“It was the schooner Hesperus
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter
To bear him company.
—————————-
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s woe!”
Only it was not the schooner Hesperus, and she did not sail the wintry sea. It was the stern-wheeled tub Amenhotep, which churned her way up and down the Nile, scraping over sand banks, butting the shores with gaiety embarrassing—for it was the time of cholera, just before the annual rise of the Nile. Fielding Bey, the skipper, had not taken his little daughter, for he had none; but he had taken little Dicky Donovan, who had been in at least three departments of the Government, with advantage to all.
Dicky was dining with Fielding at the Turf Club, when a telegram came saying that cholera had appeared at a certain village on the Nile. Fielding had dreaded this, had tried to make preparation for it, had begged of the Government this reform and that—to no purpose. He knew that the saving of the country from an epidemic lay with his handful of Englishmen and the faithful native officials; but chiefly with the Englishmen. He was prepared only as a forlorn hope is prepared, with energy, with personal courage, with knowledge; and never were these more needed.
With the telegram in his hand, he thought of his few English assistants, and sighed; for the game they would play was the game of Hercules and Death over the body of Alcestis.
Dicky noted the sigh, read the telegram, drank another glass of claret, lighted a cigarette, drew his coffee to him, and said: “The Khedive is away—I’m off duty; take me.”
Fielding looked surprised, yet with an eye of hope. If there was one man in Egypt who could do useful work in the business, it was little Dicky Donovan, who had a way with natives such as no man ever had in Egypt; who knew no fear of anything mortal; who was as tireless as a beaver, as keen-minded as a lynx is sharp-eyed. It was said to Dicky’s discredit that he had no heart, but Fielding knew better. When Dicky offered himself now, Fielding said, almost feverishly: “But, dear old D., you don’t see—”
“Don’t I?—Well, then,
“‘What are the blessings of the sight?—
Oh, tell your poor blind boy!’”
What Fielding told him did not alter his intention, nor was it Fielding’s wish that it should, though he felt it right to warn the little man what sort of thing was in store for them.
“As if I don’t know, old lime-burner!” answered Dicky coolly.
In an hour they were on the Amenhotep, and in two hours they were on the way—a floating hospital—to the infected district of Kalamoun. There the troubles began. It wasn’t the heat, and it wasn’t the work, and it wasn’t the everlasting care of the sick: it was the ceaseless hunt for the disease-stricken, the still, tireless opposition of the natives, the remorseless deception, the hopeless struggle against the covert odds. With nothing behind: no support from the Government, no adequate supplies, few capable men; and all the time the dead, inert, dust-powdered air; the offices of policeman, doctor, apothecary, even undertaker and gravedigger, to perform; and the endless weeks of it all. A handful of good men under two leaders of nerve, conscience and ability, to fight an invisible enemy, which, gaining headway, would destroy its scores of thousands!
At the end of the first two months Fielding Bey became hopeless.
“We can’t throttle it,” he said to Dicky Donovan. “They don’t give us the ghost of a chance. To-day I found a dead-un hid in an oven under a heap of flour to be used for to-morrow’s baking; I found another doubled up in a cupboard, and another under a pile of dourha which will be ground into flour.”
“With twenty ghaffirs I beat five cane and dourha fields this morning,” said Dicky. “Found three cases. They’d been taken out of the village during the night.”
“Bad ones?”
“So so. They’ll be worse before they’re better. That was my morning’s flutter. This afternoon I found the huts these gentlemen call their homes. I knocked holes in the roofs per usual, burnt everything that wasn’t wood, let in the light o’ heaven, and splashed about limewash and perchloride. That’s my day’s tot-up. Any particular trouble?” he added, eyeing Fielding closely.
Fielding fretfully jerked his foot on the floor, and lighted his pipe, the first that day.
“Heaps. I’ve put the barber in prison, and given the sarraf twenty lashes for certifying that the death of the son of the Mamour was el aadah—the ordinary. It was one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen. He fell ill at ten and was dead at two, the permis d’inhumation was given at four, and the usual thing occurred: the bodywashers got the bedding and clothing, and the others the coverlet. God only knows who’ll wear that clothing, who’ll sleep in that bed!”
“If the Lord would only send them sense, we’d supply sublimate solution—douche and spray, and zinc for their little long boxes of bones,” mused Dicky, his eyes half shut, as he turned over in his hands some scarabs a place-hunting official had brought him that day. “Well, that isn’t all?” he added, with a quick upward glance and a quizzical smile. His eyes, however, as they fell on Fielding’s, softened in a peculiar way, and a troubled look flashed through them; for Fielding’s face was drawn and cold, though the eyes were feverish, and a bright spot burned on his high cheek-bones.
“No, it isn’t all, Dicky. The devil’s in the whole business. Steady, sullen opposition meets us at every hand. Norman’s been here—rode over from Abdallah—twenty-five miles. A report’s going through the native villages, started at Abdallah, that our sanitary agents are throwing yellow handkerchiefs in the faces of those they’re going to isolate.”
“That’s Hoskai Bey’s yellow handkerchief. He’s a good man, but he blows his nose too much, and blows it with a flourish.... Has Norman gone back?”
“No, I’ve made him lie down in my cabin. He says he can’t sleep, says he can only work. He looks ten years older. Abdallah’s an awful place, and it’s a heavy district. The Mamour there’s a scoundrel. He has influenced the whole district against Norman and our men. Norman—you know what an Alexander-Hannibal baby it is, all the head of him good for the best sort of work anywhere, all the fat heart of him dripping sentiment—gave a youngster a comfit the other day. By some infernal accident the child fell ill two days afterwards—it had been sucking its father’s old shoe—and Norman just saved its life by the skin of his teeth. If the child had died, there’d have been a riot probably. As it is, there’s talk that we’re scattering poisoned sweetmeats to spread the disease. He’s done a plucky thing, though....” He paused. Dicky looked up inquiringly, and Fielding continued. “There’s a fellow called Mustapha Kali, a hanger-on of the Mudir of the province. He spread a report that this business was only a scare got up by us; that we poisoned the people and buried them alive. What does Norman do? He promptly arrests him, takes him to the Mudir, and says that the brute must be punished or he’ll carry the matter to the Khedive.”
“Here’s to you, Mr. Norman!” said Dicky, with a little laugh. “What does the Mudir do?”
“Doesn’t know what to do. He tells Norman to say to me that if he puts the fellow in prison there’ll be a riot, for they’ll make a martyr of him. If he fines him it won’t improve matters. So he asks me to name a punishment which’ll suit our case. He promises to give it ‘his most distinguished consideration.’”
“And what’s your particular poison for him?” asked Dicky, with his eyes on the Cholera Hospital a few hundred yards away.
“I don’t know. If he’s punished in the ordinary way it will only make matters worse, as the Mudir says. Something’s needed that will play our game and turn the tables on the reptile too.”
“A sort of bite himself with his own fangs, eh?” Dicky seemed only idly watching the moving figures by the hospital.
“Yes, but what is it? I can’t inoculate him with bacilli. That’s what’d do the work, I fancy.”
“Pocket your fancy, Fielding,” answered Dicky. “Let me have a throw.”
“Go on. If you can’t hit it off, it’s no good, for my head doesn’t think these days: it only sees, and hears, and burns.”
Dicky eyed Fielding keenly, and then, pouring out some whiskey for himself, put the bottle on the floor beside him, casually as it were. Then he said, with his girlish laugh, not quite so girlish these days: “I’ve got his sentence pat—it’ll meet the case, or you may say, ‘Cassio, never more be officer of mine.’”
He drew over a piece of paper lying on the piano—for there was a piano on the Amenhotep, and with what seemed an audacious levity Fielding played in those rare moments when they were not working or sleeping; and Fielding could really play! As Dicky wrote he read aloud in a kind of legal monotone:
The citizen Mustapha Kali having asserted that there is no cholera,
and circulated various false statements concerning the treatment of
patients, is hereby appointed as hospital-assistant for three
months, in the Cholera Hospital of Kalamoun, that he may have
opportunity of correcting his opinions.
—Signed Ebn ben Hari, Mudir of Abdallah.
Fielding lay back and laughed—the first laugh on his lips for a fortnight. He laughed till his dry, fevered lips took on a natural moisture, and he said at last: “You’ve pulled it off, D. That’s masterly. You and Norman have the only brains in this show. I get worse every day; I do—upon my soul!”
There was a curious anxious look in Dicky’s eyes, but he only said: “You like it? Think it fills the bill, eh?”
“If the Mudir doesn’t pass the sentence I’ll shut up shop.” He leaned over anxiously to Dicky and gripped his arm. “I tell you this pressure of opposition has got to be removed, or we’ll never get this beast of an epidemic under, but we’ll go under instead, my boy.”
“Oh, we’re doing all right,” Dicky answered, with only apparent carelessness. “We’ve got inspection of the trains, we’ve got some sort of command of the foreshores, we’ve got the water changed in the mosques, we’ve closed the fountains, we’ve stopped the markets, we’ve put Sublimate Pasha and Limewash Effendi on the war-path, and—”
“And the natives believe in lighted tar-barrels and a cordon sanitaire! No, D., things must take a turn, or the game’s lost and we’ll go with it. Success is the only thing that’ll save their lives—and ours: we couldn’t stand failure in this. A man can walk to the gates of hell to do the hardest trick, and he’ll come back one great blister and live, if he’s done the thing he set out for; but if he doesn’t do it, he falls into the furnace. He never comes back. Dicky, things must be pulled our way, or we go to deep damnation.”
Dicky turned a little pale, for there was high nervous excitement in Fielding’s words; and for a moment he found it hard to speak. He was about to say something, however, when Fielding continued.
“Norman there,”—he pointed to the deck-cabin, “Norman’s the same. He says it’s do or die; and he looks it. It isn’t like a few fellows besieged by a host. For in that case you wait to die, and you fight to the last, and you only have your own lives. But this is different. We’re fighting to save these people from themselves; and this slow, quiet, deadly work, day in, day out, in the sickening sun and smell-faugh! the awful smell in the air—it kills in the end, if you don’t pull your game off. You know it’s true.”
His eyes had an eager, almost prayerful look; he was like a child in his simple earnestness. His fingers moved over the maps on the table, in which were little red and white and yellow flags, the white flags to mark the towns and villages where they had mastered the disease, the red flags to mark the new ones attacked, the yellow to indicate those where the disease was raging. His fingers touched one of the flags, and he looked down.
“See, D. Here are two new places attacked to-day.
“I must ride over to Abdallah when Norman goes. It’s all so hopeless!”
“Things will take a turn,” rejoined Dicky, with a forced gaiety. “You needn’t ride over to Abdallah. I’ll go with Norman, and what’s more I’ll come back here with Mustapha Kali.”
“You’ll go to the Mudir?” asked Fielding eagerly. He seemed to set so much store by this particular business.
“I’ll bring the Mudir too, if there’s any trouble,” said Dicky grimly; though it is possible he did not mean what he said.
Two hours later Fielding, Dicky, and Norman were in conference, extending their plans of campaign. Fielding and Norman were eager and nervous, and their hands and faces seemed to have taken on the arid nature of the desert. Before they sat down Dicky had put the bottle of whiskey out of easy reach; for Fielding, under ordinary circumstances the most abstemious of men, had lately, in his great fatigue and overstrain, unconsciously emptied his glass more often than was wise for a campaign of long endurance. Dicky noticed now, as they sat round the table, that Norman’s hand went to the coffee-pot as Fielding’s had gone to his glass. What struck him as odd also was that Fielding seemed to have caught something of Norman’s manner. There was the same fever in the eyes, though Norman’s face was more worn and the eyes more sunken. He looked like a man that was haunted. There was, too, a certain air of helplessness about him, a primitive intensity almost painful. Dicky saw Fielding respond to this in a curious way—it was the kind of fever that passes quickly from brain to brain when there is not sound bodily health commanded by a cool intelligence to insulate it. Fielding had done the work of four men for over two months, and, like most large men, his nerves had given in before Dicky’s, who had done six men’s work at least, and, by his power of organisation and his labour-saving intelligence, conserved the work of another fifty.
The three were sitting silent, having arranged certain measures, when Norman sprang to his feet excitedly and struck the table with his hand.
“It’s no use, sir,” he said to Fielding, “I’ll have to go. I’m no good. I neglect my duty. I was to be back at Abdallah at five. I forgot all about it. A most important thing. A load of fessikh was landed at Minkari, five miles beyond Abdallah. We’ve prohibited fessikh. I was going to seize it. ... It’s no good. It’s all so hopeless here.”
Dicky knew now that the beginning of the end had come for Norman. There were only two things to do: get him away shooting somewhere, or humour him here. But there was no chance for shooting till things got very much better. The authorities in Cairo would never understand, and the babbling social-military folk would say that they had calmly gone shooting while pretending to stay the cholera epidemic. It wouldn’t be possible to explain that Norman was in a bad way, and that it was done to give him half a chance of life.
Fielding also ought to have a few days clear away from this constant pressure and fighting, and the sounds and the smells of death; but it could not be yet. Therefore, to humour them both was the only thing, and Norman’s was the worse case. After all, they had got a system of sanitary supervision, they had the disease by the throat, and even in Cairo the administration was waking up a little. The crisis would soon pass perhaps, if a riot could be stayed and the natives give up their awful fictions of yellow handkerchiefs, poisoned sweetmeats, deadly limewash, and all such nonsense.
So Dicky said now, “All right, Norman; come along. You’ll seize that fessikh, and I’ll bring back Mustapha Kali. We’ll work him as he has never worked in his life. He’ll be a living object-lesson. We’ll have all Upper Egypt on the banks of the Nile waiting to see what happens to Mustapha.”
Dicky laughed, and Fielding responded feebly; but Norman was looking at the hospital with a look too bright for joy, too intense for despair.
“I found ten in a corner of a cane-field yesterday,” he said dreamily. “Four were dead, and the others had taken the dead men’s smocks as covering.” He shuddered. “I see nothing but limewash, smell nothing but carbolic. It’s got into my head. Look here, old man, I can’t stand it. I’m no use,” he added pathetically to Fielding.
“You’re right enough, if you’ll not take yourself so seriously,” said Dicky jauntily. “You mustn’t try to say, ‘Alone I did it.’ Come along. Fill your tobacco-pouch. There are the horses. I’m ready.”
He turned to Fielding.
“It’s going to be a stiff ride, Fielding. But I’ll do it in twenty-four hours, and bring Mustapha Kali too—for a consideration.”
He paused, and Fielding said, with an attempt at playfulness: “Name your price.”
“That you play for me, when I get back, the overture of ‘Tannhauser’. Play it, mind; no tuning-up sort of thing, like last Sunday’s performance. Practise it, my son! Is it a bargain? I’m not going to work for nothing a day.”
He watched the effect of his words anxiously, for he saw how needful it was to divert Fielding’s mind in the midst of all this “plague, pestilence, and famine.” For days Fielding had not touched the piano, the piano which Mrs. Henshaw, widow of Henshaw of the Buffs, had insisted on his taking with him a year before, saying that it would be a cure for loneliness when away from her. During the first of these black days Fielding had played intermittently for a few moments at a time, and Dicky had noticed that after playing he seemed in better spirits. But lately the disease of a ceaseless unrest, of constant sleepless work, was on him. He had not played for near a week, saying, in response to Dicky’s urging, that there was no time for music. And Dicky knew that presently there would be no time to eat, and then no time to sleep; and then, the worst!
Dicky had pinned his faith and his friendship to Fielding, and he saw no reason why he should lose his friend because Madame Cholera was stalking the native villages, driving the fellaheen before her like sheep to the slaughter.
“Is it a bargain?” he added, as Fielding did not at once reply. If Fielding would but play it would take the strain off his mind at times.
“All right, D., I’ll see what I can do with it,” said Fielding, and with a nod turned to the map with the little red and white and yellow flags, and began to study it.
He did not notice that one of his crew abaft near the wheel was watching him closely, while creeping along the railing on the pretence of cleaning it. Fielding was absorbed in making notes upon a piece of paper and moving the little flags about. Now he lit a cigar and began walking up and down the deck.
The Arab disappeared, but a few minutes afterwards returned. The deck was empty. Fielding had ridden away to the village. The map was still on the table. With a frightened face the Arab peered at it, then going to the side he called down softly, and there came up from the lower deck a Copt, the sarraf of the village, who could read English fairly. The Arab pointed to the map, and the Copt approached cautiously. A few feet away he tried to read what was on the map, but, unable to do so, drew closer, pale-faced and knockkneed, and stared at the map and the little flags. An instant after he drew back, and turned to the Arab. “May God burn his eyes! He sends the death to the village by moving the flags. May God change him into a dog to be beaten to death! The red is to begin, the white flag is for more death, the yellow is for enough. See—may God cut off his hand!—he has moved the white flag to our village.” He pointed in a trembling fear, half real, half assumed—for he was of a nation of liars.
During the next half-hour at least a dozen Arabs came to look at the map, but they disappeared like rats in a hole when, near midnight, Fielding’s tall form appeared on the bank above.
It was counted to him as a devil’s incantation, the music that he played that night, remembering his promise to Dicky Donovan. It was music through which breathed the desperate, troubled, aching heart and tortured mind of an overworked strong man. It cried to the night its trouble; but far over in the Cholera Hospital the sick heard it and turned their faces towards it eagerly. It pierced the apathy of the dying. It did more, for it gave Fielding five hours’ sleep that night; and though he waked to see one of his own crew dead on the bank, he tackled the day’s labour with more hope than he had had for a fortnight.
As the day wore on, however, his spirits fell, for on every hand was suspicion, unrest, and opposition, and his native assistants went sluggishly about their work. It was pathetic and disheartening to see people refusing to be protected, the sick refusing to be relieved, all stricken with fear, yet inviting death by disobeying the Inglesi.
Kalamoun was hopeless; yet twenty-four hours earlier Fielding had fancied there was a little light in the darkness. That night Fielding’s music gave him but two hours’ sleep, and he had to begin the day on a brandy-and-soda. Wherever he went open resistance blocked his way, hisses and mutterings followed him, the sick were hid in all sorts of places, and two of his assistants deserted before noon. Things looked ominous enough, and at five o’clock he made up his mind that Egypt would be overrun with cholera, and that he should probably have to defend himself and the Amenhotep from rioters, for the native police would be useless.
But at five o’clock Dicky Donovan came in a boat, and with him Mustapha Kali under a native guard of four men. The Mudir’s sense of humour had been touched, and this sense of humour probably saved the Mudir from trouble, for it played Dicky’s game for him.
Mustapha Kali had been sentenced to serve in the Cholera Hospital of Kalamoun, that he might be cured of his unbelief. At first he had taken his fate hardly, but Dicky had taunted him and then had suggested that a man whose conscience was clear and convictions good would carry a high head in trouble. Dicky challenged him to prove his libels by probing the business to the bottom, like a true scientist. All the way from Abdallah Dicky talked to him so, and at last the only answer Mustapha Kali would make was, “Malaish no matter!”
Mustapha Kali pricked up his ears with hope as he saw the sullen crowds from Kalamoun gathering on the shore to watch his deportation to the Cholera Hospital; and, as he stepped from the khiassa, he called out loudly:
“They are all dogs and sons of dogs, and dogs were their grandsires. No good is in a dog the offspring of a dog. Whenever these dogs scratch the ground the dust of poison is in the air, and we die.”
“You are impolite, Mustapha Kali,” said Dicky coolly, and offered him a cigarette.
The next three days were the darkest in Dicky Donovan’s career. On the first day there came word that Norman, overwrought, had shot himself. On the next, Mustapha Kali in a fit of anger threw a native policeman into the river, and when his head appeared struck it with a barge-pole, and the man sank to rise no more. The three remaining policemen, two of whom were Soudanese, and true to Dicky, bound him and shut him up in a hut. When that evening Fielding refused to play, Dicky knew that Norman’s fate had taken hold of him, and that he must watch his friend every minute—that awful vigilance which kills the watcher in the end. Dicky said to himself more than once that day:
“Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s woe!”
But it was not Dicky who saved Fielding. On the third day the long-deferred riot broke out. The Copt and the Arab had spread the report that Fielding brought death to the villages by moving the little flags on his map. The populace rose.
Fielding was busy with the map at the dreaded moment that hundreds of the villagers appeared upon the bank and rushed the Amenhotep. Fielding and Dicky were both armed, but Fielding would not fire until he saw that his own crew had joined the rioters on the bank. Then, amid a shower of missiles, he shot the Arab who had first spread the report about the map and the flags.
Now Dicky and he were joined by Holgate, the Yorkshire engineer of the Amenhotep, and together the three tried to hold the boat. Every native had left them. They were obliged to retreat aft to the deckcabin. Placing their backs against it, they prepared to die hard. No one could reach them from behind, at least.
It was an unequal fight. All three had received slight wounds, but the blood-letting did them all good. Fielding was once more himself; nervous anxiety, unrest, had gone from him. He was as cool as a cucumber. He would not go shipwreck now “on the reef of Norman’s woe.” Here was a better sort of death. No men ever faced it with quieter minds than did the three. Every instant brought it nearer.
All at once there was a cry and a stampede in the rear of the attacking natives. The crowd suddenly parted like two waves, and retreated; and Mustapha Kali, almost naked, and supported by a stolid Soudanese, stood before the three. He was pallid, his hands and brow were dripping sweat, and there was a look of death in his eyes.
“I have cholera, effendi!” he cried. “Take me to Abdallah to die, that I may be buried with my people and from mine own house.”
“Is it not poison?” asked Fielding grimly, yet seeing now a ray of hope in the sickening business.
“It is cholera, effendi. Take me home to die.”
“Very well. Tell the people so, and I will take you home, and I will bury you with your fathers,” said Fielding.
Mustapha Kali turned slowly. “I am sick of cholera,” he said as loudly as he could to the awe-stricken crowd. “May God not cool my resting-place if it be not so!”
“Tell the people to go to their homes and obey us,” said Dicky, putting away his pistol.
“These be good men, I have seen with mine own eyes,” said Mustapha hoarsely to the crowd. “It is for your good they do all. Have I not seen? Let God fill both my hands with dust if it be not so! God hath stricken me, and behold I give myself into the hands of the Inglesi, for I believe!”
He would have fallen to the ground, but Dicky and the Soudanese caught him and carried him down to the bank, while the crowd scuttled from the boat, and Fielding made ready to bear the dying man to Abdallah—a race against death.
Fielding brought Mustapha Kali to Abdallah in time to die there, and buried him with his fathers; and Dicky stayed behind to cleanse Kalamoun with perchloride and limewash.
The story went abroad and travelled fast, and the words of Mustapha Kali, oft repeated, became as the speech of a holy man; and the people no longer hid their dead, but brought them to the Amenhotep.
This was the beginning of better things; the disease was stayed.
And for all the things that these men did—Fielding Bey and Donovan Pasha—they got naught but an Egyptian ribbon to wear on the breast and a laboured censure from the Administration for overrunning the budget allowance.
Dicky, however, seemed satisfied, for Fielding’s little barque of life had not gone down “On the reef of Norman’s woe.” Mrs. Henshaw felt so also when she was told all, and she disconcerted Dicky by bursting into tears.
“Why those tears?” said Dicky to Fielding afterwards; “I wasn’t eloquent.”
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