Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  ‘No backshish,’ he answered in an angry tone, threatening them with his stick, and laying about him roundly over their naked shoulders. ‘Not one penny of backshish will any of you get from me to-day. Go along, I say. Don’t want you here. Leave me alone, can’t you?’

  The boys fell back for a moment, still crying ‘Backshish, backshish!’ and regarded the stranger with a suspicious glance. Frank Linnell rose, and strolled idly towards another part of the building. The boys followed him through the deep dust, hustling him as he went with genuine Oriental eagerness.

  ‘Rameses! You want see Rameses? Me very good guide! Me show you Rameses!’ they cried in chorus in their broken English, dancing before Frank Linnell’s footsteps, raising clouds of dust as they went, and leading the way triumphantly towards the great colossal seated statue.

  ‘Me want no backshish,’ one of them insinuated coaxingly with a persuasive air. ‘Want to show English gentleman de way. Me very good boy. Dis way for see Rameses, and no backshish.’

  Frank Linnell was a hasty-tempered man, and he was also gifted with the common British incapacity for grasping the idea that anybody else should be unable to comprehend his own language, if quite distinctly, articulately, and loudly spoken. So he paused on his march for a second, and leaned his back impressively against the base of one of Amenhotep’s great sculptured propylons in the central temple.

  ‘Now, you look here, you boys,’ he observed with dignity, in his most didactic tone, holding up one warning forefinger, as if he were addressing his own national school at Hambledon-cum-Thornyhaugh in the county of Northumberland: ‘I’ve seen Rameses the Great fifty times already, in every possible form, shape, and material — sitting and standing, fighting and feasting, on foot or in his chariot, life-size or colossal — till I’m sick and tired of him. I don’t want to see Rameses the Great again, in any place, position, dress, or fashion, as long as I live; and I hope to goodness I may never more set eyes upon him anywhere. I don’t like Rameses — do you understand? — I object to Rameses: I disapprove of Rameses: and I don’t care for antiquities. I came out here in this precious temple this morning to try and get a little peace and quiet, not to be bothered with boys and colossal statues. And if any one of you fellows comes one step nearer me’ — he drew a line in the dust with his stick as his spoke— ‘if any one of you fellows dares to step one inch across that line, all I can say is,’ lifting his stick suggestively in the precise attitude of the Pharaohnic hero— ‘I’ll give him Rameses across his back and shoulders before he’s another ten minutes older.’

  The boys listened gravely to every word of this succinct address, and then, seizing with avidity upon the one word of the whole which they really understood, vociferated once more in chorus:

  ‘Yes, sah: Rameses, sah: me very good guide: me show you Rameses: dis way, sah, for Rameses de Great: dis way to Rameses.’

  The parson from Northumberland poised himself firmly against the half-buried propylon, and resigned himself to a comical look of despair at the little brown ragamuffins, who still held out their eight or ten hands persistently for backshish. As he stood there, the very picture of the baffled Briton in the midst of his foes, whose light infantry proved far too nimble for his heavy guns to disperse, an Arab, as he thought, approached by the door from the opposite direction, and walked straight up to him, with outstretched hand, as if bent on entering into conversation with the usual practical object of obtaining backshish.

  The newcomer was dressed in semi-European clothes, with an old red fez stuck jauntily on his head, as is the fashion with temple guardians and other such minor hangers-on of the bankrupt Egyptian Government. Frank Linnell immediately suspected another attempt to rob him of a fee, under pretence of asking for the official permit to visit the antiquities of Upper Egypt; so he waved the stranger aside impatiently with his warning hand, and observed once more, very loudly, in his native tongue — the only one he could use with fluency:

  ‘No backshish! no backshish! I’ve been here before. I’ve fee’d every precious soul — man, woman, or child — connected in any way with the management of this temple; and not a piastre more will one of you get out of me. Not a piastre more. Understand. Not a solitary piastre.’

  To his great surprise, the stranger, instead of bowing low and retreating politely, smiled a benign smile, and answered in English, of an unexpectedly flowing, yet distinctly Hibernian character:

  ‘Ye’re mistaken, Mr. Linnell. It’s Mr. Linnell I have the pleasure of addressing, isn’t it? Ah, yes; I thought so. They told me at the hotel a clergyman of yer name had been asking when I’d be likely coming down the river; so I thought I’d just step out at once, and see if I could find ye.’

  Frank Linnell gave a sudden start of astonishment. Could this be the refugee?

  ‘You’re not the correspondent they spoke of, who’s escaped from Khartoum, surely?’ he cried in some excitement.

  The stranger nodded a courteous assent.

  ‘Me name’s Considine,’ he answered, with conscious pride— ‘one of the fighting Considines of County Cavan. I was correspondent at Khartoum for the Daily Telephone. Ah, ye may well stare, sirr, for it’s a narrow squeak indeed I’ve had of it. When the city was taken, those nigger fellows of the Mahdi’s, they just chopped me up piecemeal into small fragments; and as I lay there on the ground in sections, near the Bourré Gate, thinking of me poor old mother in Ireland, “Considine, me boy,” says I to meself, or as much as was left of me, “diamond cement’ll never be able to stick ye completely together again.” But, somehow, they dovetailed the bits after all, and took me into the hospital; and I pulled through, by the kind offices of some Soudanese ladies, who were good enough to adopt me; and here I am, sirr, a miserable wreck as far as legs and arms go — why, those heathen hacked me to pieces, so that ye couldn’t lay a sixpence between the scars on me body, I give ye me word for it — but ready to go to the world’s end to help a fellow-countryman in distress, or a lady who stands in need of assistance. Well, sirr, I’m glad to meet ye, and to make yer acquaintance, for I knew yer brother, and I can give ye later news of him than ye’ll get in the newspapers.’

  The Reverend Frank drew himself up on his dignity a little stiffly.

  ‘Sir Austen Linnell was my cousin, not my brother,’ he answered, with official vagueness, for he could never quite bring himself to acknowledge the existence of the actress-woman’s son, who had deprived him of his birthright.

  ‘Tut, tut, tut, man,’ the correspondent answered, not without a faint tinge of wholesome contempt in his tone. ‘I knew them both — yer cousin and yer brother — and a finer man or a braver than Charles Linnell, whom ye want to disown, I never set eyes on. Sure, ye needn’t be ashamed of him.’

  And seating himself on the broken pillar by the clergyman’s side, Considine began to narrate in full, with much Irish spirit and many graphic details, the whole story of the siege, and his own almost miraculous escape from Khartoum.

  ‘But what ye’ll be wanting to know most,’ he said at last, after he’d dilated at some length upon the fragmentary condition in which the Mahdi’s troops had left his various limbs on the ground at Khartoum, and the gradual way in which ‘the chips had been picked up and welded together again,’ as with some pardonable exaggeration he phrased it— ‘what ye’ll be wanting to know, is how yer brother came out of all this trouble.’

  ‘Did he come out of it at all?’ the Reverend Frank inquired, with a little undercurrent of tremulousness in his anxious tone— ‘or Sir Austen either? Have you any accurate information about their fate to give me?’

  ‘Accurate information, is it? Well, it isn’t just the moment for observing accurately, ye must own yerself, when ye’re lying about loose in pieces, waiting for somebody to pick ye up and put ye together again,’ Considine retorted gaily. ‘But all I can tell ye is this: on the morning when the niggers broke like ants into Khartoum, yer cousin and yer brother were both alive; and if I got away, why shouldn’t they t
oo? They were as clever as I was.’

  ‘It’s very improbable,’ Mr. Frank Linnell replied incredulously, yet much disconcerted. ‘They were both reported “most likely dead” in the newspaper despatches.’

  ‘Were they so, now?’ Considine echoed with profound interest.

  ‘Yes. Stragglers and refugees even said their bodies had been identified near the Bourré Gate.’

  Considine looked up with a smile of relief.

  ‘They did, did they? Then ye may take it for granted,’ he answered, in a tone of profound conviction, ‘that they’re both this minute alive and kicking.’

  ‘Why so?’ the parson asked with a thrill of unpleasant surprise. Family affection didn’t prompt him to desire the escape of either of his two respected relations.

  ‘Why, have ye never observed,’ Considine answered with great good-humour, and the demonstrative air of a mathematician proving a theorem, ‘that whatever’s put in the newspapers about anybody ye know yerself is as sure as fate to be utterly mistaken? I’m a newspaper man meself, and I ought to be an unprejudiced observer of journalism. Take yer own case, now. Weren’t ye kilt in a railway accident? Didn’t the newspapers report ye entirely dead? Well, and when I went to the hotel just now, they told me ye were here. “Impossible,” says I; “the man’s kilt long ago.” “But he came to life again,” says the hotel-keeper; “it was only a railway accident.” “To be sure,” says I; “how stupid of me not to have thought of that before! I might have known he was alive — for didn’t I see his death meself in the newspaper?”’

  ‘Such cases must be very rare,’ Mr. Frank Linnell responded with British caution.

  ‘Rare, is it, sirr?’ the correspondent echoed hastily. ‘Well, then, take me own case again. Wasn’t I kilt in Afghanistan, as the Times itself announced? and didn’t I turn up for all that six months later at Quetta? Wasn’t I kilt with Stanley on the Upper Congo; and didn’t we all come out again, after all, alive and well, at Zanzibar? Wasn’t I kilt in Khartoum the other day, and cut up into sausage-meat for the use of the commissariat; and ain’t I on me way down to Cairo now, to offer me services and the remains of me body to me own Government for future expeditions? No, no, sirr; depend upon it, if ever a man’s kilt in the newspapers, as sure as fate, it’s a very good symptom. Why do I give Gordon up, though there are some that think he’s living still? Why, just because the newspapers were afraid to kill him. And why do I believe yer brother’s alive, and your cousin too? Why, just because the newspapers, ye tell me, without one qualm of doubt, have got rid of them altogether.’

  ‘But you say you were in Khartoum for three months after its fall,’ Frank Linnell objected. ‘Did you ever hear or see anything of either of my real or supposed relations?’

  ‘And d’ye think we went paying calls and leaving pasteboards in Khartoum after the Mahdi’s people came?’ Considine retorted contemptuously. ‘Why, sirr, till the night I stole away with a small body of natives going north on duty, I never dared to show me nose outside me own quarters, where the Soudanese ladies I told ye of were kindly taking care of me — for I flatter meself I always got on with the ladies. But one thing I can tell ye, and that’s certain.’ He dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. ‘At Dongola I met a water-carrier who’d been in Khartoum to the end, and he recognised me at once when he saw me in the bazaar. And he told me he’d observed a white man, disguised as an Indian Mussulman, in Khartoum town a month after the capture, whose description exactly answered to yer brother’s. At the time I thought he must be mistaken; for I saw Linnell cut down, meself, in the great square; but now ye tell me the newspapers have kilt him, I’d stake me reputation it was Charlie Linnell the fellow saw, and that ye’ll welcome him home yet some day at yer parsonage in England.’

  CHAPTER XXXII.

  SHOPPING.

  A few days after her arrival in Algiers, Psyche had so far recovered from her fatigue that Geraldine Maitland arranged a party to go down into the town together.

  The winter visitors at Algiers live entirely on the Mustapha hill, at a distance of some two or three miles from the town and harbour. A breakneck Arab path, sunk deep in the soil like a Devonshire lane, leads the foot-passenger in a straight line by tumble-down steps to the outskirts and the shore: omnibuses and carriages follow the slower zigzags of a broad modern highway that winds by gentle gradients round numerous elbows to the town wall at the Porte d’Isly. Psyche and the Vanrenens, under Geraldine’s guidance, took the comfortable tram (the horse-car, Cyrus called it) by this latter route, and descended gradually to the ramparts of the French engineers.

  Once within the gate, in Algiers proper, Psyche felt herself immediately in the very thick and heart of Islam. Who shall describe that wonderful dramatic Oriental world — ever old, yet ever new — busy with human life as bees at a swarming, or ants when a stick has been poked into their nest; all seething and fermenting in a Babel of tongues, and hurrying and scurrying on every side for no possible or conceivable earthly reason? Algiers is the most fascinating and animated of Mediterranean towns. Dirty, malodorous, African if you will, but alive all over, and intensely attractive and alluring for all that, in its crowded streets and courts and alleys. Psyche was not lucky enough to meet on her entry a laden caravan of solemn, long-legged camels, striding placidly out on their start for the desert; but the donkeys, the mules, the Moors, the Arabs, the infinite variety of colour and costume, amply sufficed to keep her attention alive as they threaded their way through that quaint jumble of all Mediterranean and African nationalities.

  Geraldine, to whom all this was as familiar as Petherton, led them lightly through the vestibule of the town. Psyche was amused, in spite of her sadness, at the curious jumble of transparent incongruities in that antique new-fangled Franco-Moorish Algiers. Here, a little French épicerie, ensconced half hidden in an ill-lighted shop, where Provençal bourgeois folk served out small odds and ends to bareheaded negresses; there, an Arab café, darker and dirtier still, where dusky, cross-legged figures in Oriental costume, innocent of the laundry, smoked doubtful tobacco and tossed off cups of black steaming Mocha; and yonder, again, a little bazaar for Moorish curiosities, where a Barbary Jew in dark-coloured turban, jacket, and sash, ogled them in with oleaginous smile to inspect his cheap stock of Birmingham antiquities. At every step Psyche stopped irresistibly to gaze and smile; the town itself and all its stream of passengers unrolled itself in long and endless perspective like a living panorama before her attentive eyes.

  They passed a big square with a well-kept garden of the formal French sort; a theatre that for size and imposing front might almost compare with the finest in Paris; a close-piled insanitary Arab quarter, by no means running with milk and rose-water; a tangle of lanes threading their way steeply up hill in every possible direction except a straight line, for which native architects appear to harbour an instinctive dislike; a narrow courtyard open to the sky; a whitewashed mosque, where a respectable gray-bearded native cadi squatted cross-legged on the floor doing equal justice by summary process between his Arab neighbours. Railways, tram-cars, donkeys, and omnibuses; a European brass band, and a group of red-cloaked Arabs from the desert; Moorish squalor, dirt, and discomfort; the kiosks and journals and loungers of the boulevards! The main street through which they made their tortuous way was arcaded like Paris; but, oh, what a difference in the surging crowd that thronged and filled it in unending variety! Arab, Moor, Kabyle, and Negro; Jewesses with their heads enclosed in tight black skull-caps, and their chins tied up as if they suffered perennially from an aggravated complication of mumps and toothache; and Mussulman women who showed above their veils but their great black eyes, yet coquetted so freely with those and their twitching fingers in the corners of their robes that Cyrus almost ceased to wonder as he passed at their prudent lords’ precautionary measures.

  They turned round by the brand-new minarets of the modernized cathedral, and entered the narrow little Rue de la Lyre. Ahmed ben Abd-er-Rahman (may Allah in
crease him!) has a Moorish shop in that dark thoroughfare which is the joy and delight of all feminine sojourners in the tents of Shem. Corona’s face lighted up with pleasure.

  ‘Why, we’re going to Abd-er-Rahman’s!’ she exclaimed with much delight. ‘That’s nice, Miss Dumaresq. I do just love a good day’s shopping down here in the Moorish part of the city.’

  ‘Don’t call me “Miss Dumaresq,”’ Psyche said gently. ‘Call me Psyche, won’t you!’

  Corona drew back in genuine hesitation.

  ‘May I?’ she asked. ‘Well, I do call that real nice of you, now! I was afraid to be too much at home with Haviland Dumaresq’s daughter, you see. But you ain’t set up. It’s right kind and friendly of you — that’s just what it is! And will you call us Sirena and Corona?’

  Psyche in her turn drew back, hesitating.

  ‘Why, I thought you so grand when I first saw you,’ she said, taken aback. ‘I was afraid to talk to you, almost, I was so dreadfully frightened.’

  ‘Well, I do call that good, now!’ Corona cried, laughing. ‘Say, Sirena, here’s Psyche says when she first saw us she was most afraid to speak at table to us!’

  ‘Well, I want to know!’ Sirena exclaimed, much amused. ‘Afraid of you and me, Corona!’

  They both laughed at it as a very good joke; and Psyche, she knew not why, laughed too, for their merriment was contagious. They had reached by this time a darkling corridor in the dingy side-street, under whose gloomy arch Geraldine plunged undismayed, and led them all blindfold into a central court, where Psyche found herself at once, to her sudden surprise, in a perfect paradise of Oriental art, set out in an unaffected living museum of Oriental architecture. The courtyard was tiled and roofed in with glass: round the lower floor ran a pretty open arcade of Saracenic arches; the upper story was also arcaded, but hemmed in by a balustrade of pierced woodwork, carved and latticed like a medieval screen in exquisite patterns. All round lay the usual farrago of Eastern curiosities: Damascus lamps, and Persian saddle-cloths, and Morocco jars, and Algerian embroideries, all scattered about loosely in picturesque confusion. In the centre sat solid old Abd-er-Rahman himself in dignified silence — a massive old Moor in an embroidered coat and ample turban; he rose as Geraldine Maitland entered, and bowed her into his shop with stately courtesy.