CHAPTER XIIA MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE
EDMUND had gone when I awoke, but he had left a note saying that he would be back early with what he called “the fixings for to-night.” He would remain all day, he said, and I was to go out and leave all to him.
I was glad to be at liberty, for I felt as though I had been imprisoned for weeks in the hotel, and I detested the sight and the thought of the place.
The Arab brought up a message that Brogden was waiting to see me. I went down, feeling for the first time prepared to enjoy his society, so I agreed at once to lunch with him. He had a car outside and wanted to take me for a run round the more interesting parts of the city. I readily accepted the offer; but I could not leave until I knew Edmund was in charge, and so I invented pretexts to detain him.
I took his advice as to the best boat to return home in, and asked for an introduction to his banker so that I might cash a cheque. Then I insisted that he should again procure his patent cock-tail. During this performance Edmund came into the hall with his bag. He saw me with a stranger and of course went upstairs without noticing me; so I was free at last to leave.
We drove at first among the narrow flagged streets of the native quarter, which I specially desired to see, and all the brilliantly coloured but squalid scene, which seemed so commonplace to my friend, had for me a wonder and a charm which kept me silent.
It was too soon for me when Brogden said, “I guess you’ve seen enough of this now—and smelt enough. Now we’ll have a spin.”
We came back through the central parts of the city, through squares and streets that might have belonged to Europe, along the wide, smooth surface of the Rue de la Porte Rosette, between rows of acacias with flaming blossoms, and stately tamarisks, past villas drenched in the purple of bougainvillia, dotted with the scarlet of the hibiscus, gardens with lawns kept green with infinite toil, and blazing geranium beds, and so out into the country among cotton-fields, orchards of figs and vines and plantations of dwarf bananas.
Everything was new and delightful to me, and the rush through the air completely conquered the heat.
I had forgotten my companion and all my anxieties in surrendering myself to the delight of unaccustomed colours, when suddenly Brogden said:
“Those two fellows are back with their damned boat.”
“The two Englishmen you told me about?”
“Yes, bad cess to them. They’ve done me again—for the time being. Only for the time being. I’m bound to have them. For one thing they haven’t a notion who’s on their track.”
I felt meaner than ever before. The whole squalor of the business in which I was involvedcame back on me, and seemed to take the colour out of the sunshine. Yet I felt I must play the hand through, however dirty my cards might be.
I was committed now to Edmund’s and Welfare’s side, and I must learn what I could, even though I should feel spotted with treachery all my life.
“What happened?” I asked.
“They got ahead of their time-table, or rather my time-table. One of my picket-boats picked them up only a few miles outside. The native rascal I was after was not with them, and there wasn’t a thing aboard that shouldn’t have been there. I’m practically certain they had a big lot of hashish with them, but they’d got rid of it. Unfortunately there was only a native officer in charge of my crowd, and naturally he got nothing out of them.”
“And what are you going to do now?”
“Oh, of course they’ve landed their rascal somewhere between this and the western frontier, and he is pretty sure to have the real cargo with him. He’s bound to make for Alexandria, and he’ll bring the stuff on camels to some hiding-place in the neighbourhood. I have every possible track watched, so I’m bound to get him.”
“What about the railway?” I asked with beating heart.
“Oh, no native dare put a load like that on the railway. It would be stopped and examined at once.”
I saw clearly for the first time how essential I had been for the working out of Captain Welfare’s plan, and I could not but admire the soundness of his dispositions. I thought they showed that combination of imaginative power and attention to detail which is said to distinguish great commanders.I remembered my first impressions of Welfare, and how I had instinctively thought of him as taking a lead in his line of life, whatever it might be. Yet he had come to seem small in his ways, and paltry in his aims. I wondered which was the real man, how much the Welfare I knew was but the product of untoward circumstance.
“What will you do about theAst—the ship?”
I had almost called her theAstarte, and shuddered at the thought of the consequences of such a slip. To be found out now! unmasked as another “renegade Englishman,” a member of the gang!
“I can’t touch her at present. I’ve no evidence yet. I must wait till I get this damned Arab.”
“Supposing she sails?”
“She won’t sail at present. They’re waiting till they get their stuff safely here. If they went it would only be to pick up another load at some place on the Greek coast, and I should take jolly good care to get them on the way back. Nothing would suit me better.”
We were back in the city now, and presently we pulled up at Brogden’s club.
Here we lunched very comfortably, and I met many of his friends and brother officials.
Everybody asked me if I had met so-and-so in Cairo. I felt with embarrassment that my social ignorance must seem almost uncanny. When I said my time in Egypt had been short and that I had spent it in sight-seeing, I knew I had utterly lost caste. To the official Englishman in a foreign country the only objects worthy of regard are other Englishmen and women.
One elderly and evidently important person informed me that he had been twenty-five years inEgypt and had never seen the Pyramids. “And I never mean to,” he added with a glance of mingled pride and indignation. I had not seen the Pyramids myself, but I felt it would be presumption on my part to say so, a futile attempt to regain the place I had lost in his esteem.
He evidently regarded the Pyramids as bad form. I think he suspected Cheops and the other potentates who built them of having done so with a view to attracting the undesirable tourists of a dim future. He might have dined with Cheops himself, had that been possible, but he was not one of those who could be expected to be amused by the remains of a pyramid. Was he not high in the Ministry of Finance, and decorated by a grateful Sovereign with the Order of the Bath as a reward for that magnificent inaccessibility to ideas which makes the British Official so universally loved and respected.
“No, sir,” he puffed, “no Pyramids for me, thank you.”
I did not think highly of this particular person, but the rest were very pleasant fellows, and Brogden was one of them. I was an outsider to them, and I was careful and troubled about many things at the moment. I could not enjoy their society as I would have done had they been my guests in my own vicarage. I desired very ardently to get away from them.
From the instinct of ordinary politeness, I tried to conceal this desire, but I fear that I failed. Anyhow, Brogden got up and said we must go and see his banker and the shipping agents.
I know I left that club with the reputation of a bore and a bit of a nuisance, but I console myself by reflecting that I was quite forgottenin five minutes. All the same I felt I had inflicted a further injury on the much-wronged Brogden. He had paid me the compliment of introducing me to his own little coterie in his favourite club. When one does that for a friend, one likes that friend to be a success. Among middle-aged men this is rarely possible. No doubt this is why our clubs at home debar the introduction of strange guests into the rooms frequented by members. I had not been a success, and as we went down in the lift I appreciated for the first time the profound knowledge of human nature that would prevent my taking Brogden into any room in my own club except one that suggests the waiting-room of a long-deceased dentist.
The fact is that an old friend, however valued, is apt to be a nuisance when he suddenly emerges from the Past and bursts in on the routine of the Present. In spite of his cordiality, I could not help knowing that Brogden wanted to be back among his friends of to-day, and at his usual rubber of auction.
Accordingly when our business was finished, I made excuses for getting away, and he let me go with shame-faced willingness.
I found Edmund busy with a block and tackle arrangement he had slung to one of the bedposts, and watched him in some surprise.
“We can lower six cases at a time with this,” he said. “I’m going to make a pair of shears out of a couple of these iron bedposts and make them fast over the bit of balcony outside the window. I reckon we shall be able to shift the lot in half an hour; quite as quickly as they will load it. I hope Welfare has got the felucca all right. Did you get rid of your pal?”
“I did. He’s fixed up for the evening at his club.”
“Good. He knows about theAstartebeing in, I suppose?”
“Yes; he told me all about it, and about searching her. He guesses Jakoub was landed just about where we did land. He is having all the routes to Alexandria watched.”
“Poor devil! Is he a decent chap?”
“He is, very.”
“It’s rotten having to let him down.”
“Of course it is. But the whole thing is rotten,” I said wearily.
“You still think this is the best scheme?”
“It is. Please don’t let us discuss it again. The alternative is unthinkable.”
“What is he doing about theAstarte?”
“Nothing. He has no evidence at present. I asked him what he would do if she sailed? He said, ‘She won’t sail. If she did it would be only to pick up another cargo, and he would have her then.’”
“I believe,” said Edmund, “he would have had us all right in the end—only for you.”
“Edmund,” I said after a long pause, “what about Jakoub?”
“Jakoub is at present our only risk. Fortunately he doesn’t know our name. Nobody knows that, but of course he could identify us. He can’t give us away unless he’s caught and done for himself, then of course he would. I don’t think he will be caught, but if not he will try blackmail.”
I shuddered at the thought of spending the rest of my life under the threats of this man. I remembered the impulse I had felt to shoot him,and dreaded the possibility of being subjected to such a temptation again.
“Couldn’t you take him home with you?”
“He wouldn’t come. And what could we do with him if he did? It would only make it easier for him to start his blackmailing. He’ll probably want to get to England in any case, and there’s no use our giving him a passage!”
A note came from Captain Welfare announcing that theAstartewould be ready to start in the morning, and that he would meet us with the felucca as arranged. He was too busy to join us then.
“He must have had a heavy day,” I said.
“Yes,” agreed Edmund. “It’s not everyone could have done it. But I must say for Welfare he’s a worker. Nothing will stop him when he’s fairly on a job.”
I am myself naturally very deficient in energy, and so perhaps have an exaggerated respect for it in other people. I detest the photographs one sometimes sees of raucous politicians declaiming with wide-open mouths, uplifted fists, and over-developed facial muscles. To many, I know, such men are the type of energy and what they call “efficiency.” The men whom I have worshipped, whose names I have seldom known, are those who have made great roads and bridges in remote places, who have conceived ships and mighty engines, and the few god-like ones who have written the great books of the world.
Between such men and myself there is a great gulf fixed; but between me and the loud-voiced politician there is only my own fastidiousness.
Some of this nobler energy Captain Welfare possessed in his degree. His intelligence wasof quite a high order; he had the face and aspect of a man intended for doing things on a large scale; he had the simplicity and lovableness of a great man, and he was unhampered by what we call “higher education.”
Yet beyond escaping from the dry-salter’s shop he had done nothing with his life. He had seen men and cities, but he had not known them; he had certainly not commanded them. Had he succeeded in his first primitive ambition of making money, it might have been replaced by a nobler one, and in that he would have succeeded too. But he had failed. Poking about amid adversity he had done “shady” things; he had done this one blindly dishonourable thing. But successful men, who have the choice of avoiding dishonour, have done far worse things, and I believed that as a successful, happy man, Welfare would have done nothing base.
What is the flaw in such men as this, these many men who ought to bequeath something to their race? Is it all the bishop’s “want of opportunity”? Was Edmund also to become one of them? That was to me the most poignant question.
As there was no chance of Brogden’s returning we ventured to lock the door of our room and dine together downstairs. But it was not a festive meal.
The cloud of anxiety for the enterprise in hand was dark over us, and beyond that the sky of the future looked gloomy enough. There was the threat of Jakoub’s malevolence and, more serious to me, the question of Edmund’s eventual future.
I tried to get him to talk of this, but it was as though he could not see himself apart from the associations of his past.
“How can I get rid of it?” he asked. “I am only avoiding exposure now for your sake—and the family name. Otherwise I believe I should feel better if I went through the mill and took what I have earned; prison for a bit, and then the fo’c’sle for the rest of my time. It would be a way of disappearing, and that’s all I want now.”
“Naturally; but you have no right to think only of what you want,” I said, “you are wanted yourself.”
“Yes, by the police!”
“Don’t scoff just now, old boy. Your services are wanted. I know you have capacities that have never been used, never touched. The plain fact of the matter is that up to now you have lived and acted as a boy—amusing yourself. I don’t want to rub it in, but now you have got to make up for it by giving a man’s work to the world while you can.”
“How can I? What can I do? I can do nothing but sail a ship. Ten thousand old duffers can do that better.”
“There is just one thing you can do that everyone cannot do. You can command.”
All men like to be told they are capable of command, and Edmund did not question my statement.
“Much chance I have now of commanding anything or anybody,” was all he said.
“Remember you come of the officer class,” I said. “We have ceased to be a ruling class. I know it’s old-fashioned even to think we are a class. The vulgar call it ‘snobbish.’ But heredity remains a law of Nature, and democracy is only an invention of man.”
“I don’t see that social theories are going to help us much just now.”
“Then I’ll come down to hard facts. However wrong and corrupt it may be, we are still to some extent a privileged class. And owing to that fact you can still get a fresh start, which, to be perfectly frank, a plebeian could not get.”
“How do you mean?” he asked with an eagerness that greatly encouraged me.
I told him then of the bishop’s suggestion about the Colonial Service.
Edmund made no reply. He was leaning his elbows on the table, balancing a spoon on the edge of a knife. The spoon see-sawed dangerously, and I watched it in an agony lest it should fall. It seemed as though our fate somehow depended on its equilibrium.
It swung slowly to a balance and came to rest.
“Do you think,” Edmund asked, watching the spoon, “that the bishop would still do that, or try to do it, if he knew all this business?”
“I don’t know. He will have to be told first.”
“Of course.”
“I shall tell him the whole story. Would you refuse such an offer if it came to you?” I asked, fearful that my voice had betrayed my eagerness.
He laid the spoon carefully down on the table and withdrew the knife.
“No,” he said, “I should not refuse it, after what you have said.”
I had gained all that I wanted, and much more than I could have expected so soon. There was no more to be said and no excuse for our lingering at the table.
We went out into the lounge to drink our coffee, both looking at English illustrated papers a fortnight old. Their dullness seemed intolerable inthis weary gap of inactivity that had to be lived through before the time came for our final risk.
“I can’t stand this any longer,” said Edmund suddenly, throwing down a sheet of snapshots of advertising peeresses at race-meetings, foolishly photographed in the awful ungainliness which the camera reveals in the act of walking.
“Let’s go out and walk or drive somewhere.”
“We can’t both leave. It’s not safe,” I reminded him.
I persuaded him to go out alone, for I felt I could better endure the irksomeness without him.
I returned to my room and sat by the window looking out over the sea, and listening to the sound of its waves on the sea-wall. The sound of the sea is always soothing and always melancholy, but it is especially so in distant places, for the sea has but one voice, everywhere its murmur is the same that we hear at home.
Edmund came in about midnight, and we sat together in the dark by the window.
Next door to the hotel there was a café, and its chairs and tables were spread out over the wide footpath. We could see under its electric lights the tops and tassels of tarbooshes, and the white discs of straw hats whose owners sat sipping coffee or lager beer, and eating olives and strange sweets. Most of them were talking loudly, and a strange babel of Arabic, Greek, Italian and French came up to us from the pavement.
“I have seen the policeman on duty,” said Edmund, “and put him all right with fifty piastres. The street will be as quiet as the grave when that infernal café shuts up.”
“It closes at one,” I said.
The moon, now some four days past the full,was but newly risen, but star-light is very real in Egypt, and presently we could just make out the pale pointed sail of a felucca going slowly close-hauled to windward.
“That will be Welfare,” said Edmund.
“Isn’t he too soon?”
“He’s all right. He’ll go up to windward till he sees the lights go out, then take the sail off her and drift down here. I arranged to switch the light on and off a bit to show him where we are.”
All the windows on our side of the hotel were dark, as the building fortunately faced on to the side street. The company at the café was thinning, and the guests who remained were calling for their final drinks.
“It’s about time to get to work,” Edmund said, “but I’m going to have a whisky and soda brought up. It will look more natural to Van Ermengen if he has any suspicions; besides, I want it.”
“No, there is nothing else to-night,” he said to the Arab who brought up the tray, and then he started methodically to take one of the bedsteads to pieces.
He took the two long pieces that formed the sides of the bed and lashed the ends of them together, crossing each other. From this cross he slung the block he had been experimenting with, and rove an end of the long rope through it.
I held the rods for him as he worked, greatly admiring the sailor-like precision and neatness, the economy of rope and of knots, with which the implement was completed. He put out the light and brought the whole arrangement to the window, and in a few seconds he had all theessentials of a jib-crane projecting over the balcony and firmly lashed to it.
He knotted the end of the rope into a double bowline (a bowline on the bight, he called it) which just held six of our packing-cases securely.
“Now I think we’ve earned a drink,” he said quite cheerfully, as he switched on the light again, and filled a couple of tumblers.
“We shall have to work in our socks and move about as little as possible,” he explained. “As soon as Welfare is ready I want you to hand me the cases. I’ll put them on the parapet and get them slung. You must hang on to the rope and take the strain when I get them over the side. Then lower slowly. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly.”
“I’m sorry to give you so much of the hard work, but I must see to the slinging myself. If a case slipped and fell—well, that would about close the operation.”
“I don’t mind the work,” I assured him, “I only wish we were at it.”
“It won’t be long now. The café is shutting up.”
I looked out of the window. Tired waiters were dragging in chairs from the pavement, and whisking the stained cloths off the very tables at which a few guests lingered, reluctant to leave. Others were closing shutters with a rattle.
The moonlight was steadily increasing, and now lit up the pink and yellow plaster of the tall shabby houses that faced the sea between us and the native quarter. It lit the minarets of a couple of third-rate mosques behind the houses, giving them an hour of delicacy and beauty which the crude sun denied them. The lamps along the sea-front paled, and the lights in windows disappearedone by one. The last tram crashed by, and a belatedgharrypassed with some shouting youths in it. Then silence settled down on the city as the moon raised herself above the buildings east of us, and “with delight looked round her when the heavens were bare.”
Edmund noiselessly nicked the switch up and down three or four times, and lighting a cigarette came back to the window where we waited together in silence.
Presently a dark spot appeared on the sea to windward, and soon we could see the felucca dropping down-wind towards us. The big lateen sail was stowed and she came slowly on. Not a word was spoken as she sidled up to the sea-wall, which hid all but the top of her swaying spar.
In another moment Captain Welfare with a couple of natives was looking up at us from the pavement.
“All right?” he asked in a whisper.
“All right.”
“Lower away, then!”
The first load was ready and we lowered it as arranged. The rope ran noiselessly on the carefully oiled pully. While the natives carried the cases to the boat, we got another load ready. Nobody stirred in the hotel. Agharrycame past at walking pace; but we heard it coming and put the light out. Captain Welfare stood close to the wall below us. The driver passed on without taking any notice. He delayed us about three minutes and made my heart beat unpleasantly. There were just nine loads for our derrick; but thanks to Edmund’s arrangements the whole job was finished noiselessly and without a hitch in less than forty minutes.
As the last load reached the ground Captain Welfare whispered up, “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye and good luck!” I answered, and without another word he went across the road.
I saw him clamber clumsily over the sea-wall, and then the felucca was pulling out to sea. Just as she got out of sight I heard the creak of the halyard as they got the sail on her.
I came back into the room, exhausted and streaming with sweat but happy. It was hard to realise that this most difficult and dreaded part of our task was actually over and without the slightest mishap.
I thought of Pilgrim and his rejoicing when he at last got rid of his burden. Mine had indeed been grievous, and, like Pilgrim’s, it had been a burden of sin, even if not my own.
“Thank God that’s over!” I said.
“Yes, it’s a good job it’s gone so well. By Jove! how hot you are. Strip and have a sponge down and get into your pyjamas. I must put this bed to rights and pack the tackle.”
I took his advice and made myself comfortable as he plainly needed no help.
“Now I think we’ll have our final drink. Then I’ll have a couple of hours’ doss, and be off soon after dawn. I must not leave poor old Welfare too long in that beastly felucca. He won’t be having a very comfortable time, I can tell you. If those natives guessed what they had aboard I wouldn’t give much for his life.”
“Good Heavens! I never thought of that!”
“I know you didn’t. We didn’t want you to. But he has all ready to blow up the boat and cargo if he’s attacked. He would run no risk of the stuff getting back into circulation. Yes; on the wholeold Welfare’s part of this racket is one of the few really courageous things I have known a man do.”
And I had never said a word to him! I had not known!
“He’s as pleased as punch about it,” continued Edmund. “He’s a sentimental old boy, and he has a feeling that he’s doing something to make up for the way he has treated you.”
“I shall be miserable until I know he is safe,” I said.
“Oh, the odds are on him! Even if he has to hold the crew off with his revolver! Those fellows are easily cowed, and they know theAstarteis coming up. The danger is that they may rush him in the dark. Well, here’s luck to him!”
But I could not take it so lightly, and I was certain that Edmund did not in his heart. I understood that he had felt bound to tell me in justice to Welfare, and now this anxiety would overshadow all the others until the suspense were over.
“You’re about done, anyhow,” Edmund said; “do get to bed. You’ll sleep all right.”
“I think I will. I am tired, but wake me before you go, if I’m asleep.”
“Shall I?”
“Of course. I want to say good-bye.”
The dawn had come and it was daylight when I was awakened by hearing him moving about the room.
“I shouldn’t have had the heart to wake you,” he said. “Good-bye. I say, you’ve been a brick. I wish I could tell you. Good-bye.”
And with this he left the room and went on his way.