It Happened in Egypt Part 11

Aunt C. quite resents Sir Marcus being able to engage the services of you and Antoun. She wants you both to be there, but she doesn't like Sir M. to have a superior position to Antoun's. That day on the _Enchantress Isis_ Sir M. invited us to have tea on the deck, and it really was enchanting; a deck like a huge open-air drawingroom, or one of our biggest verandas at Newport, or somewhere, with jolly green wicker chairs and tables and sofas with heaps of cus.h.i.+ons. But I forgot--you've seen the boat. The best rooms _were_ engaged, but when we talked to Sir Marcus, he called a man who can speak many languages in bits--broken English, cracked German, fractured French, and goodness knows what all. Between them, they arranged it somehow that we should have our choice, and the other people were to take what was left. I would have refused, because it didn't seem fair, but it was for Aunt Clara's sake, evidently, that Sir M. wanted to make the exchange, and _she_ accepted. She was as haughty as a queen, but in rather a fascinating, soft way that I think men like. And she was looking beautiful. So is Rachel, as even Biddy admits. I do believe Rachel looks younger than I do, in some new dresses and hats she has. I never noticed before, but I fancy now that we're rather alike. I'm so delighted to see her enjoying herself so much, for you know, she's _wonderful_. Think what courage it must have taken to break with her tiresome old life, because she felt she must see the glory of the world, when a tiny legacy gave her the chance she'd longed for. She wouldn't have had a penny left, after she'd finished her trip, if Aunt C. and I hadn't been able to help her out. It's a privilege to do anything for such a brave creature. And I can't bear to think of her having to go back when this is over, to the dull round. Perhaps some way out will be found for her.

I've fallen in love with Cairo, although--or perhaps because--I still feel as if I were moving in a marvellous picture. Antoun does make it live for us! I will say that for him, though he can be so annoying that at times he spoils everything, and makes me wish you'd won my hat instead of my winning his green turban. I'm dying to find out how you got it. But, of course, I can't ask him: it would be _infra dig_. You _must_ tell me when you come. I think the one he wears now is handsomer though. I wish I could change it for mine.

We have been to heaps of mosques, and I can't help wis.h.i.+ng we were the only tourists in Cairo. Of course, this is a selfish wish; and as dear Biddy says, it's quite funny to think how each tourist feels that _he_ is the only spiritual-minded, imaginative person travelling--that he alone has the right to be in Egypt--that all the others are offensive, vulgar creatures, who desecrate the beautiful places with their presence. But really, you know, it gets on one's nerves, meeting droves of silly men in pith helmets with little white lambrequins looped up, when it would be so much more appropriate to wear the kind of hats they have at home. And some of the women are _weird!_ They have the queerest ideas of what is suitable for Egypt. One friend of Bedr's refused to go about and be seen with the ladies who'd engaged him, as he was the smartest dragoman in Cairo and had his reputation to keep up. Don't you _like_ that? Even Antoun laughed--which he hardly ever does. He's so dignified I wish his turban would blow off or something. I _wonder_ how he'd look without it, and if most of the charm would be gone? Almost, I hope so. One doesn't like to catch one's self feeling toward an Egyptian, even for a minute, as one does toward men of one's own blood --I mean, on the same level, or even as if a person like that were _above_ one. It's just the picturesque dignity of the _costume_, and the _pose,_ perhaps. And then, this strange glamour of the East is over everybody and everything, here. I used to wonder why people wrote and spoke of the East as _mysterious._ Why should it be more mysterious than the West? I would ask. n.o.body could explain exactly. They said only, "It is." Now I know why--at least I _feel_ why. Without his green turban, or in European coat instead of his graceful silk robe, and away from these luminous sunsets of pale rose and gold and emerald, Antoun would be nothing extraordinary, would he? He says he is considered old fas.h.i.+oned in his way of dress. Most of his friends wear European clothes, and the tarboosh which Egyptians love because it never blows away or falls off when they pray. He _does_ make me angry, because he wants to banish the beggars and poor men who sell things in the street, instead of letting me give and buy. What am I _for_, with all my money, except to do things for people? And it's such fun making them happy by saying "I _want_ a cat-necklace--" or a scarab, or whatever they have, instead of pus.h.i.+ng past with a stony glare as if they were dust under our feet. Of course we're attended by great crowds whereever we go, because it's got round that we don't refuse any one, consequently it takes a _little_ long to arrive anywhere. But what does that matter in Egypt? Already I'm losing my American hustle. I want to eat lotuses, which seem out of season in Egypt now! I've asked for them everywhere but can't get them. I want to feel back in the Middle Ages, in Cairo, which, as Antoun says, is an Oriental and Medieval Gateway to the Egypt older than history. And how I am looking forward to the _Desert!_ Sir Marcus tells us that _you_ are to take the people of the _Candace_ for a desert trip before they go up the Nile; so of course you must count us among your "trippers," and Mr. Willis and Mr. Sheridan, who have settled to go on the _Isis_. You didn't mention the desert plan before you went away!

No news of that poor, beautiful child, Wretched Bey's wife though I've written twice. I'm worried about her. Mabel she used to be. Now she's Mabella Hanem! Biddy says you'll arrive for the ball to-morrow night.

But somehow I don't _feel_ you will. I don't know why you should. Men don't care for such things much. And of course I shall not dance, as I'm still in half mourning. I shall only look on, and then--Rachel and I have an amusing plan for the end of the evening. But even if you came, we couldn't let you into the secret, as you would think it silly.

Yours sincerely,

ROSAMOND GILDER.

Mine "sincerely, Rosamond Gilder!" So she ended her letter, with youthful and characteristic dignity, childishly unaware, apparently, that there was more to read between the lines than in the lines themselves.

Had I read this Rosamond letter first, the last four or five sentences would have meant little for me. As it was, I would have given a month out of my future for the gift of an astral body which could go this minute to the ball at the Ghezireh Palace. I was lost in the mystery of that "amusing plan."

In Anthony's letter lay my last hope of a clue. But in it there was none. He did not even mention Monny's name. It was all about that "desert trip" which, from her, I hadn't taken seriously. Sir Marcus was actually planning it. Kruger had written that some of the pa.s.sengers were clamouring for a few days' camping, and the idea was to send them off in my care, after three days in Cairo, while the others remained in charge of Antoun, who wasn't yet ready to leave. Fenton said:

Somebody's trying to defeat my scheme for getting the sheikh's tomb moved. I don't know who it is yet. Meanwhile my time and my head are so full, that in the few hours of the night I put aside for sleep, I dream queerer dreams than the visits of ghostly sheikhs. Apropos of dreams, do you know by chance a man who answers this description: elderly, stoutish, red face, gray hair, black moustache, pale eyes with sharp look in them. Sounds commonplace, doesn't it?

But I have a recurring dream of such a man, whose face I never saw elsewhere. For the last three nights, as soon as I shut my eyes, he comes. He seems to interrupt some scene between you and Lark, and myself, and I see him looking over Lark's shoulder. Then he turns quickly away, and tiptoes off to a very low, closed door in a deep recess. There he disappears into shadow--and I wake up with a jump, or slide off into another dream--but generally this rouses me, for there's an impression of something stealthy in the shadow round the door. That so ordinary a type of person should be in a dream. You'll laugh at my asking if you've ever known such a man, and say that I'm back at my old tricks again, as a dreamer of dreams. Never mind, I scored, dreaming of our Mountain of the Golden Pyramid the night before I got your letter with Ferlini's papers. I can't help feeling that there may be something in dreams--in mine, anyhow, though I never have any except in Egypt.

This one about the red-faced man and the closed door in the deep recess is getting a bit on my nerves.

Excited as I was over the patchwork of news, I laughed scornfully at Anthony's dream. For the man he described might be Colonel Corkran.

CHAPTER X

THE SECRET MONNY KEPT

Cairo at last! My watch said that the journey took only three hours; but my nerves said six.

I had telegraphed Biddy first thing in the morning the hour of my arrival with the "_Candace crowd_," and I half expected to see her at the big white and red station, but there was no familiar form in the throng, the gay throng which excited my charges. Everything interested them; the black face of the Sudanese engine driver who looked down from his huge British locomotive, the display of English, French and German literature mingled with Greek, Italian, Arab, or Turkish papers on the bookstall; the ebony and copper-coloured luggage carriers who seemed eager to take one another's lives, but in reality desired no more than to s.n.a.t.c.h each other's jobs, under the eyes of the uniformed hotel-porters. To me, the busy place was a desert, lacking one face.

Even outside the station-yard, and in the streets and squares where silent camels looked their contempt of electric trams, soldiers in khaki uniforms jostled Bedouins in khaki robes, and drivers of arabeahs made the way one long procession of shrieks, I still glanced at pa.s.sing carriages in hopes of a belated Biddy. All in vain! And dest.i.tute of news I resigned myself to the task of piloting the Set out to Mena House. The moon would be full that night--and it's "the thing" to be a neighbour of the Sphinx while the moon feeds her with honey.

The Flock, under the guidance of Mr. Watts, had now definitely parted from the Set, chieftained by me. They went meekly off to the cheaper hotels, where they would live before boarding the _Candace_ again for Palestine, and Colonel Corkran, who was supposed to have joined that party, had announced that he was "bound for a long talk with Mark the Lark." Mr. Watts, refused by Enid Biddell and separated from her, had relapsed into melancholia. He had ceased to brilliantine his once sleek hair, and dust and crumbs were allowed to collect in each fold of his clerical waistcoat. As we of the Set buzzed richly away in taxicabs, I saw him in a shabby arabeah between two old ladies, gazing wistfully after us. He was envying me Enid!

It is a wonderful drive through Cairo to the Pyramids, whether you spin out there in a motor, or trot on a donkey, or lilt on a camel, squatting cross-legged on a load of green bersim. Past the great swinging bridge, and the Island of Ghezireh (the word that in itself means "island") begins the six-mile d.y.k.e, which is the road made by Ismal to please the Empress Eugenie. Since her visit, in the days when the Suez Ca.n.a.l was opened, it has pleased two empresses, and more queens than I have time to count. Under the deep shade of lebbek trees it goes on and on, toward the Pyramids, a dark cool avenue, high above cultivated fields flooded by the Nile when the river is "up." The emerald waves of grain flow like green water to the foot of the broad d.y.k.e-road, and ca.n.a.ls like long, tight-drawn blue ribbons are threaded through it, their ends lost to sight at the s.h.i.+mmering horizon.

Even at this noon hour when the world should have been eating lotuses or luncheon, the interminable arbour was crowded with strings of camels, forever going both ways, into Cairo and out, one wondered why --and there were flocks of woolly brown sheep, and donkeys drawing sideless carts in which whole families of veiled women and half-naked children were seated tailor fas.h.i.+on. On we spun, past the Zoo, past scattered villas of Frenchified, Oriental fas.h.i.+on which might have been designed by a confectioner: past azure lakes left by the ebbing Nile, and so into sudden dazzling sight of three geometric mountains in a tawny desert--two, monsters in size, and one a baby trying to catch up with them.

"Oh!" everybody breathed. For these things were beyond words.

Then in a moment more the Great Pyramid had grown so big that it loomed over us, and ate up half the sky--a pyre of yellow flame against a flame of blue.

We were at the end of the shadowy road that leads like a causeway to the desert, and on the verge of the golden, billowing sea which flows round the Pyramids and engulfs the distant Sphinx. Oriental life encircled us, in the foreground of the picture--a long row of waiting camels gaily saddled and ta.s.selled, delicately nibbling bersim green as heaped emeralds--donkeys white and gray, beribboned and beaded--small yellow sandcarts; little white, desert horses and tall brown, desert men; camels snarling, donkeys braying, horses whinnying, and men touting. "Very nice sandcarts--very nice camels! Take ladies and gentlemen quick to Pyramids and Sphinx or Petrified Forest!" Farther on, the big, modern hotel, rather like an overgrown Swiss chalet built by Arabs--a vast, confused building the colour of sand or brown heather honey, with carved mushrbiyeh work lending an Eastern charm to windows, balconies, and loggias, and enough green, flowery garden to give a sensational effect of contrast with the tidal wave of desert poised ready, it would seem, to overwhelm palms and roses. Cl.u.s.tered near, the tiny mushroom village which huddles under the shelter of Cheops'

Pyramid. Beyond, the immense upward sweep of golden dunes, culminating in the Great Pyramid itself.

I stayed in the picture only long enough to settle my big children into their quarters, and to see most of them making for the dining-room, agreeably Oriental with its white and red walls, its dome and windows of mushrbiyeh work. Then I darted back to Cairo, in a taxi driven by a Nubian youth, so black that he was almost blue, like a whortleberry. He wore a scarlet tarboosh, a livery of violet, and the holes for silver rings in the tops of his ears were so large that the light s.h.i.+ning through gave the effect of inserted diamonds. Unconsciously he made a nice contrast with his modern motor.

He drove with such reckless speed that camels "rubber-necked" to look at us--and whirled me past the fat black gate-keeper into the Ghezireh Palace garden of scarlet paths, moonlike lamps, Khedivial statues, and spreading banyans where each tree continued itself in its own "next number," like an endless serial romance.

I nearly asked for Mrs. O'Brien, but turned her into Jones at the danger point. The face of the concierge, as he said that she was at home, conveyed nothing, yet I could not resist adding, "Are the ladies well?"

"Mrs. East is not very well to-day," he replied. "We have had the doctor; but the young ladies have been out spending the night with friends, I believe. They have not yet returned."

It was a long five minutes before Biddy and I were wildly shaking hands in a huge private sitting-room all red-and-gold brocade and crystal chandeliers, as it had been in the days of Ismal. I knew I should be delighted to see her, but I didn't realize that it was going to be quite as good as it was.

"Anyhow, _you're_ all right and safe," I heard myself blurt out.

"I'm safe, but not all right!" she reproached me. "My messenger who went to the train didn't find you from my description, I know, because he came back with my note----"

"Too flattering, was your description, or the other way?" I asked, trying to buoy her up with frivolity.

"You wouldn't joke if you'd read the note. Oh, Ernest, Monny and Rachel have disappeared!"

"Good gracious! But Anthony----"

"He went to look for them, of course; and he's disappeared, too."

"By Jove!" The exclamation sounded inadequate, but I was so taken aback that I had nothing else to say. It seemed impossible that Anthony, instead of averting danger, could be involved in it himself. It was unlike his resourcefulness. I could not believe it of him, and so, when I had time to control mind and tongue, I said as much to Biddy.

"Yes, I felt like that, too, at first," she admitted. "He gives one the impression of being so infallible in any emergency, somehow, as if he'd be above it, and look down on it from his height. But it's more than twelve hours since he went, and he promised to send me word how things were going on if he couldn't get to me himself. No word has come."

"What have you done?" I asked. "Have you communicated with the police?"

"Sir Marcus Lark has. He was at the ball, and has been very good. But it's for Mrs. East's sake, mostly. One feels he's glad it happened, to give him the chance to win her grat.i.tude--or something. He's been back and forth all day; and I'm expecting him any minute. Mrs. East has been fainting and hysterical, and everything early Edwardian, so I sent for a doctor. But she's better on the strength of _sal volatile_ and eggnog, and she's promised to see Sir Marcus."

"Now tell me what happened, from the beginning," I said, when I had made Biddy sit down by me on the sofa, and was trying to warm a cold little hand in mine.

What it all amounted to, told disjointedly, was this: Since Monny had had an inspiration the day after our arrival in Cairo, to give Rachel Guest a lot of her new unworn clothes, Rachel had become quite girlish and "flighty." She had lost her puritan primness, and behaved more in accordance with her slanting eyes than with her bringing up. She giggled like a schoolgirl rather than a schoolmistress, tried to make herself look young, and copied Monny in the way she tilted her hat and dressed her hair. No harm in this; but it had seemed to Biddy that Rachel deliberately incited the girl to do things which "Antoun"

disapproved. Brigit fancied that Bedr's influence had been at work, for knowing as he did that "Antoun" would gladly have given him marching orders, he took pleasure in thwarting his superior when he could do so with safety. Bedr had been clever in enlisting the girls' sympathy for his soul. As for Biddy, she had disliked him from the first, and imagined that he had tacked himself onto our party as a spy, upon the receipt of orders from America, he having learned most of his English there. The idea appeared so far-fetched that she had abandoned it. Now, however, it was again hovering at the back of her mind.

Bedr had told Rachel stories of the fascination of hasheesh smoking, and had said that no stranger knew Cairo who did not visit one of the "best houses" where hasheesh, though forbidden, was still secretly smoked. He had a.s.sured her that there were several which were "perfectly respectable," even for the "nicest ladies and gentlemen;"

and Rachel, probably at his suggestion, had tried to persuade Monny to make the expedition. Monny had mentioned it to "Antoun," in the presence of everybody; and as Rachel and Bedr had looked guilty, Biddy guessed that they had wished to keep the plan a secret.

"Antoun" had perhaps too brusquely vetoed the idea. He said that there were no such houses, which could be visited by ladies, and that it was absurd to think of going. That word "absurd" stung Monny. She began to protest that Bedr knew Cairo as well as Antoun did, and was as likely to be right. "I don't see why we shouldn't go, if others do," she persisted, "and I've always longed to know what a hasheesh dream was like, ever since I read De Quincey. A little, just once, could do us no harm, and Rachel says----"

But what Rachel had said was evidently not for publication. Miss Guest stopped her with a hand on hers, and a "_Dear_ Monny, please don't let us think of it any more, if Antoun Effendi disapproves. Maybe it was a silly idea, and we've plenty of amusing things to do every minute."

Monny was apparently contented to let the idea slip, and Brigit had thought that, in the excitement of getting ready for the ball, she and Rachel had really forgotten it. Then, before writing me, she had overheard Rachel say to her friend, "It's for twelve o'clock sharp."

And Monny had answered, "Won't it be _great!_ Does Bedr think----" But she had stopped short at sight of Brigit.

Even this did not suggest to Biddy a visit to a "hasheesh den," for various other plans had been broached and discouraged by "Antoun." She did not feel that, as she was not supposed to know his real status, she could go "blabbing" to him; and fearing that mischief was on foot, she had wished for me. When I didn't arrive, she soothed herself by reflecting that, after all, she need only keep a sharp watch over Monny when midnight drew near. None of the party intended to dance, and so it would be easy, Brigit thought, to "have an eye upon the girls."