It was a land of religions. Creeds and beliefs were serious matters—in times past matters of life and death, and within the bounds of possibility matters of life and death in the future. Christians and Mohammedan were at war, suspicious, fanatical in their hatred, no matter how well their rancors might be concealed for the time being. He perceived how a careless word, an unintentional profanation, might rouse the tumult; how the quarters of the town might hurl themselves upon one another with shouts of "Kill! Kill! . . ." He saw that there was a difference now, for the Christians were masters. No longer was the Moslem Turk in the saddle; England ruled the land. . . . And so he stirred about, poking here and there, zestful with unrestrained youth. It was all good for him.
He had discovered hospitality; how in the remote villages Christian and Moslem alike welcomed the unexpected guest. Perhaps in this virtue Christian borrowed from follower of Mohammedan, perhaps it is instinctive in the race. Nevertheless, wherever he stopped, Dare found courtesy and welcome, learning that the practice of hospitality was a first law of the Prophet, to be rewarded by twenty of the most desirable gifts of Allah! Before he had been two weeks in Nazareth he had already slept abroad, even so far as Kefr Sabt. Once, daring the saddle of a selected horse, he had ridden with Hana Effendi as far as the Jordan, and had looked across into that wild and unsettled country where every man wore his rifle across his back and where unpleasant things may happen. . . . Into Trans-Jordania, refuge of outlaws and lurking-place of bandits.
He had ridden with Hana Effendi, though he was jealous of the policeman's attentions to Rhoda Fair—was jealous of him while, strangely enough, he was drawn to him in friendship. It is true that Hana Effendi was a likable man. . . .
Now Paul was riding alone, having circled Jebel el-Tor Trabor and passed through the village of Meshah, a scattering unsanitary hamlet whose children ran out to stare wide-eyed at his passing. Children and dogs—and such handsome children, too. Olive-cheeked, black-eyed, healthy mites who made it difficult to believe that child mortality could be so frightfully high. Never, he thought, had he seen such beautiful little girls, such regular, pert, charming, intelligent faces. . . . Yet it was a beauty which seemed early to depart, to blossom but an hour after the tenth year!
Slowly he followed the road until it took up companionship with the Brook Sh' arah in wandering to the southward. It was here that three Arab policemen cantered past him, offering greetings, and swung around a shoulder of the hill. Paul followed slowly on his donkey until with startling suddenness came the sound of a rifle-shot, then, after a moment the clatter of hoofs as a riderless horse fled past in panic. Paul Dare's donkey continued unemotionally, its little hoofs twinkling in that absurd, inimitable gait which belongs to his kind alone. . . . Around the shoulder, just off the road and in the grass of a shaded gully, lay a policeman upon his face; his two companions, returning from a futile dash at the mountain wall, were dismounting. Paul Dare dismounted, too, to make his first acquaintance with death. Never before had he seen a human body from which life had departed.
He asked questions, but neither policeman spoke any language but Arabic, and so he must content himself with the facts as it stretched stark before him. The fact of unexpected, unheralded death. In such manner as was possible he assisted, inexpressibly shocked. But a moment before this man had passed him, had waved a friendly hand before he vanished around a corner—and now he had ceased to be of this earth, lay without consciousness, a thing material to be consigned to the earth. . . . The bullet had passed through the heart; thus obscurely the man had parted with that which was of supreme value to him. But why?
The hills were silent, deserted. Grim and silent the riders waited, rifles in hand, scrutinizing the upheaval of bowlders and crags where nothing moved save a distant file of black goats foraging. . . . Was the thing some act in a blood feud of those mountains? Had there been a waylaying? Upon what had these men ridden unexpectedly—and where was the assassin? One man mounted to ride off in pursuit of the vanished horse, returning with it in lead. Grimly they secured the body of their companion across the saddle and turned the heads of their mounts toward the nearest town. . . . And Paul Dare remained alone.
It was not a pleasant place to be, though the sun beat upon it blindingly, nor did Paul linger. As he mounted his donkey again and urged it out upon the road a motor car careened around the curve in the direction opposite to that from which he had arrived and stopped with a screaming of brakes and skidding of rear wheels which cast upward to the wind a cloud of thick dust with which the road was inch-deep.
"You, there," said a voice. "I thought I heard a shot." The voice was metallic, pitched high as though with the tension of excitement. Paul cleared his eyes of the dust to peer at the speaker and was caught up in a sensation, a sort of electric thrill such as sensitive people often feel in presence of an approaching thunderstorm, a sensation of foreboding, a feeling of the imminence of something dangerous, vast, engulfing. It was a handsome face Paul Dare saw, bronzed, regular, but now the eyes were narrowed, the lips set, the face-muscles taut —a face he recognized as that of Jaunty Bailey, the man so sinisterly linked with Rhoda Fair.
"There was a shot," he said, taking no care to conceal his aversion. "A policeman was killed."
"A policeman? What d'you mean, policeman? How? Who did it?"
"I've no idea," Paul said, shortly. "Someone lying in wait, possibly. It was very sudden—and unexpected."
"Unexpected—what do you mean?"
"I mean the officers were without suspicion of danger. They rode into an assassin's shot."
"What were police doing here? Did you come with them?"
"You will have to ask the police—and I was not with them!"
"What are you doing here?"
"I might ask that of you?" responded Paul.
As he made the retort he knew it would have been better to remain silent. Reason told him this, the swift adding of two and two. Whoever shot the policeman were men left on that spot as sentinels; they had fired to guard a secret which the coming of the officers threatened, or which the murderers fancied it threatened. The effect was the same. . . . And Jaunty Bailey was here, Bailey whom he had never seen in circumstances creditable to the man, in actions which were not criminal in their object! Somewhere in these hills was a secret of such a nature that men would murder to preserve it. That could mean but one thing, a tremendous crime committed or in process of commission. . . . And here was Jaunty Bailey. To Paul Dare's acute mind the addition was simple, the sum of the digits readable at a glance. If this were so, his position was not to be envied. The position of one stumbling upon a dangerous secret is never to be envied.
"Just what do you mean?" Bailey asked, his voice cold as steel.
"Doubtless what you meant when you asked the same question of me," said Paul.
Jaunty leaped from the car and stood confronting Dare, "My meddling friend," he said, "I asked you a question, and I want an answer. What are you doing here? I've taken a lot from you, Professor, but this time we're not on a crowded ship nor in a hotel full of tourists. Come through and come clean. What are you doing here?"
"Sight-seeing," said Paul, aware of the imminence of danger, but curiously unafraid. It was intellectually a satisfaction to him to note this. Whatever else he might be, he told himself, at least he was not a coward. "I often ride about on this donkey. Today, by chance, I chose this road." He found that he could think coolly and with precision in emergency, a quite different thing from sitting down quietly to reason in the quiet and safety of his study. . . . If Bailey was concerned in this secret, if a man had just been killed to preserve it, then, without doubt, he now stood in great peril.
"Are you lying?" Bailey asked, harshly.
"It is not my custom to lie, though it might be pardonable in this case." A certain boldness, he decided, were the better course in this emergency. "Because," he said, "my object in being here or elsewhere can be no concern of yours."
He noted, though
his eyes remained fixed upon Jaunty's face, that the second man was alighting slowly from the car. There was something stealthy, dangerous in this man's movements, something inimical to him.
"I'm half inclined to believe you—but you're such a snooper," said Bailey. "Um. . . . Anyhow you snooped in the wrong direction today—and you have a certain kind of intelligence."
"I trust so," said Paul, but his mind was not upon his words nor upon Bailey, but upon that other figure which slunk and circled to get behind him. He understood his predicament thoroughly. Whether or not he had come as a spy, he was there where he should not be, and Bailey could not afford to have him return to Nazareth to spread reports. . . . While Bailey held his attention the circling man would strike him down from behind. He strove to mask his consciousness of this while he waited, tense, poised, confronted by a threat which his experience had equipped him but poorly to meet. . . . Yet he must meet it somehow!
Bailey held his eyes and made some jeering remark which Dare did not hear, for his ears were straining for some stealthy sound in his rear. Of a sudden he heard it, the soft, scrunching of a foot on the roadway. . . . He must act, do something, do anything. With cruel vigor he dashed his heel into the donkey's flank, and as the creature plunged in protest, swung his head by main force toward the left so that it struck Jaunty upon the chest, the unexpectedness of it sending his enemy reeling against the car. The blow aimed at Paul's head from behind grazed his shoulder to thud futilely on the blankets covering the donkey's rump. Jaunty, off balance, snatched at the side of the motor car for support, arms widespread and clutching, and Paul, uttering the first shout of exultation of his life, leaned from his seat and struck the man with all the force he could put into the blow. . . . Fortune was with him. Jaunty's head was thrown back, but inches from the solid edge of the car's body. The blow snapped it backward against that unyielding surface sickeningly, so that he uttered a sound between a grunt and a moan, sagged sidewise against the fender, which arrested his fall for an instant, and then slumped to the road.
Again Paul kicked the donkey, and it cantered up the dusty way. He looked behind him. The second man, that Abdullah of evil report, did not follow, being of that nature which will strike from the rear or attack among numbers, but will face no man alone. Curiously exalted, Dare made the best haste he could toward the village and safety. Luck had been with him, he told himself, with that passion for truth which was ever with him, but nevertheless he had proven himself not altogether a failure in an emergency.
Three times he had encountered Jaunty Bailey and three times had come well out of the encounter. To him it seemed there was a curious fatality in thus crossing the path of this young man. Was it possible, he asked himself, that there were currents in life which tossed individuals together inimicably? Could it be that two men, strangers, might by some obscure law be destined to harass each other, to interfere with each other's plans and hopes until in the end they were forced to the ultimate struggle? He had a feeling that this was so, a foreboding that he and the flippant young man in the car could not avoid each other if they would, and that in the end they must come to grips. . . . It awoke something untrained, primitive deep within him, and he was astonished to find himself rejoicing at the prospect.
Then came other reflections, fears connected with Rhoda Fair and her life. There was the old, aching question of what was between her and this man. The question of what brought her to Nazareth, where one might say she was in hiding, and now the new question whether there was some connection between her presence and Bailey's presence—if they were working together toward some stealthy, illicit purpose. . . . And lastly, appallingly, for the death was fresh in his mind and before his eyes, if Bailey were concerned in the killing. Was it all of one piece? What was Bailey doing in that place and what reason had he for his manifest fear of detection.
At last, though he did not know it, the drama was in action. The prologue was finished, the piece itself begun. . . . He rode on with troubled mind, but out of the vexations and mysteries and perplexities emerged that afternoon one sure fact. He recognized it, admitted it—but was not yet ready to rejoice in it. This fact was love! The emotion he felt for Rhoda Fair was no common infatuation, it was love, the love whose existence in the world he had scouted, and it reached to the very roots of his being. How he knew it to be love no man may say, but he knew; he knew that whatever Rhoda Fair was, whatever she did, whatever of grief, of danger, of misery she might bring to him, she was necessary to his life, indispensable. . . .
He smiled miserably, ironically, as indeed, he was well entitled to do. Professor Paul Dare, with one career destroyed, was about to court ruin to whatever of distinction, of value, of achievement might stretch before him, by offering his heart and his name to the daughter of a criminal—the intimate of criminals—to one who was indicated by all the evidence in his possession to be a criminal and fugitive herself. . . . But it is to be noted that he did not hesitate nor draw back. So long as he might have her he would accept such marriage portion as she should bring to him.
Chapter Fourteen
HANA EFFENDI was manifestly troubled as he sat with Paul Dare in the upper hallway of the Hotel Galilee. His eyes had laid aside their perpetual twinkle, and his short, thick-lipped mouth neglected its quizzical smile. He frowned.
"Tell me what you saw," he directed his companion, and Paul described the shooting of the policeman, as much of it as he had witnessed. Hana Effendi shook his head.
"It is not natural," he said. "Those men of mine turned the corner and came upon two fellows asleep. One of them jumped upon his feet and fired. It was panic. I think. There was no need to fire. So why should he do it? . . . They were from across the Jordan, I think, but no cattle had been stolen. Then why were they afraid so that they would shoot without asking questions? . . . It gets my goat. . . . And you saw nothing more?"
Paul hesitated. He had not told the policeman of his encounter with Jaunty Bailey, and for some reason, obscure even to himself, he was reluctant to do so. There was, of course, no evidence that Bailey was connected with the murder; indeed, what evidence there was seemed to point to the impossibility of his being personally concerned with it, of his having himself committed it. Dare did not speak. It may be that this was because Bailey was a fellow-countryman; it may have been a reluctance to meddle; it may have been that bias which excellent people seem to hold in favor of the criminal and against the police—or it may have been because of Rhoda Fair. Probably that was it. If Bailey were called to the attention of the authorities, it might uncover the beginning of a trail which would lead to Rhoda.
"There's something in the wind," Hana Effendi said. "I smell it. I ache in the joints. . . . Ever since Abdullah—that bad actor—made himself to appear I have had growing pains. And this shooting has something to do with it, I think. If somebody would take Abdullah out in the hills and put a knife through his ribs it would be very benefeecial. Yes, sir, that bad egg has a hen on." Even this last happy grouping of American argot had not power to lift the somberness of his manner. Ordinarily he would have been boyishly delighted with himself. He lifted his heavy shoulders. "Well, if there are no criminals in the world there are no policemen, and I am out of luck, what?"
"That is philosophy," said Paul. "The idea that wicked persons are put into the world to give the virtuous jobs preventing them from being wicked!"
"Oh, wicked!" Hana Effendi considered the word. "What is it to be wicked and what is it not to be wicked?"
"To be wicked," said Paul, "is to behave so that you disturb your neighbors; to be good is to conduct in such a way that you never are a nuisance to anybody."
"It may be so. But you are a Christian, eh? What about that side of it?" He did not wait for an answer. "I think," he bore down upon that word as he always did when expressing an opinion as if he wished his hearers to understand distinctly that he was not dealing in fact, but in conjecture, "that religious people are so vain."
"Vain!" Paul was really
startled by this characterization. "Why vain?"
"To think they, each of them, are of so great importance. They pat themselves on the back. They swell all up. They believe in a very great God, a most important personage—and then they think that what they do can be anything to him. It is as if I sat down and worried because His Majesty the King of England was going to be upset because I have bad table manners. When, of course, the King never will know there is such a man as Hana Effendi. You see?"
"At least it is a novel idea."
"No. This is what I think. I think I must satisfy my boss to keep my job—yes. Then, besides that, I must satisfy myself, so that I am not disgusted with how I do. . . . I would not like to see myself and have to say, 'Hama, old bean, you're a rotter.' "
"At least that will get you through the world."
"And for the rest I must take what is coming to me. If what satisfies Mister Hana with himself doesn't satisfy Allah or God, then, as you say, I am in Dutch."
It was a discussion suited to Paul's temperament, yet he could not join in it with old-time zest. His mind was away—with those mounted policemen, with Jaunty Bailey, with Rhoda Fair. Thoughts flicked through his mind inconsequentially and in disorder. First it would be: "He said he was going to Jerusalem. Was that the truth?" Paul decided it was not the truth.
"I have seen mos' unpleasant people do things I must admire, nevertheless," said Hana Effendi. "You came through Beyrout?"
"Yes."
"Then you saw the City of the Refugees? Those shanties and tents! I have heard there are fifty thousand of them there, crawling over each other like bugs. From Smyrna, eh?" He lifted his shoulders. "There are always refugees in this part. In the old days it was worse—much. Burnings and killings—but always the Turk was not as much to blame as you think, maybe. I have seen blood in the gutters. . . . Now I despise an Armenian, yet I have seen them do things—those lowest forms of animal life!—and why? I have seen cowards make themselves brave. I have seen men that I have known and have much despised let themselves be killed mos' painfully so that a wife or a daughter or some person might not be killed. . . . I think every man is a much finer animal than we know. Yes. But so futile. The bad ones do fine things as well as the good ones."
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