Donovan Pasha and Some People of Egypt: 2. The Price of the Grindstone-and the Drum

2. The Price of the Grindstone-and the Drum

He lived in the days of Ismail the Khedive, and was familiarly known as
the Murderer. He had earned his name, and he had no repentance. From the
roof of a hut in his native village of Manfaloot he had dropped a
grindstone on the head of Ebn Haroun, who contended with him for the
affections of Ahassa, the daughter of Haleel the barber, and Ebn Haroun's
head was flattened like the cover of a pie. Then he had broken a cake of
dourha bread on the roof for the pigeons above him, and had come down
grinning to the street, where a hesitating mounted policeman fumbled with
his weapon, and four ghaffirs waited for him with their naboots.

Seti then had weighed his chances, had seen the avenging friends of Ebn
Haroun behind the ghaffirs, and therefore permitted himself to be marched
off to the mudirieh. There the Mudir glared at him and had him loaded
with chains and flung into the prison, where two hundred convicts arrayed
themselves against myriad tribes which, killed individually, made a spot
on the wall no bigger than a threepenny-bit! The carnage was great, and
though Seti was sleepless night after night it was not because of his
crime. He found some solace, however, in provoking his fellow-prisoners
to assaults upon each other; and every morning he grinned as he saw the
dead and wounded dragged out into the clear sunshine.

The end to this came when the father of Seti, Abou Seti, went at night to
the Mudir and said deceitfully: "Effendi, by the mercy of Heaven I have
been spared even to this day; for is it not written in the Koran that a
man shall render to his neighbour what is his neighbour's? What should
Abou Seti do with ten feddans of land, while the servant of Allah, the
Effendi Insagi, lives? What is honestly mine is eight feddans, and the
rest, by the grace of God, is thine, O effendi."

Every feddan he had he had honestly earned, but this was his way of
offering backsheesh.

And the Mudir had due anger and said: "No better are ye than a Frank to
have hidden the truth so long and waxed fat as the Nile rises and falls.
The two feddans, as thou sayest, are mine."

Abou Seti bowed low, and rejoined, "Now shall I sleep in peace, by the
grace of Heaven, and all my people under my date-trees--and all my
people?" he added, with an upward look at the Mudir.

"But the rentals of the two feddans of land these ten years--thou hast
eased thy soul by bringing the rentals thereof?"

Abou Seti's glance fell and his hands twitched. His fingers fumbled with
his robe of striped silk. He cursed the Mudir in his heart for his bitter
humour; but was not his son in prison, and did it not lie with the Mudir
whether he lived or died? So he answered:

"All-seeing and all-knowing art thou, O effendi, and I have reckoned the
rentals even to this hour for the ten years--fifty piastres for each
feddan--"

"A hundred for the five years of high Nile," interposed the Mudir.

"Fifty for the five lean years, and a hundred for the five fat years,"
said Abou Seti, and wished that his words were poisoned arrows, that they
might give the Mudir many deaths at once. "And may Allah give thee
greatness upon thy greatness!"

"God prosper thee also, Abou Seti, and see that thou keep only what is
thine own henceforth. Get thee gone in peace."

"At what hour shall I see the face of my son alive?" asked Abou Seti in a
low voice, placing his hand upon his turban in humility.

"To-morrow at even, when the Muezzin calls from the mosque of El Hassan,
be thou at the west wall of the prison by the Gate of the Prophet's
Sorrow, with thy fastest camel. Your son shall ride for me through the
desert even to Farafreh, and bear a letter to the bimbashi there. If he
bear it safely, his life is his own; if he fail, look to thy feddans of
land!"

"God is merciful, and Seti is bone of my bone," said Abou Seti, and laid
his hand again upon his turban. That was how Mahommed Seti did not at
once pay the price of the grindstone, but rode into the desert bearing
the message of the Mudir and returned safely with the answer, and was
again seen in the cafes of Manfaloot. And none of Ebn Haroun's friends
did aught, for the world knew through whom it was that Seti lived--and
land was hard to keep in Manfaloot and the prison near.

But one day a kavass of the Khedive swooped down on Manfaloot, and twenty
young men were carried off in conscription. Among them was Seti, now
married to Ahassa, the fellah maid for whom the grindstone had fallen on
Ebn Haroun's head. When the fatal number fell to him and it was ordained
that he must go to Dongola to serve in the Khedive's legions, he went to
his father, with Ahassa wailing behind him.

"Save thyself," said the old man with a frown.

"I have done what I could--I have sold my wife's jewels," answered Seti.

"Ten piastres!" said old Abou Seti grimly.

"Twelve," said Seti, grinning from ear to ear. "Thou wilt add four
feddans of land to that I will answer for the Mudir."

"Thy life only cost me two feddans. Shall I pay four to free thee of
serving thy master the Khedive? Get thee gone into the Soudan. I do not
fear for thee: thou wilt live on. Allah is thy friend. Peace be with
thee!"

II

So it was that the broad-shouldered Seti went to be a soldier, with all
the women of the village wailing behind him, and Ahassa his wife covering
her head with dust and weeping by his side as he stepped out towards
Dongola. For himself, Seti was a philosopher; that is to say, he was a
true Egyptian. Whatever was, was to be; and Seti had a good digestion,
which is a great thing in the desert. Moreover, he had a capacity for
foraging--or foray. The calmness with which he risked his life for an
onion or a water-bag would have done credit to a prince of buccaneers. He
was never flustered. He had dropped a grindstone on the head of his
rival, but the smile that he smiled then was the same smile with which he
suffered and forayed and fought and filched in the desert. With a back
like a door, and arms as long and strong as a gorilla's, with no moral
character to speak of, and an imperturbable selfishness, even an ignorant
Arab like Seti may go far. More than once his bimbashi drew a sword to
cut him down for the peaceful insolent grin with which he heard himself
suddenly charged with very original crimes; but even the officer put his
sword up again, because he remembered that though Seti was the curse of
the regiment on the march, there was no man like him in the day of
battle. Covered with desert sand and blood, and fighting and raging after
the manner of a Sikh, he could hold ten companies together like a wall
against a charge of Dervishes. The bimbashi rejoiced at this, for he was
a coward; likewise his captain was a coward, and so was his lieutenant:
for they were half Turks, half Gippies, who had seen Paris and had not
the decency to die there. Also it had been discovered that no man made so
good a spy or envoy as Seti. His gift for lying was inexpressible:
confusion never touched him; for the flattest contradictions in the
matter of levying backsheesh he always found an excuse. Where the
bimbashi and his officers were afraid to go lest the bald-headed eagle
and the vulture should carry away their heads as tit-bits to the Libyan
hills, Seti was sent. In more than one way he always kept his head. He
was at once the curse and the pride of the regiment. For his sins he
could not be punished, and his virtues were of value only to save his
life.

In this fashion, while his regiment thinned out by disease, famine,
fighting, and the midnight knife, Seti came on to Dongola, to Berber, to
Khartoum; and he grinned with satisfaction when he heard that they would
make even for Kordofan. He had outlived all the officers who left
Manfaloot with the regiment save the bimbashi, and the bimbashi was
superstitious and believed that while Seti lived he would live.
Therefore, no clansman ever watched his standard flying in the van as the
bimbashi--from behind--watched the long arm of Seti slaying, and heard
his voice like a brass horn above all others shouting his war-cry.

But at Khartoum came Seti's fall. Many sorts of original sin had been
his, with profit and prodigious pleasure, but when, by the supposed
orders of the bimbashi, he went through Khartoum levying a tax upon every
dancing-girl in the place and making her pay upon the spot at the point
of a merciless tongue, he went one step too far. For his genius had
preceded that of Selamlik Pasha, the friend of the Mouffetish at Cairo,
by one day only. Selamlik himself had collected taxes on dancing-girls
all the way from Cairo to Khartoum; and to be hoist by an Arab in a foot
regiment having no authority and only a limitless insolence, was more
than the Excellency could bear.

To Selamlik Pasha the bimbashi hastily disowned all knowledge of Seti's
perfidy, but both were brought out to have their hands and feet and heads
cut off in the Beit-el-Mal, in the presence of the dancing-girls and the
populace. In the appointed place, when Seti saw how the bimbashi
wept--for he had been to Paris and had no Arab blood in him; how he wrung
his hands--for had not absinthe weakened his nerves in the cafes of St.
Michel?--when Seti saw that he was no Arab and was afraid to die, then he
told the truth to Selamlik Pasha. He even boldly offered to tell the
pasha where half his own ill-gotten gains were hid, if he would let the
bimbashi go. Now, Selamlik Pasha was an Egyptian, and is it not written
in the Book of Egypt that no man without the most dangerous reason may
refuse backsheesh? So it was that Selamlik talked to the Ulema, the holy
men, who were there, and they urged him to clemency, as holy men will,
even in Egypt--at a price.

So it was also that the bimbashi went back to his regiment with all his
limbs intact. Seti and the other half of his ill-gotten gains were left.
His hands were about to be struck off, when he realised of how little
account his gold would be without them; so he offered it to Selamlik
Pasha for their sake. The pasha promised, and then, having found the
money, serenely prepared the execution. For his anger was great. Was not
the idea of taxing the dancing-girls his very own, the most original tax
ever levied in Egypt? And to have the honour of it filched from him by a
soldier of Manfaloot--no, Mahommed Seti should be crucified!

And Seti, the pride and the curse of his regiment, would have been
crucified between two palms on the banks of the river had it not been for
Fielding Bey, the Englishman--Fielding of St. Bartholomew's--who had
burned gloriously to reform Egypt root and branch, and had seen the fire
of his desires die down. Fielding Bey saved Seti, but not with
backsheesh.

Fielding intervened. He knew Selamlik Pasha well, and the secret of his
influence over him is for telling elsewhere. But whatever its source, it
gave Mahommed Seti his life. It gave him much more, for it expelled him
from the Khedive's army. Now soldiers without number, gladly risking
death, had deserted from the army of the Khedive; they had bought
themselves out with enormous backsheesh, they had been thieves,
murderers, panderers, that they might be freed from service by some
corrupt pasha or bimbashi; but no one in the knowledge of the world had
ever been expelled from the army of the Khedive.

There was a satanic humour in the situation pleasant to the soul of
Mahommed Seti, if soul his subconsciousness might be called. In the
presence of his regiment, drawn up in the Beit-el-Mal, before his
trembling bimbashi, whose lips were now pale with terror at the loss of
his mascot, Mahommed Seti was drummed out of line, out of his regiment,
out of the Beit-el-Mal. It was opera boufe, and though Seti could not
know what opera boufe was, he did know that it was a ridiculous fantasia,
and he grinned his insolent grin all the way, even to the corner of the
camel-market, where the drummer and the sergeant and his squad turned
back from ministering a disgrace they would gladly have shared.

Left at the corner of the camel-market, Mahommed Seti planned his future.
At first it was to steal a camel and take the desert for Berber. Then he
thought of the English hakim, Fielding Bey, who had saved his life. Now,
a man who has saved your life once may do it again; one favour is always
the promise of another. So Seti, with a sudden inspiration, went straight
to the house of Fielding Bey and sat down before it on his mat.

With the setting of the sun came a clatter of tins and a savoury odour
throughout Khartoum to its farthest precincts, for it was Ramadan, and no
man ate till sunset. Seti smiled an avid smile, and waited. At last he
got up, turned his face towards Mecca, and said his prayers. Then he
lifted the latch of Fielding's hut, entered, eyed the medicine bottles
and the surgical case with childish apprehension, and made his way to the
kitchen. There he foraged. He built a fire; his courage grew; he ran to
the bazaar, and came back with an armful of meats and vegetables.

So it was that when Fielding returned he found Mahommed Seti and a
savoury mess awaiting him. Also there was coffee and a bottle of brandy
which Seti had looted in the bazaar. In one doorway stood Fielding; in
another stood Mahommed Seti, with the same grin which had served his
purpose all the way from Cairo, his ugly face behind it, and his
prodigious shoulders below it, and the huge chest from which came forth,
like the voice of a dove:

"God give thee long life, saadat el bey!"

Now an M.D. degree and a course in St. Bartholomew's Hospital do not
necessarily give a knowledge of the human soul, though the outlying lands
of the earth have been fattened by those who thought there was knowledge
and salvation in a conquered curriculum. Fielding Bey, however, had never
made pretence of understanding the Oriental mind, so he discreetly took
his seat and made no remarks. From sheer instinct, however, when he came
to the coffee he threw a boot which caught Mahommed Seti in the middle of
the chest, and said roughly: "French, not Turkish, idiot!"

Then Mahommed Seti grinned, and he knew that he was happy; for it was
deep in his mind that that was the Inglesi's way of offering a long
engagement. In any case Seti had come to stay. Three times he made French
coffee that night before it suited, and the language of Fielding was
appropriate in each case. At last a boot, a native drum, and a wood
sculpture of Pabst the lion-headed goddess, established perfect relations
between them. They fell into their places of master and man as accurately
as though the one had smitten and the other served for twenty years.

The only acute differences they had were upon two points--the cleaning of
the medicine bottles and surgical instruments, and the looting. But it
was wonderful to see how Mahommed Seti took the kourbash at the hands of
Fielding, when he shied from the medicine bottles. He could have broken,
or bent double with one twist, the weedy, thin-chested Fielding. But
though he saw a deadly magic and the evil eye in every stopper, and
though to him the surgical instruments were torturing steels which the
devil had forged for his purposes, he conquered his own prejudices so far
as to assist in certain bad cases which came in Fielding's way on the
journey down the Nile.

The looting was a different matter. Had not Mahommed Seti looted all his
life--looted from his native village to the borders of Kordofan? Did he
not take to foray as a wild ass to bersim? Moreover, as little Dicky
Donovan said humorously yet shamelessly when he joined them at Korosko:
"What should a native do but loot who came from Manfaloot?"

Dicky had a prejudice against the Murderer, because he was a murderer;
and Mahommed Seti viewed with scorn any white man who was not Fielding;
much more so one who was only five feet and a trifle over. So for a time
there was no sympathy between the two. But each conquered the other in
the end. Seti was conquered first.

One day Dicky, with a sudden burst of generosity--for he had a button to
his pocket--gave Mahommed Seti a handful of cigarettes. The next day Seti
said to Fielding: "Behold, God has given thee strong men for friends.
Thou hast Mahommed Seti"--his chest blew out like a bellows--"and thou
hast Donovan Pasha."

Fielding grunted. He was not a fluent man, save in forbidden language,
and Seti added:

"Behold thou, saadat el bey, who opens a man's body and turns over his
heart with a sword-point, and sewing him up with silken cords bids him
live again, greatness is in thy house! Last night thy friend, Donovan
Pasha, gave into my hands a score of those cigarettes which are like the
smell of a camel-yard. In the evening, having broken bread and prayed, I
sat down at the door of the barber in peace to smoke, as becomes a man
who loves God and His benefits. Five times I puffed, and then I stayed my
lips, for why should a man die of smoke when he can die by the sword? But
there are many men in Korosko whose lives are not as clean linen. These I
did not love. I placed in their hands one by one the cigarettes, and with
their blessings following me I lost myself in the dusk and waited."

Mahommed Seti paused. On his face was a smile of sardonic retrospection.

"Go on, you fool!" grunted Fielding.

"Nineteen sick men, unworthy followers of the Prophet, thanked Allah in
the mosque to-day that their lives were spared. Donovan Pasha is a great
man and a strong, effendi! We be three strong men together."

Dicky Donovan's conversion to a lasting belief in Mahommed Seti came a
year later.

The thing happened at a little sortie from the Nile. Fielding was chief
medical officer, and Dicky, for the moment, was unattached. When the time
came for starting, Mahommed Seti brought round Fielding's horse and also
Dicky Donovan's. Now, Mahommed Seti loved a horse as well as a Bagarra
Arab, and he had come to love Fielding's waler Bashi-Bazouk as a Farshoot
dog loves his master. And Bashi-Bazouk was worthy of Seti's love. The
sand of the desert, Seti's breath and the tail of his yelek made the coat
of Bashi-Bazouk like silk. It was the joy of the regiment, and the
regiment knew that Seti had added a new chapter to the Koran concerning
horses, in keeping with Mahomet's own famous passage--

          "By the CHARGERS that pant,
          And the hoofs that strike fire,
          And the scourers at dawn,
          Who stir up the dust with it,
          And cleave through a host with it!"

But Mahomet's phrases were recited in the mosque, and Seti's, as he
rubbed Bashi-Bazouk with the tail of his yelek.

There was one thing, however, that Seti loved more than horses, or at
least as much. Life to him was one long possible Donnybrook Fair. That
was why, although he was no longer in the army, when Fielding and Dicky
mounted for the sortie he said to Fielding:

"Oh, brother of Joshua and all the fighters of Israel, I have a bobtailed
Arab. Permit me to ride with thee." And Fielding replied: "You will fight
the barn-yard fowl for dinner; get back to your stew-pots."

But Seti was not to be fobbed off. "It is written that the Lord, the
Great One, is compassionate and merciful. Wilt thou then, O saadat."

Fielding interrupted: "Go, harry the onion-field for dinner. You're a dog
of a slave, and a murderer too: you must pay the price of that
grindstone!"

But Seti hung by the skin of his teeth to the fringe of Fielding's
good-nature--Fielding's words only were sour and wrathful. So Seti
grinned and said: "For the grindstone, behold it sent Ebn Haroun to the
mercy of God. Let him rest, praise be to God!"

"You were drummed out of the army. You can't fight," said Fielding again;
but he was smiling under his long moustache.

"Is not a bobtailed nag sufficient shame? Let thy friend ride the
bobtailed nag and pay the price of the grindstone and the drum," said
Seti.

"Fall in!" rang the colonel's command, and Fielding, giving Seti a
friendly kick in the ribs, galloped away to the troop.

Seti turned to the little onion-garden. His eye harried it for a moment,
and he grinned. He turned to the doorway where a stew-pot rested, and his
mind dwelt cheerfully on the lamb he had looted for Fielding's dinner.
But last of all his eye rested upon his bobtailed Arab, the shameless
thing in an Arab country, where every horse rears his tail as a peacock
spreads his feathers, as a marching Albanian lifts his foot. The
bobtailed Arab's nose was up, his stump was high. A hundred times he had
been in battle; he was welted and scarred like a shoe-maker's apron. He
snorted his cry towards the dust rising like a surf behind the heels of
the colonel's troop.

Suddenly Seti answered the cry--he answered the cry and sprang forward.

That was how in the midst of a desperate melee twenty miles away on the
road to Dongola little Dicky Donovan saw Seti riding into the thick of
the fight armed only with a naboot of domwood, his call, "Allala-Akbar!"
rising like a hoarse-throated bugle, as it had risen many a time in the
old days on the road from Manfaloot. Seti and his bobtailed Arab, two
shameless ones, worked their way to the front. Not Seti's strong right
arm alone and his naboot were at work, but the bobtailed Arab, like an
iron-handed razor toothed shrew, struck and bit his way, his eyes
bloodred like Seti's. The superstitious Dervishes fell back before this
pair of demons; for their madness was like the madness of those who at
the Dosah throw themselves beneath the feet of the Sheikh's horse by the
mosque of El Hassan in Cairo. The bobtailed Arab's lips were drawn back
over his assaulting teeth in a horrible grin. Seti grinned too, the grin
of fury and of death.

Fielding did not know how it was that, falling wounded from his horse, he
was caught by strong arms, as Bashi-Bazouk cleared him at a bound and
broke into the desert. But Dicky Donovan, with his own horse lanced under
him, knew that Seti made him mount the bobtailed Arab with Fielding in
front of him, and that a moment later they had joined the little band
retreating to Korosko, having left sixty of their own dead on the field,
and six times that number of Dervishes.

It was Dicky Donovan who cooked Fielding's supper that night, having
harried the onion-field and fought the barn-yard fowl, as Fielding had
commanded Seti.

But next evening at sunset Mahommed Seti came into the fort, slashed and
bleeding, with Bashi-Bazouk limping heavily after him.

Fielding said that Seti's was the good old game for which V.C.'s were the
reward--to run terrible risks to save a life in the face of the enemy;
but, heretofore, it had always been the life of a man, not of a horse. To
this day the Gippies of that regiment still alive do not understand why
Seti should have stayed behind and risked his life to save a horse and
bring him wounded back to his master. But little Dicky Donovan
understood, and Fielding understood; and Fielding never afterwards
mounted Bashi-Bazouk but he remembered. It was Mahommed Seti who taught
him the cry of Mahomet:

          "By the CHARGERS that pant,
          And the hoofs that strike fire,
          And the scourers at dawn,
          Who stir up the dust with it,
          And cleave through a host with it!"

And in the course of time Mahommed Seti managed to pay the price of the
grindstone and also of the drum.

Back to chapter list of: Donovan Pasha and Some People of Egypt