V.
HAMID
The lean, black man upon the angareb, the narrow native bed which constituted almost the whole furniture of the room, sighed quietly with closed eyes and began to roll his head from side to side. Miss Gregory, seated near him on a camp-stool, leaned forward watchfully. A lamp of pierced brass hung from the ceiling by a chain, and made a complicated tracery cf light and shade over the whitewashed austerity of the little chamber. Under it, in high relief against the white cloth on which he lay, the man's face was thin and drawn, with something rapt and intense in the stillness of it. He looked like a man on the verge of a discovery; the aptness of it struck Miss Gregory with a thrill. The watch which she wore in a strap upon her wrist showed her that the hour was three in the morning; it was close upon the time when the man on the angareb would catch his breath with a little astonished gasp, as if the discovery were made, and thereafter would cease to breathe at all. The plague in the last of its stages keeps time like a clock.
A friendly eye might have noted certain changes in Miss Gregory, as she sat, hunched upon her camp-stool, waiting for that final moment. It was not that she was less than before, but a month of grim labour among the sick and the fearful in the stricken quarter of a little Red Sea town had set an edge upon her. She preserved yet her fine pink freshness of complexion; she was trim and forceful still, a very tower of strength in that place of hushed houses and slinking terrors. But below the pink there was an underhue of pallor, a note of strain; the touch of arrogance which characterised her level gaze was softened to something more steadfast and tolerant. One would have said she was already older, a little riper—perhaps the least thing more human. She had followed death in and out of the homes, subduing something of his awfulness by the mere force of her ordered demeanour. She had sat to the last by bed sides where no other would venture; eyes that darkened in a moment took their last view of life in the grave composure of her face. The nightly entries in her diary had grown brief. "So many died to-day," was a frequent record. And in one place there was a piece of observation: "They die just like white people."
The man on the angareb was still again; his time was very near at hand when the door behind Miss Gregory opened. She turned and nodded to the man who stood there looking in, and he entered. He was a young man, clad in soiled and crumpled white linen, with a fez on his head. He had the swarthy skin and delicate features which belong to the Levant; a black moustache stood stiff across his upper lip. In him, too, there were signs of wear; the pair of them had sustained the fight against the plague together. He crossed at once to the bed and looked briefly at the sick man.
"Nearly gone," he said. His voice had the flat tones of utter weariness. "You will wait, eh?"
"Yes," said Miss Gregory. "I won't leave him now. He might—he might open his eyes just at the last."
The other nodded shortly. "He might," he said; "but I don't think so."
They spoke to one another curtly, with the absence of ceremony which people use who understand one another without many words. The young Turk's face had that cast of restraint which goes with good breeding; he spoke English fluently; hut nothing in him went to Miss Gregory's heart so directly as his habit of concise speech. There were times in those dark days when she felt the need of reinforcements, of something to hold her together. Her days were a nightmare, her nights a delirium. Through them, a sane figure, a link with the reasonable world, went this quiet, sufficient young man, with the manners and the tongue of her own people. She owed him a debt for his mere existence.
Suddenly, even while they stood looking down upon him, the man on the bed spoke one short, clear sentence. He did not open his eyes; he did not address himself to either of those who stood beside him.
"What did he say?" asked Miss Gregory, for the words had been Arabic.
"It was the—how do you say?—the confession of faith," answered the young man, leaning over the bed. "'There is only one God,' you know. 'There is only one God.' he said—like that. Strange—eh?"
He looked round at her for a moment as he drew the cloth over the man's face. Miss Gregory shuddered.
"Is he—?" she hesitated.
"Yes. He's gone," answered the young man. He surveyed Miss Gregory thoughtfully. "I could get you some coffee now," he suggested.
She shook her heed dully. She was weak with want of sleep, and death was never stale to her. Though she saw it almost hourly, it was always portentous, tragic, heart-breaking. Under its coverings the thin body on the angareb was suddenly awful and solemn; the dead have their pomp.
"No," she said. "I will get some sleep, too."
It was new a month and some odd days since Miss Gregory, making her gradual way beck to Europe, had ended at Andjerrah. She had come in a dhow from Aden, its sole passenger, allured by a map which showed the Red Sea coast of Arabia as a yellow blank, sparsely sprinkled with the names of unknown waterside towns. At dawn on the day of her arrival she had seen the sun come up, red and smoky, over the crowded, flat roofs and the two or three minarets of Andjerrah, squatting like a mushroom in the emptiness of the landscape. Banks of smooth sand complicated its passage to the sea; with its great lateen half-lowered, the gaunt dhow, a homing crow of the coast, swam slowly on level water towards the yellow beach. At her stern, muffled against the morning chi1l, Miss Gregory sat and let her eyes range in contented appreciation of the scene. It was her business in life to see end remember; she was a professional spectator. Forward, in the bows, the crew of the dhow were grouped as though in some expectancy. Their talk was brief and low-toned, and they would break it off in the middle of a sentence to gaze landward at the town. Miss Gregory was wondering with mild curiosity what they might have in hand, when there travelled to her across the still water, mellow with distance, a long, insistent call, a strong, faintly sonorous voice crying from the huddle of squat white walls which constituted Andjerrah.
Again it sounded, the only thing vocal in the world wide hush that lay on sea and land; it had a strange note of urgency. At the sound of it, the men forward ceased their talk: each, as though drilled to it, spread his mat upon the short deck and fell to prayer, facing the east and bowing towards the rising sun and Mecca. It was the muezzin calling to worship. Miss Gregory drew her breath. "Capital," she murmured.
Thus she came to Andjerreh, seeing it first in the only aspect which does it credit. By noon she had tested its charm and found it lacking. It was a commonplace little shore town, split in halves by a broad tideway which was dry at low tide and a communal sewer at high. In her costume of travel—the slack flannel coat which gave room for her shoulders, the business-like tweed skirt, and the felt hat with a silk puggaree—she explored the seaward side of the town with her usual energy and made a deep impression upon the inhabitants. In the narrow streets she came round corners upon them with the effect of an apparition; her sturdy, serene presence, drifting under her sun-umbrella through the thronged bazaar, was followed by dumb stares and wondering gapes. Women like Miss Gregory have not common anywhere; among her acquaintances in various lands were some few who professed to find this fact consolation for her existence; but Andjerrah saw her the first time, a woman walking abroad unveiled, taking the middle of the way, daunting grown men with looks of criticism and appraisement.
She saw the great house of the Governor at the end of a little square, flanked by a mosque. A couple of ruffianly soldiers, one in uniform, the other nearly naked, lounged at its gate. The other side of the square was open; a trodden path led from it to the edge of the tideway, where now the water lay barely ankle deep. Upon this path, squatted in the sun, were more nondescript soldiery. As she looked at them a strange thing happened. There was a gate to that part of the town which lay on the farther side of the water; its arch was black against the wall in which it was pierced. From this arch there came suddenly forth a man in the long shroud-like robes of the country. He stepped into the sunlight with the abruptness of a harlequin coming through a trap-dour, but he did not walk fast. He strode down towards the water with a quality of deliberation, almost of solemnity, in his gait. It was this that took Miss Gregory's eye; he made a figure almost of drama against his pale background as he went, solitary and erect, down the gradual slope of sand. She watched him with a feeling that he was about to do something; his face—a mere spot of black at that distance—seemed turned directly towards her. She noted unconsciously that the soldiers on the path were interested, too; there was a stir among them, and then, sharp and sudden, one of them fired at the solitary man. It was the most unexpected thing in the world; a thunderbolt striking him down from the sky would have seemed more in order; the thing tasted pungently of wanton, wasteful murder. On the far bank of the tideway the white-robed man took one step more and faltered. He did not fall; rather, he sank, seeming to float to the ground, his face up turned to the last. Then he was prone and startling against the sand, with weak, purposeless movements of limbs and body, but no outcry. The backs of the soldiers were towards Miss Gregory; they were staring across at the body.
She gasped; the event had taken her without warning, and tragedy had entered at the gallop. The soldiers seemed to he waiting, and she marked, almost idly, that the gun of one of them smoked, breathing thin threads of vapour into the still air. Then from the archway came another figure, a men in European clothes this time—c1othes of soiled white linen, with a red fez upon his head. He made some gesture to the soldiers with his hand and went down to the body. Miss Gregory gathered herself together, holding her nerves to see the tragedy repeated. But no shot was fired. The men stood watching in silence while the man with the fez half-carried, half-dragged the limp, white bundle back to the obscurity of the arch. He laboured in the sand as he went, paused a breathing-space on the threshold of the entry, and was gone. The shabby soldiers sat down again and resumed their lazy talk. The thing was finished. Miss Gregory moistened her dry lips mechanically and turned away. Obviously, there was nothing more to stay for.
In Andjerrah that night she was the one topic of conversation.
"She strides boldly like a camel," said those who had seen her in the forenoon. "She is pink as if she had been skinned, and looks before her smiling."
"No, no," corrected those who had viewed her after the spectacle by the banks of the tideway. "She halts as she goes like a horse that sees a snake, and she looks at men without seeing them. And she speaks to herself as though she were drunk, saying continually, 'Wy, Wy?'"
There is a narrow way in Andjerreh which is known in the native tongue as we Street of Merchants. Miss Gregory, passing here, still full of wonder and not yet healed of horror, started suddenly at the sound of a voice calling to her in English. "Lady, lady," it said. She looked round sharply to encounter the insinuating smile of a man squatted upon the board of a shop.
"English lady," he said, "I speak English. I bin Malta, Gibraltar—everywhar. You want-a buy something?"
He was grossly fat, a jelly of a man, smooth and rounded like a prize beast. His little eyes, alert and joyful, danced about her. Miss Gregory saw a chance of information.
"I will come in," she said.
Inside, the shop was almost dark. Seated soberly on the little divan, she let the fat man sell her several things of which she had not the least need, at prices which betrayed an imagination hidden somewhere in his bulk. A thin, shrinking negro woman, with slavish eyes, brought her coffee.
"No," she said at last. "I have enough. I will not buy anything more. But I should like to talk to you."
"Talk." The fat man came to anchor willingly; he beamed up at her from a mat on the floor. "I talk English same as soldierman. Malta, Gibraltar—bin everywhar."
"I see there are soldiers here," suggested Miss Gregory.
"Soldiers? Turk soldier. Arab soldier—tha's all." The fat man flapped a languid hand to dispose Of them. "Damn rascal, those soldier. Belong to the Governor."
"Rascals, eh?" repeated Miss Gregory. "Yes; I saw them shoot a man just now."
The fat man on the floor started. News at killing by soldiers may be a matter of everybody's business in Andjerrah. When once killing begins it may easily spread.
"Shoot?" he asked. "Shoot?"
"Yes," said Miss Gregory. Choosing her words carefully that she might be understood, she told him what she had seen. He heard her intently, with a shapeless forefinger checking off her phrases, and to her astonishment his face cleared as she came to the end of her recital. He laughed obesely, the thick throaty laugh of the fat.
"Oh, that!" he said. "Yes, they shoot 'im because he come out. It is forbid. You see, there is sickness."
"Sickness," queried Miss Gregory. "What sickness do you mean?"
"Sickness," repeated the fat man. "Peple die. People go walking like you an' me—well, comfortable. Then the tumble down—sick. By-'n-by they die. And so the governor put soldiers by the water. Nobody mus' came out, or else—shoot! Bang! Dead quicker than sickness. By order."
"I see, " said mg» Gregory. "The place is quarantined."
The fat man seized upon the word eagerly.
"Yes, yes," he cried. "Quarantined—all the same as a steamer. Yes, quarantined—yes."
Miss Gregory pondered. Matters were clearer, but the affair still had an ugly look. The quarantine itself signified a certain measure of enlightenment not to he expected in Anderrah, but there was still the shooting. That seemed inconsistent. What epidemic made it necessary to enforce isolation so drastically?
"What do you call this sickness?" she asked.
The fat man uttered an Arabic word. "I forget 'im in English," he said regretfully.
"Cholera?" suggested Miss Gregory. He shook his head, watching her face expectantly for the word. "Typhoid? Some kind of fever? Small-pox?" She named the most virulent of those scourges which be long to hot countries, and at each of them he shook his head. She frowned in perplexity; a fact out of reach made her restless. "Not plague?" she said at last.
"Ah!" The fat man sat up joyfully. "P1ague—tha's 'im. I forget 'im. P1ague—yres. First you turn a leetle sick, like bellyache; then you bulge here," his fat finger stroked his flank under the arm pit, "an' then you die. Plague—tha's 'im."
"I see." Miss Gregory sat up with a return of her usual briskness. At home, in the Kentish village that lay under the windows of the Hall, she was accustomed to take a short way with sickness. "Plague, eh?"
"Tha's 'im," repeated the fat man complacently. "Tha's 'im—plague. So—it is forbid to come out—by order of the Governor."
"Tell me about the Governor," demanded Miss Gregory. "Who is he?"
But here the fat man could not help her. The Governor was an Effendi from Constantinople; he knew no more. He showed himself to his people only as a remote majesty passing by at the gallop in the midst of an escort. He had not long held his post, and there was much that was mysterious about him. He had, for example, no wives—not even a wife. He made little of matters of ceremony and had small regard for his own dignity. The fat man spoke of him none the less in hoarse whispers, with an anxious eye on the shop door. In his time he had seen men killed by slow stages in public for no greater offence.
"Thank you," said Miss Gregory at last, rising. "Thank you. You speak English very well. Good afternoon."
Her compliment moved the fat man to his foundations; he looked after her sentimentally as she passed on her way through the Street of Merchants. She was already more at her ease since she had found an affair to concern herself with.
The captain of the dhow had found her a lodging in the house of a Jew, and from this lodging she went forth in the cool of the early evening to pay a visit to the Governor. It was very clear to Miss Gregory that there were things to be done. The methods of civilisation must be involved in aid of the stricken town beyond the waterway. She felt authoritative and in some measure official as she approached the great gate where the shabby soldiers still sat and killed time. To do honour to the occasion she was clad in white drill, stiff and spotless, from her neck to her ankles. The soldiers would have stopped her from entering; one of them, a hooded Arab, even lowered his lance. but she held on in face of them. By sheer momentum she arrived at last in a large, cool room, where a languid, elderly official gave her audience in bad French.
"I wish to see the Governor," Miss Gregory stated flatly, and offered her card.
The official was grey and weary, with a slow, bored manner. He took the card and glanced at it perfunctorily.
"His Excellency is away," he said. "He will not be back for many days. What is your business?"
He stood looking at her neatly-booted feet as she told him. She had learned with grief that the plague was in Andjerrah. Having some experience with epidemics, she hoped to be of use. She spoke colourlessly, with patient politeness; nothing could be so discouraging as the weary abstraction of the grey- moustached Turk who heard her.
"Ah!" he sighed as she finished. "Madame is very gracious. I cannot suggest anything that Madame could do. And His Excellency is away."
"There are many deaths?" asked Miss Gregory.
"Yes," he answered, assenting absently.
The big room was very quiet; it was a little like talking to a ghost. He was so tired, so empty of all help; his very politeness had a faded quality, as though it had lain too long in lavender ere he brought it out for use. He spoke of the Governor always with a note of uneasiness; Miss Gregory gained somehow an impression that His Excellency had habits which were trying to his subordinates. As to the plague, he really knew very little. The orders to prevent escape from the infected area were peremptory; they were not to be evaded in any circumstances. The man in the red fez—yes, he had heard of him. A Turk, he believed, with some medical knowledge. He was doing what he could. No, there were no other doctors in the place. People might enter the infected quarter if they chose. Some had done so to join friends or relations. But they might not return. Once in, they must remain.
"Could I go in?" asked Miss Gregory.
He looked up at her vaguely. She repeated her question. He broke into a smile.
"Oh, certainly, certainly," he replied, with a kind of wan effusiveness. "Madame may certainly go in. Only—" his flat voice dropped again—"there is the rule, you know—the rule about not coming out."
"I should be shot, eh?"
A faint light of resolution showed for one moment in his dull eyes.
"It would be most regrettable," he murmured.
Miss Gregory made a mental note of him; he was material for that book she designed to write, the large, important volume, pungent with character, scintillating with delicate observation, which was to be the monument of her travels. He would have his place in its pages, a wraith capable of force. She cast an acquisitive eye over him as she took her leave.
In the square outside the Governor's residence there was the stillness of evening. The soldiery beside the water were squatted about a couple of little fires that winked cheerfully. The town beyond showed no lights; it was dark and silent, enduring its fate like some patient animal that suffers in quiet. Miss Gregory stood awhile to look at it. It was not that she had to make up her mind, for according to the plain standards of her life her way was clear. Alternatives were not for her; weak creatures who hesitate between two paths are not of her world. She looked across the water in the tideway at the silent houses, bunched together about a single minaret, speculatively. Soon she would know all about them. What they held for her she would find out in due course. She began to check off upon her fingers the things she would take with her.
"And writing materials," she concluded. "This might make a book in itself."
The tide between the towns was at its lowest at three in the morning. A dozing sentry, beside the fire, lifted his head and stared sleepily, as Miss Gregory came down towards him. She was alone; there was no one who would come with her, even to carry her luggage to the waterside. At the house of the Jew, where she had lodged, they had protested stridently against her departure, wondering and awed at the serenity with which She resisted and overbore them. Some letters which she had written were entrusted to the captain of the dhow to he mailed at Aden; and then her preparations were complete. The sentry saw her first as a short and sturdy figure bowed under a huge bundle; then she came into the light of the fire and he rose with a grunt of amazement. She set her bundle down with a sigh of relief and produced money, smiling at him and inviting him, with signs, to carry the bundle across the water for her. He reached out his foot and woke one of his companions to share the situation with him, and others set up and stared with eyes that glinted white in the firefight. They were a choice collection of ruffians, tattered brigands of half a dozen races joined in the service of the Governor, but they showed an almost genial civility to Miss Gregory. They seemed even to persuade her to go back; one great negro, belted about with weapons, reasoned with her in a soft voice, and put a gentle hand on her arm to draw her away from the tideway. When they saw she was firm, they took her money willingly, and picked up her bundles and walked before her through the wet sand. She waved her hand to the rest of them, standing at gaze in the firefight, strange and wild in their robes and arms, and crossed over. The soldiers carried her things to within a few yards of the gate, and set them down in the sand. They grinned at her amiably, gave salutation, and trudged back. Miss Gregory saw the arch in the wall, tall and black before her, a witless mouth. wide open and dumb. She stooped and burdened herself again with her belongings, and, bending beneath them, went with slow steps in at the gate.
It led her to a narrow street, dark as a sewer. On either hand the houses were silent; and their few windows, set high in the walls, were blank and lightless. She plodded the length of it before a sound came to her ears, and then it was the voice of a man humming a tune as he walked. She caught a fragment of the melody, and found herself puzzling to identify it. Before she could do so, the man came round a crook in the way, swinging a lantern in his hand, and stopped short at the sight of her. By the light which he bore, Miss Gregory knew him at at once; he was the young man with the red fez who had carried in the body. She set her bundles down gladly.
"I do hope you speak English," she said, cordially.
He held the lantern shoulder-high to look at her. Miss Gregory liked the strong, whimsical manner of his countenance and the hard directness of his eyes. She recognised caste when she saw it, for she wore its badge herself.
"I speak English," he answered. He had hardly a trace of foreign accent. "I suppose you know where you are?"
"I came on purpose," said Miss Gregory. "I'm used to nursing, and I like work. I want to help."
He still scrutinised her. "English, of course."
"Of course," agreed Miss Gregory, cordially.
"Well," he said, and hesitated.
"My dear man," said Miss Gregory, with good-natured impatience; "do let's recognise facts and save time. Here I am, and here I stay. I'm not going to be shot for going out, so you need n't expect it. So it comes to this—can I help you, or must I get to work for myself? That's the only question."
"I see." The young man smiled as he lowered the lantern. Its moving light swung along the walls around them, making peep-holes of pale radiance in the haunted solitude. "Well, we 'll try," he added. "If you 'll take the light I 'll carry your things."
"I suppose you can find me a room?" suggested Miss Gregory.
"A houseful," he answered, stooping over her bundles. "There are more empty houses every day."
In this manner Miss Gregory entered upon the task she had chosen. Her companion—he gave his name as Hamid—established her in a chill little house on the town wall, overlooking the bare beach, and the still sea, and set her to work forthwith.
"It's not nursing they want," he told her; "it's discipline. Panic's what we 've got to fear. It's lucky they 're Mohammedans, and don't drink, or we'd have a little working model of hell in this place."
"Where did you learn English?" asked Miss Gregory, irrelevantly.
"Oxford," he repeated, shortly, and returned to the matter in hand.
When she crossed the water from Andjerrah, Miss Gregory had entertained visions of war upon the plague after the methods approved by sanitary science. Boiled water, disinfection. iso1stion—these were to be among the weapons of the campaign; they were familiar to her hand. But she had not been at work a day before she realised the mere impotence of her designs. Here were some two thousand people cooped within a guarded wall, each family jealous of its privacy, after the manner Of the East, and altogether proof against her teachings and arguments. The difficulty was to find the plague-stricken. For fear of being abandoned, the sick concealed their condition till it could no longer be hidden, and went abroad sowing contagion. The stricken were deserted on their beds, and sometimes, desperate and terrified, they would rise and reel forth, to go naked and raving into the streets and die there. Men died everywhere, and none lifted a finger to aid them. They were carried away at night by a gang of negroes which Hamid had organised. From her place by some bedside, Miss Gregory heard that gruesome traffic—the pad of the blank men's bare feet, their call as they went, the doors that opened to them, and the clumsy carrying forth of the dead. Then the bare feet would recede a little more slowly for their burden, and all would be silent again. Seldom was there a noise of weeping; it was as though the town were numbed by its affliction.
Hamid did the doctoring, with infinite persistence and no hope, for all the stricken died. He worked, Miss Gregory thought, with a sort of contempt for his patients, but not the less gallant1y for that. He was industrious, courageous, indefatigable; he drove himself without mercy; but the woe about him seemed not to touch him. She put it down to a racial trait, the callousness of the well-bred Turk. He headed her off all references to himself with a dexterity which she deferred to; their intimacy stopped short of an understanding. He was by no means the only man she knew whose past was a sore subject with him, so after a while she let the matter rest. Their duties divided themselves naturally. It was his to doctor and organise, always with a rather scornful manner of peremptoriness and a certain evident condescension; it was hers to soften the bitterness of plague and death for the abandoned and doomed.
Usually they met for an hour in the late afternoon in a room in Miss Gregory's quarters, to drink quaint1y-flavoured coffee and consult regarding their work. It had come to be an institution, and for both of them it was relief from the daily press of horror. It was on the day after the lean black men, speaking with closed eyes on his angarreb, had announced his crucial discovery, that Hamid came late to the meeting-place. He dropped himself into a seat with a sigh of weariness.
"Hoped you'd come, " said Miss Gregory, handing him the little cup of coffee.
He stared at the floor between his feet.
"I have been sick," he said abruptly.
Miss Gregory could see from her chair the early sunset on the see, tinging the waters with crimson. She did not look round.
"I don't wonder," she said absently. "Twelve deaths to-day. It's always twelve, somehow."
There was a pause before he answered. Then he set the little cup down on the floor with a rattle, and looked at her with a touch of consternation.
"The day after to-morrow," he said, very deliberately, "there will be thirteen."
"Eh?" Miss Gregory turned her head. "What d' you mean?"
He nodded to her. "Yes," he said, "I 've got it."
She sprang to her feet in the sheer shock of his meaning and stood over him. This was a thing she had never thought of; it had grown to be a convention in her mind that the pair of them were immune. She was overcome with a vast sense of ill-usage, of wrong. This was not fair.
"Hamid!" she gasped, quavering. "It's impossible. You can't be sure."
"You tell me, then," he said, and leaned forward to slip his arm from the sleeve of his coat.
The ensign of the plague is as clear as the black flag. Miss Gregory bit her lip to steady herself, and groped with her fingers for the swollen gland that means death. There was no mistaking it in the light of her experience, the little, hard nodule like a marble under the skin; it shifted under her finger-tips as they lighted on it. For a moment the room darkened about her.
"You see?" she heard Hamid saying, in his tired voice, as he drew his coat on again.
"You must go to bed," said hfisa Gregory. "Now, at once. Hamid, you must get well. Go home now and go to bed; I 'll come in ten minutes."
He nodded and rose from his chair with an effort.
"Glad to go to bed at last," he said, smiling a little awry. "But you must n't desert the others "
"The others he blowed," retorted Miss Gregory Violently. "Oh, Hamid, do go."
"I'm going," he said, and went. Behind him, Miss Gregory stared vacantly at the door, her hands knit nervously before her.
"There is no help," she said aloud. "No help."
Hamid's quarters were also upon the wall, but from his room the view was over the tideway to Andjerrah. As she came to his bedside, Miss Gregory could see through his windows the fires on the further bank, where the soldiers watched; they shone in the growing night like twinkling eyes of menace. Behind them was the low bulk of the Governor's palace, with its two squat towers. She wondered with an access of anger why the man did not return to his city and come to the succour of his people.
From his pillow Hamid looked up at her with an unabated listlessness. As yet the plague had not put its seal upon his face,but this new languor was scarcely less significant. He seemed already so far removed from the man she knew. The harsh lines of his face, which weariness had grown deeper, were softened.
"It's something to be able to lie down," he said. "And yet if a call came"
"You could n't go," said Miss Gregory.
He sighed. "No," he said. "I suppose I could n't. I don't think I ever failed them before. but I'm dangerous now. Queer, isn't it?"
The room, like the rooms of all the houses in that place, was small and square, a mere cell, sparsely accoutred with necessary furniture. Miss Gregory made her dispositions with silent swiftness, and settled herself to pass the night with him. There was not much that she could do, but at least she could be on hand. Her strong, pink face, a little thinner and less fresh than of old, was grave; there was a darkness in her grey eyes; hut she held up her good grey head gallantly and faced what fortune should bring. She knew, only too well, the common course of Hamid's malady. In three hours the fever would be upon him to endure until the dawn. Then would come the gross pains, the agony that breaks the patient's fibre and leaves him defenceless against the plague's last encroachments. After them there would be the fatal weakness, passing into unconsciousness; and last, that final shudder or little start—perhaps an exclamation or a brief look—and the end.
"We 'll do what we can," she said, as she gave him the medicine which they were accustomed to use.
"Of course," he answered weakly, and smiled at her. "I don't seem to want to sleep, though."
"Need you talk?" she asked.
"Why not?" he said. "Better than tormenting a sore mind, don't you think? And we 've hardly ever had a real talk, you know."
"All right," agreed Miss Gregory, and drew a rug over her knees.
The lamp burned with a faint hissing noise, and the night filled the window and the world outside. The slow sound of the sea on the shallow beech was an undertone to their consciousness; for the rest, the room seemed set apart from the world. Once, as they talked, they heard the slow, melodious summons of the gatherers of the dead at their work; those toilers in the darkness did their grim business musically.
"I wonder," said Hamid, "if we 've done any good?"
"How can one tell?" replied Miss Gregory. "Anyhow, does it really matter?"
He cocked his tired eye at her with a momentary shrewdness.
"No," he agreed. "It doesn't matter. One had to do what one could—that's what you mean, eh?"
She nodded. "Yes," she said.
"It's funny," said Hamid. "Eighteen months ago I was in Paris, and sore—sore. There was a lady—but it does n't matter. I thought there was nothing left for me in the whole world. And yet, when this plague came, and all these poor cattle here needed me, I felt—well, repaid. It was very curious."
He dreamed upon it for a while, smiling up at the ceiling, his lips moving soundlessly.
"Elise," he said at last. "That was her name. I thought she was everything for me—I was a fool. She had a great fat father with a complexion like a girl, so juicy and tender. 'You are a Mohammedan,' he said to me. 'No, it is not possible. And if you cease to be a Mohammedan, you will be a pauper—pas vrai?' He patted me on the shoulder. 'No, no,' he said. 'You must be good. Return to your country and establish a harem. It should console you.' He really seemed to think so. And then, when I returned to Constantinople, they sent me here."
"You were in Government service?" inquired Miss Gregory.
"Yes," he answered, with all his old curtness. But a moment later he smiled at her, as though to apologise for it. "It was intended as a punishment. But—I don't know."
"A punishment for what?" asked Miss Gregory.
"For Elise," he_replied. "For that incident. It offended the—well, it offended everybody. But it does n't matter now. They used to say at Oxford that you might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb; so I may as well—er—suffer for the poor beasts here as for that."
"At any rate," said Miss Gregory, "they 're grateful. You should see how they look at you when you pass by."
He smiled again; it was strange to see the large, generous contempt overcome the languor of his face.
"Grateful," he repeated. "This scum?"
"If you thought that," said Miss Gregory, "you would n't have stood by them as you did."
"Would n't I?" he said. "Oh, yes: I think so. Dogs or men, infidels or—or anything else—there's no such great difference."
The fever was near to him new. He moistened his lips from time to time and lay still, only repeating in e whisper: "No—such—great—difference."
The stillness wrought on him with all its dreadful punctuality. Miss Gregory, labouring expertly to stay it, found herself helpless; it was as though she had tried to stem a running stream with her hands. She brought to bear all her craft, all the arts and expedients he had taught and those others which were born of her own wisdom; she made a barrier of precautions about his life; and the plague never stayed its stride. Soon after the daylight had come, his senses returned to him; he looked up at her under brows knotted like a cord. He was wrung and limp like a wet cloth; only his face was clenched hard.
"This—hurts," he said.
It was the season of agony, well on time. Miss Gregory stepped back from the bedside appalled. For her, the night had passed in anxious toil; she had come to think that her care and industry were gaining ground, but here was the plague unabated. Hamid, holding himself rigidly against his throes, saw her stand aghast.
"I can—bear it," he said. "You—sit down."
The cold light of early morning shone in upon them, the colour of woe and disaster. It made the lamp pale and futile, and showed up the disorder of the small bed. Miss Gregory turned her eyes from Hamid's suffering and stared through the window. The soldiers across the water were huddled about their dull fires, and in the square behind them there was a small crowd about the door of the palace. It rose in her mind that this was not usual; she wondered if it could be that the Governor had returned at last. But she could not spare much thought upon it; behind her Hamid gasped and shivered on his bed, and each sound that he made was magnified to her ears. She dreaded that he would scream, as some of the others had screamed, drained of force and manhood by that crucial anguish.
He was speaking. "The opium," he said, in queer hurried tones, as though he feared a cry might escape with the words.
Miss Gregory rose, and hesitated. It was a thing on which they differed—the value of opium to the stricken. She held that it had a part in the weakness which succeeded the pain and was the prelude to death. Hamid always overruled her. "If they are spared the pain, it is something to the good," was his decision.
He stared up at her now out of a face that was damp and shining with strange sweat. She returned his look desperately.
"Opium," he repeated, "opium. For the love of—ah." A throe twisted him as he lay, and he bit off the word, with a harsh rasp of indrawn breath.
Miss Gregory still hesitated, and then flung herself on her knees beside him. She put both hands before her face to shut out the sight of his struggle, and spoke in a muffled voice of trouble.
"Hamid," she tried. "Hamid. Don't ask me—don't ask me. I can't bear it. Scream if you like. But"
He interrupted her. "For the love" he began, and again his speech was out off. Her forehead was bowed on the edge of his bed, and she could feel it shake as he writhed and quivered in his torment.
"It's a chance." she wailed. "It's a chance. I dare n't. Don't ask me, Hamid. You know it's a chance."
There was silence then, broken only by gasps from the sick man. Miss Gregory, huddled at the bedside, had strange thoughts. In that moment of stress, she remembered, of all things, the book she was to write, the great ripe book that should manifest her to the world. And she knew the flavour of emptiness that comes to the writer who has tasted life and knows it is not to he put into printed pages.
Hamid spoke again at last.
"All right," he said. "All right."
His words were still blurred and hurried. Miss Gregory's shoulders heaved, but she did not look up. She had found the point at which breeding gives away and trained demeanour crumples into mere humanity. For more than an hour she held her posture, till it seemed to her that the sound of Hamid's breathing had grown quieter and more regular.
She lifted her head and looked at him. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to sleep. Very cautiously she rose to her feet and bent over He was very white and unfamiliar, the mere shell of what he had been only twenty-four hours ago, but hope flamed violently in Miss Gregory. Here at last—a signal triumph—was a divergence from the plain course of the plague. He should have been wide-eyed and powerless, conscious only that his strength was gone: instead, his sleep seemed like a reprieve. She moved away lest her mere neighbourhood might disturb him, and went back to her chair by the window.
It was broad day now, hut the room still held the chill of the night. She drew a shawl about her, a gaudy, native thing with a fringe of tinsel, and let it droop about her head like the hood of some tawdry sultana.The sun was shining on the square of Andjerrah, and people, in great numbers, were going to and fro.
"It must be the Governor," she told herself. "The brute has thought it safe to come back at last."
She was full of hope, and watched the scene with interest. She regretted that she had not her field-glasses with her, for something noteworthy was plainly going forward. The folk were thickest about the gate of the palace, and as she watched, there came forth from the throng of them a little string of men who made across the square.
"Now that's curious," said Miss Gregory.
The foremost of them could he seen, even at the distance, to be wearing European dress, and he was coming towards the water. A few minutes later she made him out plainly—the elderly official with whom she had talked. There was no mistaking his ambling gait, his general droop, as of a wet fowl; soon she could see his grey moustache and the feeble, indeterminate face. But what was strange was that he came put the soldiers and, without a halt, paddled through the shallow water and began to come up the slope of sand towards the plague-stricken quarter. These who followed him came likewise; behind them the square was full of watching people.
"The Governor has come hack," Miss Gregory told herself with conviction. "He's sent these people to see what can be done."
She glanced at Hamid, who still slept, and then leaned forth from the window to watch. The gate in the wall was some fifty paces to her right. On his way to it, the elderly official happened to glance up and see. He halted forthwith and made her a slack little bow.
"Madame," he called.
Miss Gregory carried her finger to her lips.
"Hush!" she said, end looked to see that Hamid still slept.
Her caution seemed somewhat to perplex the elderly official; he came slowly forward till he stood directly below her, blinking upwards with eyes that reproached the brightness of the daylight. About him, on the loose sand, stood his followers, immaculate in their robes. By contrast with them, his frock-coat and fez seemed seedy.
He waited a whisper up to her. "Where is he?" he breathed.
"Who?" demanded Miss Gregory. "Hamid?"
She noted with astonishment that her question seemed to shock him. He ruffled himself like a very mild cock, and replied with uncertain dignity.
"The monsieur of whom I inquire," he said, "is named Hamid, among many other names."
"He's here," said Miss Gregory. "Ill, so don't make a noise."
"Ill?" said the Turk. He showed her the whites of his eyes. "Not—not the plague?"
Miss Gregory nodded. The elderly official gasped and, turning, seemed to interpret her words to those with him. There was a murmur of voices at once.
"Hush!" bade Miss Gregory again, sharply. "He's asleep."
"We will come in," said the elderly man, despondently, and led the way towards the gate.
It was all very curious, but the faculty of wonder, like any other faculty, can be exhausted. Miss Gregory opened the door of the little room and went out into the corridor to wait for her visitor. She was determined there should be no noise. He arrived almost immediately.
"I must see him," he said.
"He's asleep," whispered Miss Gregory fiercely. "Don't you dare wake him."
The grey man eyed her with dislike, and put a constraint upon himself. The forms of politeness were the vehicle of his mind.
"Mais—il le faut," he insisted. "I must see him." He hesitated. "I will take my boots off." Then carrying the boots in his hand, he followed her into the room and stood looking down at Hamid.
"Will he die?" he asked.
Miss Gregory turned on him in breathless fury. Unforgettable things were on her tongue, when the luckless creature dropped one of the boots. It rang on the bare floor like a hammer; Hamid stirred and opened his eyes.
"Ah!" he said weakly. "Vous voila."
The elderly official put the hand that held the other boot to his bosom and bowed over it profoundly. On the bed, Hamid smiled.
"The plague is out then," he questioned. "It has got into the town, eh?"
The grey Turk answered in his own language, bowing again. Miss Gregory stood by impatiently, comprehending nothing. Hamid's eye met hers with faint amusement.
"The quarantine has failed," he told her. "So it is raised. There is plague in Andjerrah. You can go out now."
"I'm not in any hurry," she answered stoutly. "But what does this man want with you?"
"Ask him yourself," he said.
She put the question to the grey official in French. "What do you want with monsieur?"
He seemed to consult Hamid with his eyes; Hamid nodded.
"I am the secretary of His Excellency the Governor of Andjerreh," answered the wan man and bowed towards the bed.
Miss Gregory stared dumbly. Hamid was still smiling. As she drew breath he spoke.
"The Governor is grateful to you," he said. "But—Governor or slave, there is no—such great—difference."
Miss Gregory nodded. She had her wits about her. She did not allow the situation to bewilder her.
"Quite so, " she said briskly. "And now it is time for Your Excellency's most excellent medicine."
•••••••
It was six weeks later that Miss Gregory, from her cushions at the stern of a dhow, watched Andjerrah slide back against the sky and become again a city of mystery. As they passed the last of the keys of sand the flag on the palace dipped three times. Miss Gregory waved her hand.
"He was wonderful," she said half aloud, as the flat roofs fell back from them; "wonderful, yes; but very wearing for a close acquaintance."