Chapter XV

Near where Ismailia sits amidst her flowery gardens and tasselled avenues, on the edge of the scorching Desert of el Jifar, is an arid rectangle of sand east of the Canal, above Lake Timsah, used at the time I write of as an Air Base. Beyond Essenian, there were no native officers serving at the Air Base, though the indomitable Gyppos of the Labour Corps were employed at the aërodrome in building hangars, and cleaning the machines. Here rows of 'buses, both B.C.'s and D.H.6's--used for reconnaissance on the Canal, along the shores of the Red Sea as far as Aden--and over the Front in Palestine--were ranged in readiness in front of their great hangars, and observers in double-breasted tunics of drill or serge, with shorts and forage-caps--or yet more simply and economically attired in flannel shirts, canvas shoes and sun-helmets--stood on the summits of wooden towers, combing the blue with high-powered binoculars for enemy aircraft, in watches, relieved at three-hour intervals....

Not without reason had the Pasha boasted of the beauty of his villa, a white marble palace of Arabian-Turkish architecture, standing well back from an avenue of casuarinas, embowered in trailing roses, clothed with imperial Bougainvillea and shaded with trees, rising from the green velvet lawns that carpet what was a rectangle of barrenness wrested from the Desert twenty-three years ago.

Within the palace, suites of rooms--used in the Oriental style as reception saloons or bedrooms--according to the needs of the moment--were furnished in luxury rivalling the most modern of Parisian hotels. Soft-footed, low-voiced servants, chiefly Mohammedans, dressed in speckless white, and moving like automata, waited upon the master's guests and did the master's will.

Here Nasr Ullah, the Pasha's elderly body-servant and confidential messenger, ruled with rigidity, taking it out of his subordinates when the Presence dealt hardly with him. In two rooms of the vast warren of rooms opening on a rearward court, his "house" and a small brood of sturdy boys were accommodated. A little dark Moslemah the wife of Nasr Ullah, well dressed and laden with solid silver jewellery. Plain, with projecting rabbit teeth, and shallow forehead; meek, dutiful, pious and greatly given to prayer. A grave for the secrets of her husband Nasr, who was occasionally burdened with a conscience, whose smarting called for soothing feminine balms.

He stood on the threshold of his outer room, in the mild, pale hour when the stars were flowering through the last glow of the sunset, and his tall white turban was pushed awry, and his high forehead was ridged with care.

"'Tis a tyranny to force a man of kindly heart towards God's creatures, to scatter poisoned barley for the birds," he said uneasily. "And the carrier-dove is the Bird of Nun, that went forth from the Ark and brought back the olive-leaf, and a dove was the bird that the Son of Mariam--when as yet but a babe of tender years--playing with others who knew not His holiness--wrought by the riverside of clay."

"And the boys laughed and mocked Him, because He had made one bird instead of many. And He was not angry, but said, 'Do ye then as I do!' And then He clapped His hands and the dove flew away. Did it not so, O my father?" a thready voice piped.

"Since when," asked Nasr Ullah with affected sternness, "have the babes permission to lift up voice when their elders take counsel?" His lined face softened into tenderness as the child clinging to the mother's skirts hid his head under her veil. "Remember, O woman!" he went on, "I have said the white powder is a deadly poison. If a speck, such as would lie safely hidden under the finger-nail--find a way into the child's milk-bowl, I were without a son."

"It is all in there.... I boiled the barley until soft, and drained the water away carefully--emptied the paper-packet of powder in among the barley and stirred the barley well with a little stick. Then I burned both the paper and the stick, as thou didst order. Remains for thee to break the pot to sherds when--when thou hast finished. O my misfortune! What a task! My lord, Nasr Ullah, who hath the pride of princes!--to creep about under cover of night--from the courtyard of the Commandant-Sahib to the _haush_ where the _Ifrangis_ keep their swallow-boats, scattering poisoned barley for pigeons with messages--"

"Hûs! ..."

She had raised her usually quiet voice somewhat indiscreetly, and the toddler, youngest save one of Fatimeh's brood of four, scared by the unusualness of this demonstration, lifted up his own voice in a lusty howl.

"_Hus--sus!_ No one is vexed with thee, my joy!--nobody is angry! Run out and play with the little grey goat awhile before thy sleep-time comes!" And as the boy with a shrill joyful chuckle toddled over the threshold to seek his playmate, Nasr Ullah promptly clapped the door to and shot the wooden door-bolt, and not content with this, pulled the heavy leather curtains that kept out chilly winds and June and February _samûms_, over the doorway and the latticed window-screens.

"By the life of the Prophet--peace on him!--by thy head! speak lower. What Afrit hast thou vexed--throwing away the carrot-tops and the water that washed the dishes?" he demanded of his now hysterically-tearful wife. "Is this my house, whom I deemed discreet as Kadijah--peace be upon her! Raising the voice like a woman accustomed to go unveiled? Trumpeting secrets as it were on the very housetops! Wouldst be a widow? 'Nay?' Then shun the road to mourning! Wouldst die thyself, knowing thy four sons cast out--to whine for _faddahs_ and broken bread at the doors of the khans and mosques.... 'Nay' again? ... Then even hold thy tongue. And, Fatimeh my beloved--" Nasr Ullah's lean, dark, muscular hand caressed the woman's small head, adorned with a smart black silk kerchief with a brightly coloured border, and a forehead-string of coins--all gold ones, though their value was but small,--"vex not thy soul overmuch about the doves and pigeons. Are not their numbers countless as the numbers of the flies? And tell me, my olive-tree, fruitful in bearing--my Garment of Comfort," his tone had become wheedling, "whether any of the veiled women serving about this house be one-eyed? _Wallah_! I jest not! It is a new order of the Presence that all such are to be dismissed!"

"How soon?" Another tempest seemed about to shake Nasr Ullah's fruitful olive. Her bosom under its many serried rows of solid silver necklaces began to heave again. Her heavy anklets clashed as her small, henna-stained feet shifted nervously on the whitened clay floor of the family living-room where the charcoal stove daily burned, and the cooking-pots stood against the wall. "How soon?"

"By Allah! no later than an hour after sunrise, and that delay is granted as an especial grace."

"And the mother of thy wife--the grandmother of thy children--the guardian of thy house's honour--what of her?" demanded Fatimeh; "Is she not one of the many decent ones upon whose eyes the flies have sat in childhood? Is--"

"_Wallah_! I had forgotten her," exclaimed the man in dismay. For the mother of Fatimeh, at that moment congenially engaged in crooning the latest new baby to sleep, in the inner room dignified by the title of the _harîm_, had suffered in early youth, like many other Egyptian women of the lower classes, the loss, through ophthalmia, of one of her eyes.

Now a faint grin showed on the face of her son-in-law, even in the midst of his perplexity, as he said:

"Rebuke is justly mine, wife, that I did not remember it. But by the border of thine _usbêh_ I swear it! Thy mother sees more with her one eye than other women with two. Yet would I not part with her. She is wise in dealing with the teething-troubles of the lesser babes, and her slipper hath more sting in it than thine, for the ruling of the elder. We will send her away to thy brother at Kantara until this scare of one-eyed women is over and done. Meanwhile,--" he glanced over his shoulder at the door, and sitting on the hard-cushioned divan that ran round three sides of the whitewashed room, drew Fatimeh to sit beside him; "meanwhile I would speak to thee of Khalid thine eldest. Where is the boy to-night?"

"He is gone with his brother Amru to lay snares for fig-birds in the orchard. They must be set at moon-dark, for the birds to enter them at dawn."

"He is a born hunter. Seven years old this month of Safar, and witful as he is handsome--the praise be unto Allah Who makes them of all kinds! Wife, if I told thee that the Presence, seeing the boy so ripe for his tender years, and of goodly promise, had bidden--"

Nasr Ullah's tone had been studiously commonplace, but the ridges in his high forehead had deepened, and his eyes had an anxious stare. He winced as his wife without a word slid from the divan, and next instant lay prostrate on the white-washed floor, with her forehead on his feet.

"Nay, nay! ... My pearl, my joy! ... Take it not so hardly! ..."

"O Everlasting, spare me this! O husband, in pity, hear me. Hast thou forgotten Nasi, our joy and my firstborn? He would have been nine years old, this Nile-Rise.... Hast thou forgotten? Ay, ay, it was the old cry; 'This boy was stupid--that one showed fear. This must have known sin,--for he could see nothing at all in the ink-pools or in the Eye of Radiance.' So the Presence takes my Nasi, and gives him gifts and praises his excellence, and one day he comes home, crying '_My head, my head!_' like the son of the woman who fed the Prophet El Jah, peace be upon him!--and three days later, thou, weeping bitter tears, dost hang my green-striped shawl over the shabid of his tiny bier."

"Peace, wife!"

Sweat broke forth and stood on Nasr Ullah's face. He wiped it with the sleeve of his white _kaftan_, repeating:

"Peace, woman! ... It was a fever the boy had caught.... Dost thou not remember what the _hakim_ said? ..."

"Ay! But I had watched by the bed of my sick child, and shuddered at the visions he told of in his ravings. O, Husband, I have sat in the house one year, and thou hast said in thine heart, '_She is forgetting_' ... Yet all the time--" She sat upright on the floor before him now, her strained eyes glued upon his worried face, and the swift words poured from her without his opposition.

"Peace! thou sayest. How can there be peace in this house where soothsayers and necromancers come and go, and the sand-tables are forever cast, and fresh boys are brought each new day to peer into the ink-pools.... Lo! I will speak my mind. Ten years I have been thy wife, and a duteous and a silent, but a mother in fear for her flesh and blood hath the courage to defy Shaitan...."

"Be not disturbed.... I will find some way. The boy shall be sent to El Kantara with thy mother."

"And when my Agib is of likely age, will not the ink-pools claim him? Will the Presence have bowels to spare a child, who in all these years hath loved no woman?"

"Nay," was the reply. "What need hath He of women, who is in love with Life? ..."

"'Tis true. Save when the Inglizi ladies come with their menfolk to see the house and gardens, and eat fruit and drink iced sherbets, and say 'charmin'--charmin'' and 'rippin'--rippin','" thus the better-half of Nasr Ullah rendered the English slang, "no woman ever comes here. What now?" for the knee on which she rested her arm had jerked slightly.

"I had forgotten. He hath said but now--that a woman comes here at midnight! No _râziye_ of the Bazâr, or other of the shameless, but a lady-Sahib from the Palace of Montana at Iskanderieh.... The car brings her by the fifth hour.... The gates are to be open. When the car has passed in, the gates are to be shut and locked...."

"_Ya rabbi!_" The exclamation broke from the woman involuntarily. "After all these years--it may be that He changes.... How old is He, husband? Canst thou not even guess? ..."

"Perhaps He is less old than He pretends, but He is many years older than folks believe Him. Of that there is no doubt at all...."

"And it _is_ done by devilry? Witchcraft and spells--and philtres?" The woman breathed quickly. "Say, is't not?"

"God knows! But from whomever the Presence buys his youth, He pays a heavy price for it. See how He lives! Even as one who carries in his breast a stolen jewel, and goes in fear lest it be snatched from him. The pleasures of the belly--He must shun them. The joys that are tasted on perfumed cushions--He must fly them one and all. It is tyranny. Yet He thinks He is envied. He is only wretched when Those I may not speak of, ask--too high a price for the magical drugs...."

"The drugs. The devil-brews that keep Him youthful, who else would be as dry and wrinkled as the mummies of the ancient Kings?"

"Verily. And--one thing I have seen of late--" Once launched upon the sea of Confidence, Nasr Ullah grew less fearful. "Whether Protection fails him, or the philtres lose their power, I know not--but--He grows old!"

"I too!--" Her eyes grew large with awe. "I have fancied He is somewhat changed...."

"_Chut_! Do not interrupt. It goes deeper than the skin--this change that I have seen in him. His moods vary like those of a pregnant woman; he frames designs and throws them aside as a monkey plucks, and bites, and casts bananas away. He does not even hate as He used to hate. Once--if an enemy rose up in the path, he removed that one with his own hand, and troubled no more about the affair. Or said to one he trusted, '_Kill!_'" the tone was studiously smooth, the speaker's face expressionless--"and that man or that woman died--more quietly than the _bowab's_ daughter who ate the nectarine. But now--since the killing of Usborn Sahib by a Turk in Palestine,--and the night he dined at Iskanderieh in the company of the big Jew Tomi--the Presence talks of nought but sprinkling poisoned grain for carrier-doves and dismissing of one-eyed females--and my heart is stricken with fear for my lord! Spells, and charms, and philtres bought from Those in the Distant Places will not avail forever against the day of Fate. Azrael will come behind my lord with a touch upon the shoulder. The Black Camel of Allah will tread upon his heel. Then--even at a breath--the House of Life will crumble!" Nasr Ullah started to his feet as a silvery sound, momentarily increasing in volume, rolled into the stuffy closed room, and hummed about their ears. "It is the gong from my lord's room. He calls, and I must go! ..."

He added, slipping the earthen pot of soaked and poisoned barley within the bosom of his embroidered vest: "Sleep well, my wife, if I see thee not ere morning. And call in the children--it is time they went to rest! ..."