The Four Feathers Part 36

"But you have your Crimean nights," said Durrance, cheerfully.

Feversham shook his head. "There have been none since Harry went away. I had no heart for them," he said slowly. For a second the mask was lifted and his stern features softened. He had suffered much during these five lonely years of his old age, though not one of his acquaintances up to this moment had ever detected a look upon his face or heard a sentence from his lips which could lead them so to think. He had shown a stubborn front to the world; he had made it a matter of pride that no one should be able to point a finger at him and say, "There's a man struck down." But on this one occasion and in these few words he revealed to Durrance the depth of his grief. Durrance understood how unendurable the chatter of his friends about the old days of war in the snowy trenches would have been. An anecdote recalling some particular act of courage would hurt as keenly as a story of cowardice. The whole history of his lonely life at Broad Place was laid bare in that simple statement that there had been no Crimean nights for he had no heart for them.

The wheels of the carriage rattled on the gravel.

"Good-bye," said Durrance, and he held out his hand.

"By the way," said Feversham, "to organise this escape from Omdurman will cost a great deal of money. Sutch is a poor man. Who is paying?"

"I am."

Feversham shook Durrance's hand in a firm clasp.

"It is my right, of course," he said.

"Certainly. I will let you know what it costs."

"Thank you."

General Feversham accompanied his visitor to the door. There was a question which he had it in his mind to ask, but the question was delicate. He stood uneasily on the steps of the house.

"Didn't I hear, Durrance," he said with an air of carelessness, "that you were engaged to Miss Eustace?"

"I think I said that Harry would regain all that he had lost except his career," said Durrance.

He stepped into the carriage and drove off to the station. His work was ended. There was nothing more for him now to do, except to wait at Wiesbaden and pray that Sutch might succeed. He had devised the plan, it remained for those who had eyes wherewith to see to execute it.

General Feversham stood upon the steps looking after the carriage until it disappeared among the pines. Then he walked slowly back into the hall. "There is no reason why he should not come back," he said. He looked up at the pictures. The dead Fevershams in their uniforms would not be disgraced. "No reason in the world," he said. "And, please G.o.d, he will come back soon." The dangers of an escape from the Dervish city remote among the sands began to loom very large on his mind. He owned to himself that he felt very tired and old, and many times that night he repeated his prayer, "Please G.o.d, Harry will come back soon," as he sat erect upon the bench which had once been his wife's favourite seat, and gazed out across the moonlit country to the Suss.e.x Downs.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE HOUSE OF STONE

These were the days before the great mud wall was built about the House of Stone in Omdurman. Only a thorn zareeba as yet enclosed that noisome prison and the s.p.a.ce about it. It stood upon the eastern border of the town, surely the most squalid capital of any empire since the world began. Not a flower bloomed in a single corner. There was no gra.s.s nor the green shade of any tree. A brown and stony plain, burnt by the sun, and, built upon it a straggling narrow city of hovels crawling with vermin and poisoned with disease.

Between the prison and the Nile no houses stood, and at this time the prisoners were allowed, so long as daylight lasted, to stumble in their chains down the half-mile of broken sloping earth to the Nile bank, so that they might draw water for their use and perform their ablutions.

For the native or the negro, then, escape was not so difficult. For along that bank the dhows were moored and they were numerous; the river traffic, such as there was of it, had its harbour there, and the wide foresh.o.r.e made a convenient market-place. Thus the open s.p.a.ce between the river and the House of Stone was thronged and clamorous all day, captives rubbed elbows with their friends, concerted plans of escape, or then and there slipped into the thickest of the crowd and made their way to the first blacksmith, with whom the price of iron outweighed any risk he took. But even on their way to the blacksmith's shop, their fetters called for no notice in Omdurman. Slaves wore them as a daily habit, and hardly a street in all that long brown treeless squalid city was ever free from the clink of a man who walked in chains.

But for the European escape was another matter. There were not so many white prisoners but that each was a marked man. Besides relays of camels stationed through the desert, much money, long preparations, and above all, devoted natives who would risk their lives, were the first necessities for their evasion. The camels might be procured and stationed, but it did not follow that their drivers would remain at the stations; the long preparations might be made and the whip of the gaoler overset them at the end by flogging the captive within an inch of his life, on a suspicion that he had money; the devoted servant might shrink at the last moment. Colonel Trench began to lose all hope. His friends were working for him, he knew. For at times the boy who brought his food into the prison would bid him be ready; at times, too, when at some parade of the Khalifa's troops he was shown in triumph as an emblem of the destiny of all the Turks, a man perhaps would jostle against his camel and whisper encouragements. But nothing ever came of the encouragements. He saw the sun rise daily beyond the bend of the river behind the tall palm trees of Khartum and burn across the sky, and the months dragged one after the other.

On an evening towards the end of August, in that year when Durrance came home blind from the Soudan, he sat in a corner of the enclosure watching the sun drop westwards towards the plain with an agony of antic.i.p.ation. For however intolerable the heat and burden of the day, it was as nothing compared with the horrors which each night renewed. The moment of twilight came and with it Idris es Saier, the great negro of the Gawaamah tribe, and his fellow-gaolers.

"Into the House of Stone!" he cried.

Praying and cursing, with the sound of the pitiless whips falling perpetually upon the backs of the hindmost, the prisoners jostled and struggled at the narrow entrance to the prison house. Already it was occupied by some thirty captives, lying upon the swamped mud floor or supported against the wall in the last extremities of weakness and disease. Two hundred more were driven in at night and penned there till morning. The room was perhaps thirty feet square, of which four feet were occupied by a solid pillar supporting the roof. There was no window in the building; a few small apertures near the roof made a pretence of giving air, and into this foul and pestilent hovel the prisoners were packed, screaming and fighting. The door was closed upon them, utter darkness replaced the twilight, so that a man could not distinguish even the outlines of the heads of the neighbours who wedged him in.

Colonel Trench fought like the rest. There was a corner near the door which he coveted at that moment with a greater fierceness of desire than he had ever felt in the days when he had been free. Once in that corner, he would have some shelter from the blows, the stamping feet, the bruises of his neighbour's shackles; he would have, too, a support against which to lean his back during the ten interminable hours of suffocation.

"If I were to fall! If I were to fall!"

That fear was always with him when he was driven in at night. It worked in him like a drug producing madness. For if a man once went down amid that yelling, struggling throng, he never got up again--he was trampled out of shape. Trench had seen such victims dragged from the prison each morning; and he was a small man. Therefore he fought for his corner in a frenzy like a wild beast, kicking with his fetters, thrusting with his elbows, diving under this big man's arm, burrowing between two others, tearing at their clothes, using his nails, his fists, and even striking at heads with the chain which dangled from the iron ring about his neck.

He reached the corner in the end, streaming with heat and gasping for breath; the rest of the night he would spend in holding it against all comers.

"If I were to fall!" he gasped. "O G.o.d, if I were to fall!" and he shouted aloud to his neighbour--for in that clamour nothing less than a shout was audible--"Is it you, Ibrahim?" and a like shout answered him, "Yes, Effendi."

Trench felt some relief. Between Ibrahim, a great tall Arab of the Hadendoas, and Trench, a friendship born of their common necessities had sprung up. There were no prison rations at Omdurman; each captive was dependent upon his own money or the charity of his friends outside. To Trench from time to time there came money from his friends, brought secretly into the prison by a native who had come up from a.s.souan or Suakin; but there were long periods during which no help came to him, and he lived upon the charity of the Greeks who had sworn conversion to the Mahdist faith, or starved with such patience as he could. There were times, too, when Ibrahim had no friend to send him his meal into the prison. And thus each man helped the other in his need. They stood side by side against the wall at night.

"Yes, Effendi, I am here," and groping with his hand in the black darkness, he steadied Trench against the wall.

A fight of even more than common violence was raging in an extreme corner of the prison, and so closely packed were the prisoners that with each advance of one combatant and retreat of the other, the whole jostled crowd swayed in a sort of rhythm, from end to end, from side to side. But they swayed, fighting to keep their feet, fighting even with their teeth, and above the din and noise of their hard breathing, the clank of their chains, and their imprecations, there rose now and then a wild sobbing cry for mercy, or an inhuman shriek, stifled as soon as uttered, which showed that a man had gone down beneath the stamping feet. Missiles, too, were flung across the prison, even to the foul earth gathered from the floor, and since none knew from what quarter they were flung, heads were battered against heads in the effort to avoid them. And all these things happened in the blackest darkness.

For two hours Trench stood in that black prison ringing with noise, rank with heat, and there were eight hours to follow before the door would be opened and he could stumble into the clean air and fall asleep in the zareeba. He stood upon tiptoe that he might lift his head above his fellows, but even so he could barely breathe, and the air he breathed was moist and sour. His throat was parched, his tongue was swollen in his mouth and stringy like a dried fig. It seemed to him that the imagination of G.o.d could devise no worse h.e.l.l than the House of Stone on an August night in Omdurman. It could add fire, he thought, but only fire.

"If I were to fall!" he cried, and as he spoke his h.e.l.l was made perfect, for the door was opened. Idris es Saier appeared in the opening.

"Make room," he cried, "make room," and he threw fire among the prisoners to drive them from the door. Lighted tufts of dried gra.s.s blazed in the darkness and fell upon the bodies of the prisoners. The captives were so crowded they could not avoid the missiles; in places, even, they could not lift their hands to dislodge them from their shoulders or their heads.

"Make room," cried Idris. The whips of his fellow-gaolers enforced his command, the lashes fell upon all within reach, and a little s.p.a.ce was cleared within the door. Into that s.p.a.ce a man was flung and the door closed again.

Trench was standing close to the door; in the dim twilight which came through the doorway he had caught a glimpse of the new prisoner, a man heavily ironed, slight of figure, and bent with suffering.

"He will fall," he said, "he will fall to-night. G.o.d! if I were to!" and suddenly the crowd swayed against him, and the curses rose louder and shriller than before.

The new prisoner was the cause. He clung to the door with his face against the panels, through the c.h.i.n.ks of which actual air might come.

Those behind plucked him from his vantage, jostled him, pressed him backwards that they might take his place. He was driven as a wedge is driven by a hammer, between this prisoner and that, until at last he was flung against Colonel Trench.

The ordinary instincts of kindness could not live in the nightmare of that prison house. In the daytime, outside, the prisoners were often drawn together by their bond of a common misery; the faithful as often as not helped the infidel. But to fight for life during the hours of darkness without pity or cessation was the one creed and practice of the House of Stone. Colonel Trench was like the rest. The need to live, if only long enough to drink one drop of water in the morning and draw one clean mouthful of fresh air, was more than uppermost in his mind. It was the only thought he had.

"Back!" he cried violently, "back, or I strike!"--and, as he wrestled to lift his arm above his head that he might strike the better, he heard the man who had been flung against him incoherently babbling English.

"Don't fall," cried Trench, and he caught his fellow-captive by the arm.

"Ibrahim, help! G.o.d, if he were to fall!" and while the crowd swayed again and the shrill cries and curses rose again, deafening the ears, piercing the brain, Trench supported his companion, and bending down his head caught again after so many months the accent of his own tongue. And the sound of it civilised him like the friendship of a woman.

He could not hear what was said; the din was too loud. But he caught, as it were, shadows of words which had once been familiar to him, which had been spoken to him, which he had spoken to others--as a matter of course. In the House of Stone they sounded most wonderful. They had a magic, too. Meadows of gra.s.s, cool skies, and limpid rivers rose in grey quiet pictures before his mind. For a moment he was insensible to his parched throat, to the stench of that prison house, to the oppressive blackness. But he felt the man whom he supported totter and slip, and again he cried to Ibrahim:--

"If he were to fall!"

Ibrahim helped as only he could. Together they fought and wrestled until those about them yielded, crying:--

"Shaitan! They are mad!"

They cleared a s.p.a.ce in that corner and, setting the Englishman down upon the ground, they stood in front of him lest he should be trampled.

And behind him upon the ground Trench heard every now and then in a lull of the noise the babble of English.