Hazel strives with his masterful, bright-winged passion--not trying to detain Love, but rather to compel Love, by force of thews, to go....

The blood-red sunset glorifies the West, fills the defile from cliff to cliff, and now smoulders out in amber and jade-green, peacock blue and rose-madder. Grey twilight comes--and the birds are still, as a giant owl flies over, and sinks, as a shadow sinks, amongst the shadowy trees.... No one draws near. The cavalry patrols of the Turk are oddly infrequent on this particular Shechem end of the Jaffa-going road....

John gets up and shakes his dreams and hopes and memories from him, as a swimmer emerging from a sluggish stream might shake off clinging weeds. His hopes are scarcely weeds. Rather are they trails of blossoming lotus or water-lily. But lilies or weeds, they hamper. And there is work to do.

He stretches himself, shakes his giant frame, pitches away the stump of his cigarette--gets down from the driver's seat, climbs into the body of the lorry and proceeds to inspect the boxes that form its load. They are heavy wooden cases roughly dovetailed together, painted a dirty stone-blue and grossly daubed with the Crescent and Star in bright vermilion paint. They are branded with the initials of the Turkish A.S.C., carry the stamp of the shell-factory at Makrikeui, and belong to the 2nd battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment, (Headquarters Salonika) of the IIIrd Ottoman Ordu.

John thinks it would be as well to have a look inside a few of those blue boxes, with the assistance of a spanner, and his pocket electric torch. He looks about for a spanner and presently finds one in the tool-box aft of the driver's seat. It is a large spanner of good steel, and--in the hands of John Hazel--makes a most efficient substitute for the key of the Turkish lock. The nails draw, the wood splinters, the lid is lifted.... The box--instead of being full of packets of Mauser cartridges, proves to be packed with metal spheres the size of biggish cricket-balls, painted a bilious brown....

"Bombs ..." With a thrill of pleasurable recognition John picks up one of the cricket-balls and weighs it in his hand. "Our make too. Some find!" he thinks. "Now, where did they get these? ... Snapped up a string of mules at the tail of an ammunition-convoy, or found 'em in some abandoned dump on the Peninsula, when the Expeditionary Army evacuated Gallipoli! ... Anyhow they come in handy. Damned handy! ... Let's look in another box...."

He breaks open four more, with the assistance of the spanner. Two out of the lot hold bombs, British-made, pitched in higgledy-piggledy, with the recklessness that may be born of Mohammedan fatalism. The others prove to contain paper clips of cartridges, marked for use in the 1890 pattern Mauser magazine-rifle of 7.56. mm.

Two boxes of British bombs, at this especial juncture, come to John Hazel as manna from the skies. If there is a weapon the ex-insurance broker of Cornhill prefers before all known devices for killing other men--that weapon is the bomb, of the cricket-ball, hand-pitched variety, that makes of one long-armed man, the equal of many men armed....

At Rondes Poix in the March of 1915, a party of Fenchurch Street Fusiliers being hemmed in at an advanced post by the enemy, Private Hazel and Private Spurge--a rival star-artist in the line of effective bomb-throwing--kept the Hun at bay for eleven hours by pitching cricket-ball bombs.

Again, in the April of that year, east of "that mad place called Ypres," John, possibly urged to derring-do by the urgent spirit of Sergeant Harris, and armed with a bag of bombs of this variety--crawled through a hole in the enemy's barbed-wire, and single-handed--argued in such wise with the Germans established at a certain machine-gun position, that the Fenchurch Streets--charging over the front-line parapet at the critical moment, were able to clear three hundred yards of the trench in question, and held the same triumphantly for the rest of the fighting day. The D.C.M., that silver disc bearing his Sovereign's bust, which he calls his "bit of tin" and is secretly vain of,--was subsequently bestowed on Private Hazel when a patient at the Auxiliary Military War Hospital, of Colthill, Middlesex, in recognition of this feat.

"Given they're not duds," he murmurs now, lovingly toying with the spring-pin of one of the cricket-balls, "I could hold up a half-battalion of Turks with these, until the cows come home! ..."

He looks up to his left and right, roughly estimating the height of the defile, the perpendicular walls of which are somewhat lower on his left than on his right-hand--and calculates the width of the road here at under twenty feet. More like eighteen-and-a-half. Well, given that to-night's attempt at the rescue of Father Julian Forbis does not prove a washout--here is the wherewithal to keep the road, in case of a pursuit....

Twilight creeps on. The crickets chirp, and noiseless as a shadow, the great owl slips from the thicket and takes his soundless flight. The little owls hunt in the grass for frogs, lizards and beetles, and the great bats come out of the crannies in the rocks to gorge themselves with fruit.

For a while the guns have ceased to argue, and the night is still and breathless; not the clear violet night of Syria, radiant with dazzling silver light of moon and starshine, but a moonless night of semi-obscurity, and diffuse and formless shadows, with menacing rumbles of thunder in the east, where sheet-lightning flickers now and then. Venus suspends her sapphire lamp above the hills of Judæa, and the Pleiades shine almost directly overhead. Bright-armed Orion rises in splendour over the ramparts of blue-black cumuli that brood in the east over the Mountains of Gilead. Low down, through a jagged cleft in these, twinkles the star Y Crucis, that forms the summit of the Southern Cross....

No trot of hoofs on the stony road draws nearer from the eastward; no clink of spur on scabbard, or bit against chain-bridle, tells of the approach of a cavalry patrol along the Jaffa Road. There are yet three hours and more to wait for the sound of hoof-beats coming from Shechem, that may signify the escape of the prisoner from the Bey's wire cage.

Does all go well? Has Esther Hazaël carried out her stratagem? She has shown John how--when the Dark comes down--she will feed the prisoner. By a device almost absurd in its direct simplicity--used, in this Eastern land, millions of times ere now. Women are cunning in such tricks, and full of subtle resources.... Well for men that it is so!--especially in time of War....

Ummshni is at her business now. John feels certain. He nods to himself, solemnly, and sitting on the lid of one of the broken bomb-boxes, folds his great arms, narrows his eyelids and sends his Thought ranging abroad in search of her.

Perhaps he sleeps and dreams, sitting there. Who knows whether he does or does not. But after some moments of silent concentration, he sees his messenger go forth. A tiny thing--human in form, light as a puff of thistledown, no bigger than a locust--it leaps down to the big Jew's knees, and thence to the bottom of the lorry; drops from it into the dust and scours down the road. Swift as the wind, it passes over the highway--reaches the west gate of Shechem and slips through a crevice in the ponderous iron-studded timbers, lodging between the sandalled feet of the Mustahfiz infantry guard.... Now it goes by the Khan of the Fox, darts through the square where the archway is (under which the Orderly Staff Sergeant Major of the German Intelligence Department waited for the dropping of the despatch-bag from the Two Faced Nightingale), traverses the town, thronged to-night with variously attired strangers of many nations, and--lightly as a withered leaf, and inconspicuous as a dust-swirl--traverses the main thoroughfare of the ancient town.

Shechem is packed to the walls to-night with the exiles from Jerusalem. And in addition to these, with strangers in foreign clothing, diverse in type, sinister-faced and stern-eyed, speaking unknown languages.... There are many Turkish officers, young and old, in uniform and out of it, and German officers of many ranks and decorations, accompanied by women, painted and overdressed.

So many strange feet, bringing strange dust from strange lands. Yet the little thing no bigger than a leaf finds a way between them all. Now it spins out at the east gate and rolls down the rutted road towards the Wired Enclosure.... Here storm-lamps hang outside the guard-tent and on either side of the entrance. The officer's tent is lighted within, but unlike the tent of the _postas_, it is furnished with a door-flap. From inside comes the sound of laughter, the clinking of glasses, and unmistakably, the rattle of shaken dice. Near the gate, in conversation with the _bash-châwush_ of the guard, stands a tall, thin, elderly Bedawi, known to the reader as the Shaykh Gôhar.

"Nay, nay! Do not trouble the _Yuzbashi_." He waves a hand in the direction of the tent whence comes the convivial clink. "The affairs of the humble must wait upon the leisure of the great ones. Yet if thy dignity were not lowered by the mention of a hundred piastres--one _lira_ Osmanli--" Gôhar carelessly displays the coin.

"O my friend! O my soul!" hiccups the _bash-châwush_, who at this early stage of the evening is only amiably drunk. "I will do thine errand with gladness for friendship's sake only!" Having duly received and pouched the coin, he adds: "Now tell thy business to me."

"Briefly, it was but to ask thy _Yuzbashi_ to accord me the watchword, the Emir Fadl Anga having cause to pass the gates to-night. In thine ear, O friend! he hath a pigeon to fly at dawn for Mecca, and he is minded to loose the bird from the Mount."

The _bash-châwush_ nods and disappears into the tent, whence, sung in a high nasal tenor voice to lute-accompaniment, issue the unblushing erotics of an Arab love-song. The Shaykh turns to one of the _postas_ lounging near the guard-tent, and smilingly offers him a handful of thick Arab cigarettes.

"Dost thou use the Consoler? ... Take, then!"

"May Allah make it 'take' upon thee, O generous hearted one! ..."

As the handful changes owners, and other soldiers look out of the corners of their eyes and sidle nearer, the Shaykh plunges both hands into deep pockets beneath his mantle, and draws them forth generously filled with the thick, strong cigarettes.

Upon the return of the _bash-châwush_ with the information--willingly placed at the service of the Emir--that the pass-word of the night is "Baal Zebub," he, too, accepts a handful of the cigarettes that are so heavily drugged with opium. And then the Shaykh Gôhar, with ceremonious farewells, stalks away from the Wired Enclosure, knowing his work begun.