The Weavers
CHAPTER XXIX
THE RECOIL
It was a great day in the Muslim year. The Mahmal, or Sacred Carpet, was
leaving Cairo on its long pilgrimage of thirty-seven days to Mecca and Mahomet's
tomb. Great guns boomed from the Citadel, as the gorgeous procession, forming
itself beneath the Mokattam Hills, began its slow march to where, seated in the
shade of an ornate pavilion, Prince Kaid awaited its approach to pay devout
homage. Thousands looked down at the scene from the ramparts of the Citadel,
from the overhanging cliffs, and from the tops of the houses that hung on the
ledges of rock rising abruptly from the level ground, to which the last of the
famed Mamelukes leaped to their destruction.
Now to Prince Kaid's ears there came from hundreds of hoarse throats the cry:
"Allah! Allah! May thy journey be with safety to Arafat!" mingling with the
harsh music of the fifes and drums.
Kaid looked upon the scene with drawn face and lowering brows. His retinue
watched him with alarm. A whisper had passed that, two nights before, the
Effendina had sent in haste for a famous Italian physician lately come to Cairo,
and that since his visit Kaid had been sullen and depressed. It was also the
gossip of the bazaars that he had suddenly shown favour to those of the Royal
House and to other reactionaries, who had been enemies to the influence of
Claridge Pasha.
This rumour had been followed by an official proclamation that no Europeans
or Christians would be admitted to the ceremony of the Sacred Carpet.
Thus it was that Kaid looked out on a vast multitude of Muslims, in which not
one European face showed, and from lip to lip there passed the word,
"Harrik—Harrik—remember Harrik! Kaid turns from the infidel!"
They crowded near the great pavilion—as near as the mounted Nubians would
permit—to see Kaid's face; while he, with eyes wandering over the vast
assemblage, was lost in dark reflections. For a year he had struggled against a
growing conviction that some obscure disease was sapping his strength. He had
hid it from every one, until, at last, distress and pain had overcome him. The
verdict of the Italian expert was that possible, but by no means certain, cure
might come from an operation which must be delayed for a month or more.
Suddenly, the world had grown unfamiliar to him; he saw it from afar; but his
subconscious self involuntarily registered impressions, and he moved
mechanically through the ceremonies and duties of the immediate present. Thrown
back upon himself, to fight his own fight, with the instinct of primary life his
mind involuntarily drew for refuge to the habits and predispositions of youth;
and for two days he had shut himself away from the activities with which David
and Nahoum were associated. Being deeply engaged with the details of the
expedition to the Soudan, David had not gone to the Palace; and he was unaware
of the turn which things had taken.
Three times, with slow and stately steps, the procession wound in a circle in
the great square, before it approached the pavilion where the Effendina sat, the
splendid camels carrying the embroidered tent wherein the Carpet rested, and
that which bore the Emir of the pilgrims, moving gracefully like ships at sea.
Naked swordsmen, with upright and shining blades, were followed by men on camels
bearing kettle-drums. After them came Arab riders with fresh green branches
fastened to the saddles like plumes, while others carried flags and banners
emblazoned with texts and symbols. Troops of horsemen in white woollen cloaks,
sheikhs and Bedouins with flowing robes and huge turbans, religious chiefs of
the great sects, imperturbable and statuesque, were in strange contrast to the
shouting dervishes and camel-drivers and eager pilgrims.
At last the great camel with its sacred burden stopped in front of Kaid for
his prayer and blessing. As he held the tassels, lifted the gold-fringed
curtain, and invoked Allah's blessing, a half-naked sheikh ran forward, and,
raising his hand high above his head, cried shrilly: "Kaid, Kaid, hearken!"
Rough hands caught him away, but Kaid commanded them to desist; and the man
called a blessing on him; and cried aloud:
"Listen, O Kaid, son of the stars and the light of day. God hath exalted
thee. Thou art the Egyptian of all the Egyptians. In thy hand is power. But thou
art mortal even as I. Behold, O Kaid, in the hour that I was born thou wast
born, I in the dust without thy Palace wall, thou amid the splendid things. But
thy star is my star. Behold, as God ordains, the Tree of Life was shaken on the
night when all men pray and cry aloud to God—even the Night of the Falling
Leaves. And I watched the falling leaves; and I saw my leaf, and it was
withered, but only a little withered, and so I live yet a little. But I looked
for thy leaf, thou who wert born in that moment when I waked to the world. I
looked long, but I found no leaf, neither green nor withered. But I looked again
upon my leaf, and then I saw that thy name now was also upon my leaf, and that
it was neither green nor withered; but was a leaf that drooped as when an evil
wind has passed and drunk its life. Listen, O Kaid! Upon the tomb of Mahomet I
will set my lips, and it may be that the leaf of my life will come fresh and
green again. But thou—wilt thou not come also to the lord Mahomet's tomb? Or"—he
paused and raised his voice—"or wilt thou stay and lay thy lips upon the cross
of the infidel? Wilt thou—"
He could say no more, for Kaid's face now darkened with anger. He made a
gesture, and, in an instant, the man was gagged and bound, while a sullen
silence fell upon the crowd. Kaid suddenly became aware of this change of
feeling, and looked round him. Presently his old prudence and subtlety came
back, his face cleared a little, and he called aloud, "Unloose the man, and let
him come to me." An instant after, the man was on his knees, silent before him.
"What is thy name?" Kaid asked.
"Kaid Ibrahim, Effendina," was the reply.
"Thou hast misinterpreted thy dream, Kaid Ibrahim," answered the Effendina.
"The drooping leaf was token of the danger in which thy life should be, and my
name upon thy leaf was token that I should save thee from death. Behold, I save
thee. Inshallah, go in peace! There is no God but God, and the Cross is the sign
of a false prophet. Thou art mad. God give thee a new mind. Go."
The man was presently lost in the sweltering, half-frenzied crowd; but he had
done his work, and his words rang in the ears of Kaid as he rode away.
A few hours afterwards, bitter and rebellious, murmuring to himself, Kaid sat
in a darkened room of his Nile Palace beyond the city. So few years on the
throne, so young, so much on which to lay the hand of pleasure, so many millions
to command; and yet the slave at his door had a surer hold on life and all its
joys and lures than he, Prince Kaid, ruler of Egypt! There was on him that
barbaric despair which has taken dreadful toll of life for the decree of
destiny. Across the record of this day, as across the history of many an Eastern
and pagan tyrant, was written: "He would not die alone." That the world should
go on when he was gone, that men should buy and sell and laugh and drink, and
flaunt it in the sun, while he, Prince Kaid, would be done with it all.
He was roused by the rustling of a robe. Before him stood the Arab physician,
Sharif Bey, who had been in his father's house and his own for a lifetime. It
was many a year since his ministrations to Kaid had ceased; but he had remained
on in the Palace, doing service to those who received him, and—it was said by
the evil-tongued—granting certificates of death out of harmony with dark facts,
a sinister and useful figure. His beard was white, his face was friendly, almost
benevolent, but his eyes had a light caught from no celestial flame.
His look was confident now, as his eyes bent on Kaid. He had lived long, he
had seen much, he had heard of the peril that had been foreshadowed by the
infidel physician; and, by a sure instinct, he knew that his own opportunity had
come. He knew that Kaid would snatch at any offered comfort, would cherish any
alleviating lie, would steal back from science and civilisation and the modern
palace to the superstition of the fellah's hut. Were not all men alike when the
neboot of Fate struck them down into the terrible loneliness of doom, numbing
their minds? Luck would be with him that offered first succour in that dark
hour. Sharif had come at the right moment for Sharif.
Kaid looked at him with dull yet anxious eyes. "Did I not command that none
should enter?" he asked presently in a thick voice.
"Am I not thy physician, Effendina, to whom be the undying years? When the
Effendina is sick, shall I not heal? Have I not waited like a dog at thy door
these many years, till that time would come when none could heal thee save
Sharif?"
"What canst thou give me?"
"What the infidel physician gave thee not—I can give thee hope. Hast thou
done well, oh, Effendina, to turn from thine own people? Did not thine own
father, and did not Mehemet Ali, live to a good age? Who were their physicians?
My father and I, and my father's father, and his father's father."
"Thou canst cure me altogether?" asked Kaid hesitatingly.
"Wilt thou not have faith in one of thine own race? Will the infidel love
thee as do we, who are thy children and thy brothers, who are to thee as a nail
driven in the wall, not to be moved? Thou shalt live—Inshallah, thou shalt have
healing and length of days!"
He paused at a gesture from Kaid, for a slave had entered and stood waiting.
"What dost thou here? Wert thou not commanded?" asked Kaid.
"Effendina, Claridge Pasha is waiting," was the reply.
Kaid frowned, hesitated; then, with a sudden resolve, made a gesture of
dismissal to Sharif Bey, and nodded David's admittance to the slave.
As David entered, he passed Sharif Bey, and something in the look on the Arab
physician's face—a secret malignancy and triumph—struck him strangely. And now a
fresh anxiety and apprehension rose in his mind as he glanced at Kaid. The eye
was heavy and gloomy, the face was clouded, the lips once so ready to smile at
him were sullen and smileless now. David stood still, waiting.
"I did not expect thee till to-morrow, Saadat," said Kaid moodily at last.
"The business is urgent?"
"Effendina," said David, with every nerve at tension, yet with outward
self-control, "I have to report—" He paused, agitated; then, in a firm voice, he
told of the disaster which had befallen the cotton-mills and the steamer.
As David spoke, Kaid's face grew darker, his fingers fumbled vaguely with the
linen of the loose white robe he wore. When the tale was finished he sat for a
moment apparently stunned by the news, then he burst out fiercely:
"Bismillah, am I to hear only black words to-day? Hast thou naught to say but
this—the fortune of Egypt burned to ashes!"
David held back the quick retort that came to his tongue.
"Half my fortune is in the ashes," he answered with dignity. "The rest came
from savings never made before by this Government. Is the work less worthy in
thy sight, Effendina, because it has been destroyed? Would thy life be less
great and useful because a blow took thee from behind?"
Kaid's face turned black. David had bruised an open wound.
"What is my life to thee—what is thy work to me?"
"Thy life is dear to Egypt, Effendina," urged David soothingly, "and my
labour for Egypt has been pleasant in thine eyes till now."
"Egypt cannot be saved against her will," was the moody response. "What has
come of the Western hand upon the Eastern plough?" His face grew blacker; his
heart was feeding on itself.
"Thou, the friend of Egypt, hast come of it, Effendina."
"Harrik was right, Harrik was right," Kaid answered, with stubborn gloom and
anger. "Better to die in our own way, if we must die, than live in the way of
another. Thou wouldst make of Egypt another England; thou wouldst civilise the
Soudan—bismillah, it is folly!"
"That is not the way Mehemet Ali thought, nor Ibrahim. Nor dost thou think
so, Effendina," David answered gravely. "A dark spirit is on thee. Wouldst thou
have me understand that what we have done together, thou and I, was ill done,
that the old bad days were better?"
"Go back to thine own land," was the surly answer. "Nation after nation
ravaged Egypt, sowed their legions here, but the Egyptian has lived them down.
The faces of the fellaheen are the faces of Thotmes and Seti. Go back. Egypt
will travel her own path. We are of the East; we are Muslim. What is right to
you is wrong to us. Ye would make us over—give us cotton beds and wooden floors
and fine flour of the mill, and cleanse the cholera-hut with disinfectants, but
are these things all? How many of your civilised millions would die for their
prophet Christ? Yet all Egypt would rise up from the mud-floor, the dourha-field
and the mud-hut, and would come out to die for Mahomet and Allah—ay, as Harrik
knew, as Harrik knew! Ye steal into corners, and hide behind the curtains of
your beds to pray; we pray where the hour of prayer finds us—in the street, in
the market-place, where the house is building, the horse being shod, or the
money-changers are. Ye hear the call of civilisation, but we heap the Muezzin—"
He stopped, and searched mechanically for his watch. "It is the hour the
Muezzin calls," said David gently. "It is almost sunset. Shall I open the
windows that the call may come to us?" he added.
While Kaid stared at him, his breast heaving with passion, David went to a
window and opened the shutters wide.
The Palace faced the Nile, which showed like a tortuous band of blue and
silver a mile or so away. Nothing lay between but the brown sand, and here and
there a handful of dark figures gliding towards the river, or a little train of
camels making for the bare grey hills from the ghiassas which had given them
their desert loads. The course of the Nile was marked by a wide fringe of palms
showing blue and purple, friendly and ancient and solitary. Beyond the river and
the palms lay the grey-brown desert, faintly touched with red. So clear was the
sweet evening air that the irregular surface of the desert showed for a score of
miles as plainly as though it were but a step away. Hummocks of sand—tombs and
fallen monuments gave a feeling as of forgotten and buried peoples; and the two
vast pyramids of Sakkarah stood up in the plaintive glow of the evening skies,
majestic and solemn, faithful to the dissolved and absorbed races who had built
them. Curtains of mauve and saffron-red were hung behind them, and through a
break of cloud fringing the horizon a yellow glow poured, to touch the tips of
the pyramids with poignant splendour. But farther over to the right, where Cairo
lay, there hung a bluish mist, palpable and delicate, out of which emerged the
vast pyramids of Cheops; and beside it the smiling inscrutable Sphinx faced the
changeless centuries. Beyond the pyramids the mist deepened into a vast deep
cloud of blue and purple, which seemed the end to some mystic highway
untravelled by the sons of men.
Suddenly there swept over David a wave of feeling such as had passed over
Kaid, though of a different nature. Those who had built the pyramids were gone,
Cheops and Thotmes and Amenhotep and Chefron and the rest. There had been
reformers in those lost races; one age had sought to better the last, one man
had toiled to save—yet there only remained offensive bundles of mummied flesh
and bone and a handful of relics in tombs fifty centuries old. Was it all, then,
futile? Did it matter, then, whether one man laboured or a race aspired?
Only for a moment these thoughts passed through his mind; and then, as the
glow through the broken cloud on the opposite horizon suddenly faded, and veils
of melancholy fell over the desert and the river and the palms, there rose a
call, sweetly shrill, undoubtingly insistent. Sunset had come, and, with it, the
Muezzin's call to prayer from the minaret of a mosque hard by.
David was conscious of a movement behind him—that Kaid was praying with hands
uplifted; and out on the sands between the window and the river he saw kneeling
figures here and there, saw the camel-drivers halt their trains, and face the
East with hands uplifted. The call went on—"La ilaha illa-llah!"
It called David, too. The force and searching energy and fire in it stole
through his veins, and drove from him the sense of futility and despondency
which had so deeply added to his trouble. There was something for him, too, in
that which held infatuated the minds of so many millions.
A moment later Kaid and he faced each other again. "Effendina," he said,
"thou wilt not desert our work now?"
"Money—for this expedition? Thou hast it?" Kaid asked ironically.
"I have but little money, and it must go to rebuild the mills, Effendina. I
must have it of thee."
"Let them remain in their ashes."
"But thousands will have no work."
"They had work before they were built, they will have work now they are
gone."
"Effendina, I stayed in Egypt at thy request. The work is thy work. Wilt thou
desert it?"
"The West lured me—by things that seemed. Now I know things as they are."
"They will lure thee again to-morrow," said David firmly, but with a weight
on his spirit. His eyes sought and held Kaid's. "It is too late to go back; we
must go forward or we shall lose the Soudan, and a Mahdi and his men will be in
Cairo in ten years."
For an instant Kaid was startled. The old look of energy and purpose leaped
up into his eye; but it faded quickly again. If, as the Italian physician more
than hinted, his life hung by a thread, did it matter whether the barbarian came
to Cairo? That was the business of those who came after. If Sharif was right,
and his life was saved, there would be time enough to set things right.
"I will not pour water on the sands to make an ocean," he answered. "Will a
ship sail on the Sahara? Bismillah, it is all a dream! Harrik was right. But
dost thou think to do with me as thou didst with Harrik?" he sneered. "Is it in
thy mind?"
David's patience broke down under the long provocation. "Know then,
Effendina," he said angrily, "that I am not thy subject, nor one beholden to
thee, nor thy slave. Upon terms well understood, I have laboured here. I have
kept my obligations, and it is thy duty to keep thy obligations, though the hand
of death were on thee. I know not what has poisoned thy mind, and driven thee
from reason and from justice. I know that, Prince Pasha of Egypt as thou art,
thou art as bound to me as any fellah that agrees to tend my door or row my
boat. Thy compact with me is a compact with England, and it shall be kept, if
thou art an honest man. Thou mayst find thousands in Egypt who will serve thee
at any price, and bear thee in any mood. I have but one price. It is well known
to thee. I will not be the target for thy black temper. This is not the middle
ages; I am an Englishman, not a helot. The bond must be kept; thou shalt not
play fast and loose. Money must be found; the expedition must go. But if thy
purpose is now Harrik's purpose, then Europe should know, and Egypt also should
know. I have been thy right hand, Effendina; I will not be thy old shoe, to be
cast aside at thy will."
In all the days of his life David had never flamed out as he did now.
Passionate as his words were, his manner was strangely quiet, but his white and
glistening face and his burning eyes showed how deep was his anger.
As he spoke, Kaid sank upon the divan. Never had he been challenged so. With
his own people he had ever been used to cringing and abasement, and he had
played the tyrant, and struck hard and cruelly, and he had been feared; but
here, behind David's courteous attitude, there was a scathing arraignment of his
conduct which took no count of consequence. In other circumstances his vanity
would have shrunk under this whip of words, but his native reason and his quick
humour would have justified David. In this black distemper possessing him,
however, only outraged egotism prevailed. His hands clenched and unclenched, his
lips were drawn back on his teeth in rage.
When David had finished, Kaid suddenly got to his feet and took a step
forward with a malediction, but a faintness seized him and he staggered back.
When he raised his head again David was gone.