RHODA FAIR: The Classic Novel of a Woman at the Crossroads

by Clarence Budingtion Kelland

  "It is good to be welcomed," he said to Rhoda.

  The bigness of him, his calm, the nobility of his features, the wonderful depth and placidity of his eyes restored Rhoda. Hysteria which threatened for a moment abated; a wave of gratitude, of peace, of fortitude engulfed her, so that for an instant it seemed that all woes were erased from the world. She was secure. . . .

  "Oh, you are welcome," she said, and forgot that she was speaking to a stranger, a man casually met on shipboard—a mysterious personage enigmatic to her as to all others.

  His hand continued to hold hers as a father's might have done, and she clung to it as a child.

  "I wondered if you took an old man's advice," he said. "And is not Nazareth all I promised? What has it done for you?"

  "Done! . . . It has tried to do! I have felt it trying, but—"

  "But other things have crowded between!" He smiled down at her. "There have been troubles, vexations, demands—"

  "And now tragedy," she said.

  "Tragedy?" he turned his splendid face full upon her.

  "Today. Mr. Friend—Reuben Friend—has been attacked on the road from Tiberias." She hesitated over the next word, "Robbers have taken him away—him and his wife. Perhaps killed him."

  The lofty serenity of his face did not alter; no shadow troubled his eyes. In that moment it seemed to her that he was a being above troubles, above and free from the woes of mankind; that he could perceive but never be touched by them. . . . Or was it that his own woes were so deep, his own agonies so tremendous, his own experience so appalling, that all else was pallor and dimness by comparison. . . . And yet the sorrows of others did not pass unnoticed; her anxieties and problems had drawn his attention and his sympathy. What was it? What was it about this man? What was his history and what his place in the maelstrom of life?

  "And is that," he asked, gently, "tragedy to you? Was he, then, a friend, dear to you?"

  "He was a friend," she said, "but that is not what makes the tragedy."

  "And you cannot tell me," he said, with quick understanding. "You cannot tell it even to me."

  "I can only tell you that—that it seems as if I had done this thing; as if I were guilty of treachery to that kind old man."

  "But more," he said, "as if you would be guilty of treachery if you were to tell. . . . And that is hard, very hard." She was astounded by his understanding, his penetration, but mystified when he spoke again, his voice low, sorrowful, "And I," he said in a voice scarcely more than a whisper, "must remain a spectator—with nothing but word—words. . . . How much longer, Oh, Thou! The years, and the weight of the years! The crushing weight of the years, and still Thou dost not come!"

  "You must guide me," she said. "I am alone—alone. You must tell me what to do."

  "You must be brave and do what your soul demands of you. I cannot advise, I cannot help. . . . No man so helpless as I! . . . Poor child, you know who has done this thing." It was not a question; it was a statement of knowledge.

  "I know," she said.

  "But you must not speak, because you are bound to him by loyalty—or think you are bound to him, which is the same. For we can but act as we think, be true only to what we believe. . . . How many teeming millions have saved their souls by being true to an error believed!"

  "If I keep silent I wrong that kind old man—if I speak I betray another. . . . How can I choose? How shall I know? Whichever thing I do I—I shall always despise myself."

  "Is it, then, so important to you to be without guilt?" he asked, gently. "Have you reached that decision?"

  She had not reached it, did not suspect she had reached it, and his words struck her with the impact of a blow. "It is not that," she said, "right and wrong, to follow one life or another, that is not it. No, I have not decided. . . . But this, this is actual. It has happened. And I was taught to play fair."

  "Do you love this man?" Mr. Ghafir asked.

  "I do not know."

  "If I had not come, if there had been none of whom you could ask advice, what was your plan? For you had a plan."

  "I thought—I had determined—to search for him. Oh, it sounds wild, foolish for a girl to think of searching and finding when these men trained to the work may search in vain! But it would be trying."

  "And if you found him—what?"

  "I would beg him to release Mr. Friend."

  "Would he grant your request.?"

  "I—I would make him—I would offer him something."

  "And that something?" His eyes glowed as he looked down upon her, glowed as if he were finding an oasis of happiness in the desert of his years.

  "Myself," she said.

  "Does he desire you?"

  "He loves me," she said.

  "And you would cling to him, and follow him—in the life he has chosen?"

  "I would be true to him, loyal to him in all he desired."

  "Even to becoming his—accomplice?"

  "Even that—if he would give up this thing."

  "And so give up the battle! And so become what you might find it abhorrent to become! . . ."

  "If it were abhorrent I should be glad. . . . But I am afraid it would not be so—when the thing was done. Oh, you do not know me! You do not know the hunger, the restlessness, the urge that is with me day after day. It is in my blood. . . . No, once it was inevitable, I should be glad! . . . To do as he wishes, to live the life he paints—adventure, risk,—the swift action! Never a humdrum day! Excitement! Oh, how it calls to me! Can't you see? . . . Can't you understand?"

  "I understand," he said, and his eyes were still alight. He did understand. He perceived clearly the sturdiness of her fabric; how every impulse within her struggled to carry her to fair mountain tops; he saw how her strength might become her weakness and work destruction, a terrible, glorious self-immolation for a mistaken ideal. He understood her inheritances and how they worked upon her; how the pressure of the world and its opinion had crowded in from without. It was given to him to sympathize with her vivid, questing youth, that daring which demanded something to front; that hunger for the outre, that impatience with the slow processes of life which called upon her to hasten them, to crowd weeks and months into a day. . . . But the light in his eyes was because of none of these things, it was because he saw the clean, clear, unsmirched courage living in her like a flame—and the woman she might be if all went well. . . . But because of the very fineness of her and the courage she stood in peril of losing her happiness upon earth, and her soul after it had forsaken her body.

  "Rhoda Fair," he said, "I can only tell you this—that every living thing must work out its own destiny. Each soul must clear its eyes to see. You are strong, and your will is strong. You have come here to think, to find peace, but, my dear, you are one of those to whom peace can come only after ordeal—if then. Study your own heart, and when you know what your heart moves you to do—then do it fearlessly, accepting neither advice nor help. You and you alone can find the way. . . . So, if your heart and your mind tell you that you should find this man and make your offer—go, and God go with you."

  "Do you think," she asked, with curious intentness, "that there is a God—or that He would bother to go with me?"

  "I know,"—he dwelt upon the word—"that there is a Son of God who once walked the street below—and he has always been with you."

  "He takes notice of individuals? He can be aware of just one tiny person among all the hundreds of millions on this earth?"

  "He took notice of me," said El Ghafir. "That I know and to that I am living testimony. For his own high ends he took notice of me."

  She was awed. There was that in his face, in his manner, in his voice, which filled her with something not physical fear, but was deeper, more profound than physical fear. It was something akin to this which Moses must have felt before the burning bush. . . . That tale of Fatima Kaleel—never forgotten, often pondered by her—was with her now; that this man could not die—could not die, by command of the Son of God. . . .


  Could it be truth and no wild native superstition? Was it possible this man had wandered over the face of the earth since Christ was crucified, living, always living and praying for his release? . . . Was it possible El Ghafir had seen the Messiah face to face! . . . The awful tragedy of it! Impossible, beyond nature—and yet, was not God beyond nature? It could not be, yet it explained him, made him plausible. . . . Yet she dared not ask.

  "Once," said El Ghafir. "I resented Him. Hatred flamed in my heart. I—even I—was the Antichrist. . . . For—" Rhoda knew in her heart that the word he suppressed was "centuries." He did not utter it. "For many years," he said, "I was His declared enemy because of the curse He put upon me. In such ways as I could devise I did Him despite—and because I was what I was, I was not without power. . . . But I could not harm Him. I could only harm the poor deluded who were my accomplices. . . . He could not be harmed—He, the Word which became Flesh! Nor could his message be brought to discredit. . . . And then—oh, the years! The weary, dragging, endless years!—the resentment and the hatred were worn from me, as water may wear away the hardest granite—and I saw Him for what He was and His message for what it was. . . . His sentence rested more lightly, for I labored to bring about His will and not to destroy it. . . . And I am able to testify to you, my child, of my own knowledge, that He exists and that His mercy and love are without beginning and end."

  "Of your own knowledge! How can that be?" She approached closer to him, touched his arm, felt the reality, the earthiness of him. "Tell me who you are. Tell me how you know."

  He smiled and his eyes were ineffably sad. "Who am I? The folk hereabout call me El Ghafir, as you know."

  "El Ghafir—and what does that mean?"

  "The Watchman," he said, simply. "And now have you determined—is your decision made?"

  "I must go," she said. "I must find him if I can."

  He nodded. "But not alone. Go to your home and I will send to you one you may trust, one who knows the country and its people. . . . But you know him already I think—the man Saffoury. He will go with you."

  "He is kind," she said. "It was you who sent him to me in Beyrout. . . . You seem to know him well, but he could tell me nothing of you."

  "He has never seen me," said El Ghafir, "nor I him. But his grandfather—and his grandfather—" He stopped upon that. "But you may trust him, and he will be invaluable to help you. . . . And I—even I—" Again he paused and into his eyes came that look of ineffable sadness, of more than earthly patience. "But I am an onlooker—only an onlooker. . . . And yet I shall see you again, be with you again, for to what purpose is the play if there be no spectator. And I may speak a word or unlock a door."

  "You have made me afraid," she said.

  He took her hand and, speaking softly, quoted, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son—' "

  "I have heard that in church," she said.

  "It is spoken in church, but it is spoken more often and more beautifully in the privacy of troubled and fearful hearts. . . . And it is true. . . . His Only Begotten Son!"

  "Are you a minister, a missionary?"

  "I am only The Watchman," he said.

  "For what do you watch?"

  "For His coming," he said, and then in a tone of rarest sweetness, "and for my release." He held out his hand. "And now good-by for a time. . . . You have your affairs and I have mine, but we shall see each other again. I shall be with you when I am least expected—and who knows but it may be my joy to hold open the door."

  So she took his hand and said good-by and went to the house of Josef the carpenter, amazed at the man and striving to pierce the mystery which underlay his words. . . . But she was comforted, strengthened. Her courage was renewed, for it seemed to her that whatever this man approved must be good. . . . Before she retired she prepared for a journey. But it is to be noted that she did not pray, for she felt that God was no acquaintance, but a stranger, and, though she craved His aid—some aid—she would not ask it in her hour of need—lest it be considered an intrusion and savoring of cowardice. . . . Rhoda had read of deathbed prayers and repentance, and such was her nature that she looked upon them with scorn.

  "If ever I am entitled to pray," she said, "I will pray. But I will not pray because I am afraid."

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hana Effendi was well equipped to deal with the criminal Oriental mind; he knew its deviousness, where it was bold and where timid, where it was artful and where it functioned with childlike directness. He knew it, for he was Oriental himself. But in this matter he was to encounter something quite different, baffling to him, and that was the keen Anglo-Saxon intelligence of Jaunty Bailey. He was to encounter a boldness not the result of fatalism, a finesse which came not from a natural cunning, but from cold reason, and a genius for guessing the plans and movements of the pursuer. Hana Effendi knew exactly what Abdullah, if left to himself, would do, and upon that knowledge he acted. The police, in short, knew that captor and captives had gone in headlong flight to the fastnesses of Trans-Jordania, and thither the pursuit thundered.

  Traces were visible, easily to be followed. Herdsmen and husbandmen alike reported the passage of a company of desert men, dangerous to regard, threatening, traveling at breakneck speed. Villages here and there gave like report, for it seemed the marauders had sought only to put distance between themselves and the scene of the crime, and had taken no thought to concealment. This was as it should be. The hiding would come when the Jordan was crossed and that no-man's land of sand and undergrowth and rock and ravine safely reached. . . . The wires carried these tidings to Tiberias, to Acre, to Jerusalem, to Jericho, and Hana Effendi lashed his horses to a lather upon the road while converging parties thundered from other centers to give the wilderness such a combing as they never had known. For the authorities of Palestine were aroused. Government House as Jerusalem was in a state of mind; The American Consulate in a flurry; cables flashed to London and to Washington—and within twenty-four hours the press of the world, and more especially of America, flared headlines in the faces of its readers. Jaunty Bailey was right; he had waved a red flag in the face of the bull of law and order; he had rocked the world. . . . It is doubtful if he had foreseen quite how violently he was to rock it. . . .

  But those horsemen, galloping from Tiberias, from Nazareth, from Jerusalem over the road taken by the Good Samaritan, across the wastes at the head of the Dead Sea and into the wilderness beyond, were galloping vainly. What hornet's nest of outlaws they might stir up, what possibility of sudden war might lie in their path, was a matter of no moment to Jaunty Bailey, who had sent them there on wildest of goose chases. It was his brain had devised that flight and insured the pursuit, while himself, with his prisoners and Abdullah to assist in the dirty work, were in quite another direction, very much at his ease and highly pleased.

  As a matter of fact, he had fled not at all, but had proceeded in leisurely and highly efficient manner along the road toward Nazareth, swinging off to the eastward of Jebel el-Tor, himself inconspicuous on muleback in the guise of a farmer, while close behind, yet obviously not with him, came a little party of five, three in a small car and two ahorseback. So they proceeded, keeping discreet intervals, until they arrived at the valley where were pitched the black tents of the Sheik El-Ssimairi, and there they vanished unobtrusively from view. Hana Effendi had but to stretch out his hand from Nazareth to touch them—but Hana Effendi was pounding the roads far to the eastward.

  There, in the camp of the Bedouins, remained Reuben Friend and his wife—she in the tent of the women, hidden from prying eyes, as was fitting, he permitted to roam at large—or as much at large as the horde of savage dogs would recommend, clad in such black, greasy robes as were worn by his host, inconspicuous as a grain of sand in the desert. Altogether it was efficient, well conceived and highly successful; Jaunty Bailey congratulated himself and sat down to wait. His only regret was that newspapers would not be available.

  Presen
tly from distant Damascus, a place which would afford no information and rather bewilder the receivers, would be posted a letter regarding ransom, its amount and the manner of payment, which letter would be signed simply El-Harami—The Robber.

  So Jaunty settled down in drowsy comfort to smoke innumerable Giubecs, to drink quantities of black coffee, to wonder idly what this strange food he was compelled to consume would do to his digestive apparatus, and to watch with interest how the Sheik El-Ssimairi ruled his seven sons, his wives, their wives—and administered his wealth. The sheik was a swarthy, bearded, patriarchal, and dignified old rascal whose pride was in his hospitality, and who could lie fluently and convincingly by the hour, telling how many pounds of flour were baked each day into bread by his women, how many sheep were killed—and all for guests or charity. Notwithstanding the business arrangements between them, he insisted upon the fiction that Jaunty was his honored guest and treated him most ceremoniously. With his seven sons grouped about him under the unwalled portion of the tent he would stand and discourse, while Jaunty would recline upon cushions not of the cleanest—as was fitting for a guest—and the pair of them would drink cup after cup of thick coffee, while one son attended the coffee pot and washed the cups with a grimy thumb between each drinking. And there would be bread, which looked like a rug in need of laundering, limp and tough, and sometimes a plate of colorless goat's butter served as a dainty which one was supposed to eat with his fingers—a rather messy occupation. . . . And always there were the dogs!

  Upon Jaunty's first arrival it had been necessary to send an escort to fetch him to the tents—eight young men with clubs, of whom four walked on either side of him, flailing at the savage curs to prevent them from making a meal of the guest. . . . But it was all bizarre enough to entertain Jaunty, and his sense of humor stood him in good stead. Some day it would be a tale to tell.