WY DHAM BIMBASHI'S career No. 2 Bored as he generally was, Wyndham had ideas of reform-in the army, in the state, everywhere. With all his Englishness he was for doing what is characteristic of the Frenchman; transplanting schemes of home government and administration bodily into colonies and spheres of influence. He had not that rare quality often found among Englishmen, of working the native up through his own medium, as it were, through his own customs and predispositions, to the soundness of Western administrative methods. Therefore in due time he made some bad mistakes, which, in natural sequence, were followed by dangerous mistakes. By virtue of certain high-handed actions he was the cause of several riots in native villages, and he had himself been attacked at more than one village as he rode between the fields of sugar-cane. On these occasions he had behaved very well-certainly no one could possibly doubt his bravery; but that was a small offset to the fact that his want of tact and his overbearing manner had been the means of turning the Hadendowa Arabs loose upon the country, raiding and killing. in Egypt had been a series of mistakes. In the first place he was opinionated; in the second place he never seemed to have any luck; and, worst of all, he had a little habit of doing grave things on his own lightsome responsibility. This last quality was natural to him, but he added to it a supreme contempt for the native mind and an unhealthy scorn of the native official. He never seemed to realize that, after all, the native knows, in one sure way, a good deal more about his country than a foreigner possibly can; also, that, however corrupt in character Mahommed may be, he is in touch with the mind of his countrymen. But Major Wyndham, which is to say Wyndham Bimbashi, was convinced of the omniscience of the British mind, of its universal superiority. He said as much to Vernet, the French count in the confidence of the Khedive, who had got him his billet at a time when there were scarcely any English officials in Egypt. Vernet chafed, but he had been Wyndham's guest in Sussex years before, and he contented himself with a satirical warning. In this he deserved credit, for Wyndham's manner, with his unimaginative, bullet-headed cocksureness, his yawning indifference, his unpitying endurance of foreigners' opinions, was provoking if nothing more. But he could not, or would not, see his own vain stupidity. The climax came in a foolish sortie against the Hadendowas. In that unauthorized melee, in covert disobedience to a general order not to attack, unless at ad vantage for the Gippies under him were raw levies-his troop was diminished by half, and cut off from the Nile by a flank movement of the Hadendowas. He was obliged to retreat and take refuge in the wellfortified and walled house of a friendly sheikh, which had previously been a Coptic monastery. Here, at last, the truth came home to Wyndham Bimbashi. He realized that though in his six years' residence in the land he had acquired a command of Arabic equal to that of others who had been in the country twice that time, he had acquired little else. He awaked to the fact that in his cocksure schemes for the civil and military life of Egypt there was not one element of sound sense; that he had been all along an egregious failure. It did not come home to him with clear accurate conviction-his brain was not a first-rate medium for illumination; but the facts struck him now with a blind sort of force; and he accepted the blank sensation of failure. Also, he read in the faces of those round him an alien spirit, a chasm of black misunderstanding, which his knowledge of Arabic could never bridge over. Here he was, shut up with Gippies who had no real faith in him, in the house of a sheikh whose servants would cut his throat on no provocation at all; and not an eighth of a mile away was a horde of Arabs: a circle of death through which it was impossible to break with the men in his command. They must all die here if they were not relieved. The nearest garrison was at Berber, fifty miles away. Five hundred men were stationed there. Now that his cup of mistakes was full, Wyndham Bimbashi would willingly have made the attempt to carry word to the garrison there. But he had no right to leave his post. He called for a volunteer. No man replied. Panic was upon the Gippies. Though Wyndham Bimbashi's heart sickened within him, his lips did not frame a word of reproach; but a blush of shame came into his face, and crept up to his eyes, dimming them. For there flashed through his mind what men at home would think of him when this thing, such an end to his whole career, was known. As he stood still, upright and confounded, someone touched his arm. It was Hassan, his Soudanese servant. Hassan was the one person in Egypt who thoroughly believed in Wyndham Bimbashi. Wyndham was as a god to Hassan, though this same god had given him the taste of a belt more than once. Hassan had not resented the belt, though once, in a moment of affectionate confidence, he had said to Wyndham that when Wyndham got old and died he would be the servant of an American or a missionary, "who no whack Mahommed." to It was Hassan that now volunteered carry word to the garrison at Berber. "If I no carry, you whack me with the belt, Pasha," said Hassan, whose logic and reason were like his master's, neither better nor worse. "If you do you shall have fifty pounds and the missionary," answered Wyndham Bimbashi, his eyes still cloudy and his voice thick; for it touched him in a tender nerve that this one Soudanese boy should believe in him and do for him what he would give much to do for the men under him. For his own life he did not care, his confusion and shame were SO great. He watched Hassan steal out into the white brilliance of the night. "Mind you keep a whole skin, Hassan," he said as the slim lad, with the white teeth, oily hair, and legs like ivory, stole along the wall, to drop presently on his belly, and make for some palm trees a hundred yards away. The minutes went by in silence, an hour went by, the whole night went by; Hassan had got beyond the circle of trenchant steel. They must now abide Hassan's fate; but another peril was upon them. There was not a goolah of water within the walls. It was the time of low Nile, when all the land is baked like a crust of bread, when the creaking of the shadoofs and the singing croak of the sakkia are heard all the long night like untiring crickets with the throats of frogs. It was the time succeeding the khamseen, when the skin dries like slaked lime and the face is forever powdered with dust; and the felaheen, in the slavery of superstition, strain their eyes day and night for the Sacred Drop, which tells that the flood is flowing fast from the hills of Abyssinia. It was like the Egyptian, that nothing should be said to Wyndham Bimbashi about the dearth of water until it was all gone. The house of the sheikh, and its garden where were a pool and a fountain, were supplied from the great Persian wheel at the water side. On this particular sakkia had been wont to sit all day a patient fellah, driving the blindfolded buffaloes in their turn. It was like the patient fellah, when the Arabs in pursuit of Wyndham and his Gippies suddenly cut in between him and the house, to deliver himself over to the conqueror, with his hand upon his head, in sign of obedience. It was also like the gentle Egyptian that he eagerly showed the Hadendowas how the water could be cut off from the house by dropping one of the sluice gates; while, opening another, all the land around the Arab quarters might be well watered, the birkets filled, and the bersim kept green for their horses and camels. Which was how it was that Wyndham Bimbashi and his Gippies, and the sheikh and his household faced the fact the morning after Hassan left, that there was not a goolah of water for a hundred burning throats. Wyndham understood now why it was that the Hadendowas sat down and waited, that torture might be added to the on-coming death of the Englishman, his natives and the "friendlies." All that day terror and a ghastly hate hung like a miasma over the besieged house and garden. Fifty eyes hungered for the blood of Wyndham Bimbashi; not because he was Wynd ham Bimbashi, but because the heathen in these men cried out for sacrifice; and what so agreeable a sacrifice as the Englishman who had led them into this disaster and would die so wellhad they ever seen an Englishman who did not die well! Wyndham Bimbashi was quiet and watchful, and he cudgelled his bullethead, and looked down his long nose in meditation all the day, while his tongue became dry and thick, and his throat seemed to crack like roasting leather. At length he worked the problem out; then he took action. He summoned his troop before him, and said briefly : "Men, we must have water. The question is, who is going to steal out to the sakkia to-night to shut the one sluice and open the other?" No one replied. No one understood quite what Wyndham meant. Shuting one sluice and opening the other did not seem to meet the situation. There was the danger of getting to the sakkia, but there was also an after. Would it be possible to shut one sluice and open the other without the man at the wheel knowing? Suppose you killed the man at the wheel-what then! friendlies The Bim : The Gippies and the scowled, but did not speak. bashi was responsible for all he was an Englishman, let him get water for them, or die like the rest of them, perhaps before them! Wyndham Bimbashi could not travel the sinuosities of their minds, and if he could have done so it would not have affected his purposes. When no man replied, he simply said: "All right, men, you shall have water before morning. Try and hold out till then." And he dismissed them. For a long time he walked up and down the garden of straggling limes, apparently listless, and smoking hard. He reckoned in his mind how long it would take Hassan to get to Berber, and how long it would take for relief to come. He was fond of his pipe, and he smoked now as if it was the thing he most enjoyed in the world. |