Pall Mall/"The Light of Other Days"

GILBERT PARKER

LINDERS' prospects had suddenly ceased by the productive marriage of a rich uncle late in life; and then his career began. He went to Egypt at the time when men who knew things had their chance to do things. His information was general and discursive, but he had a real gift for science, an inheritance from a grandfather who received a peerage for abstruse political letters written to the Times, and lectures before the Royal Institution. Besides, he had known well and loved inadvertently the Hon. Lucy Gray, who kept a kind of social kindergarten for confiding man, whose wisdom was as accurate as her face was fair, her manners simple, and her tongue demure and biting.

Egypt offered an opportunity for a man like Flinders, and he always said that his going there was the one inspiration of his life. He did not know that the inspiration was that of Lucy Gray. She had purposely thrown him in the way of General Duncan Pasha, who, making a reputation in Egypt, had been rewarded by a good command in England and a K.C.B.

After a talk with the General, who had spent his Egyptian days in the agreeable strife with native premiers and hesitating Khedives, Flinders rose elated, with his mission in his hand. After the knock-down blow his uncle had given him, he was in a fighting mood. General Duncan's tale had come at the psychological moment, and hot with inspiration he had gone straight off to Lucy Gray with a Cooks's ticket in his pocket, and told her he was going to spend his life in the service of the pasha and the fellah. When she asked him a little bitingly what form his disciplined energy would take, he promptly answered:

“Irrigation.”

She laughed in his face softly. “What do you know about irrigation?” she asked.

“I can learn it—it's the game to play out there, I'm sure of that,” he answered.

“It doesn't sound distinguished,” she remarked drily. She had had hopes of his going into official life, and becoming the head of a department—Financial Adviser, Secretary of the Interior, or something of the kind. She had a busy and ambitious brain, and she meant really well by her friends, when she once was assured of their allegiance—it was the only return she really made them for their devotion to her selfish self. That Flinders should have cast the die for irrigation seemed humiliating; but perhaps that was because she had visions of a spade and a watering-can, and knew nothing of the thing that is before all things in Egypt, its most ancient, its most honoured science, begotten by the goodness of the Goddess of the Nile.

Because she smiled satirically at him, and was unresponsive to his enthusiasm, and gave him no chance to tell her of the nobility of the work in which he was going to put his life; of the work of the Pharaohs in their day, the hope of Napoleon in his, and the creed Mahomet Ali held and practised—that the Nile was Egypt and Egypt was irrigation—because of this he became angry, said unkind things, drew acid comments upon himself, and left her with a last good-bye. He did not realise that he had played into the hands of Lucy Gray in a very childish manner. For in scheming that he should go to Egypt she had planned also that he should break with her; for she never had any real intention of marrying him, and yet it was difficult to make him turn his back on her, while at the same time she was too tender of his feelings to turn her back on him. She held that anger was the least injurious of all grounds for separation. In anger there was no humiliation. There was something dignified and brave about a quarrel, while a growing coolness which must end in what the world called jilting was humiliating. Besides, people who quarrel and separate may meet again and begin over again: impossible in the other circumstance.

In Egypt Flinders made a reputation; not at once, but he did make it, by the help of that strong little man in favour with the Khedive, Dicky Donovan. The first two years of his stay he had plenty to do. He was given no responsible position, i>ut meanwhile he studied, and meanwhile certain members of the Government eyed him askance. There was not a report or blue-book on irrigation in Egypt which he did not make his own. At the end of the time he could have drawn a map of the Nile from Uganda to the Barrages; he knew the rains in each district from the region of the Sadds to the Little Borillos; there was not a canal, from the small Bahr Shebin to the big Rajeh Menoufieh or the majestic Ibrahimieh, whose slope, mean velocity and discharge he did not know; and he carried in his mind every drainage cut and contour from Tamis to Damanhur, from Cairo to Beltim. He knew neither amusement nor society, for every waking hour was spent in the study of the Nile and what the Nile might do. He spent the last thousand pounds he had in the world in travelling about the country, in buying scientific instruments, in gathering data, not only as to canals and barrages and drainage cuts, but in finding how the water was distributed, in what way the fellah fared in relation to the pasha, how he paid for his water, and what his crops and his taxes were. At last the Government began to fear him. Reform was a bogey-man to the pashas and the miniisters, and Flinders was persistent.

After one of his journeys up the Nile, Imshi Pasha, the Minister of the Interior, said to him: “Ah, my dear friend, with whom be peace and power, what have you seen as you travelled?”

“I saw a fellah yesterday who has worked nine months on the corvée—six months for the Government and three for a pasha, the friend of the Government. He supplied his own spades and baskets; his lantern was at the service of the Khedive; he got his own food as best he could. He had one feddan of land in his own village, but he had no time to work it or harvest it. Yet he had to pay a house-tax of five piastres, a war-tax of five piastres, a camel-tax of five piastres, a palm-tax of five piastres, a salt-tax of nine piastres, a poll-tax of thirty piastres, a land-tax of ninety piastres. The canal for which he was taxed gave his feddan of land no water, for the Pasha, the friend of the Government, took all the water for his own land.”

Prince Imshi stifled a yawn. “I have never seen so much at one breath, my friend. And having seen, you feel now that Egypt must be saved—eh?”

Imshi Pasha was an Egyptian of the Egyptians—a Turk of the Turks, oriental in mind with the polish of a Frenchman. He did not like Flinders, but he did not say so. He knew it was better to let a man have his fling and come a cropper over his own work than to have him unoccupied, excited, and troublesome, especially when he was an Englishman and knew about what he was talking. Imshi Pasha saw that Flinders was a dangerous man, as all enthusiasts are, no matter how right-headed; but it comforted him to think that many a reformer, from Amenhotep down, had, as it were, cut his own throat in the Irrigation Department. Some had tried to distribute water fairly, efficiently and scientifically, but most of them had got lost in the underbush of officialdom, and never got out of the wood again. This wood is called . Reformers like Flinders had drawn straight lines of purpose for the salvation of the country, and they had seen these straight lines go crooked under their very eyes, with a devilish smoothness. Therefore Imshi Pasha, being a wise man and a deep-dyed official who had never yet seen the triumph of the reformer and the honest Aryan, took Flinders's hands and said suddenly, with a sorrowful break in his voice:

“Ah, my friend, to tell the whole truth as God gives it, it is time you have come. Egypt has waited for you—the man who sees and knows. I have watched you for two years. I have waited, but now the time is ripe. You shall stretch your arm over Egypt and it will rise to you. You shall have paper for plans, and men and money for travel and works-cuttings, and pumps, and sand-bags for banks and barrages. You shall be second in your department—but first in fact, for shall not I, your friend, be your chief? And you shall say ‘go there,' and they shall go, and ‘come here,' and they shall come. For my soul is with you for Egypt, O friend of the fellah and saviour of the land. Have I not heard of the great reservoirs you would make in the Fayoum, of the great dam at Assouan? Have I not heard, and waited, and watched? and now …”

He paused and touched his breast and his forehead in respect to Flinders.

Flinders was well-nigh taken off his feet. It seemed too wonderful to be true: a free hand in Egypt, and under Imshi Pasha, the one able Minister of them all, who had, it was said, always before resisted the schemes for irrigation proposed by the foreigners, who believed only in the corveée and fate! Had he not heard of Imshi Pasha diverting water from hundreds of feddans of land to his own fields in winter, leaving the poor man with half-grown barley and flax and beans and tobacco? Had not Imshi Pashi in the summer, ere the flood came, monopolised the water in the canals in his own mudirieh for himself and his friends, leaving the poor man lamenting the crop of sultana rice to save which he had worked months on the corvée, sleeping at night with no shelter, starving by day, thinking of the land at home untilled, of the poor feddan he had slaved to buy, the taxes for which had been wrung out of him by the kourbash?

Flinders thought of all this, and rejoiced that at the very beginning of his career he had so inspired the powerful one with confidence. With something very like emotion he thanked Imshi Pasha, and said he was proud that the new responsibility had not been offered him through the intercession of English authority, but had come direct from an Egyptian Minister renowned above all others.

“Ah, my dear friend,” answered the Pasha, “the love of Egypt has helped us to understand each other. And we shall know each other better still by-and-by-by-and-by…. You shall be gazetted to-morrow. Allah preserve you from all error!”

This began the second period of Flinders' career. As he went forth from Cairo up the Nile with great designs in his mind, and an approving Ministry behind him, he had the feeling of a hunter with a sure quarry before him. Now he remembered Lucy Gray; and he flushed with a delightful and victorious indignation remembering his last hour with her. He even sentimentally recalled a song he once wrote for her sympathetic voice. The song was called “No Man's Land.” He recited two of the verses to himself now, with a kind of unction:

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A wave of feeling passed over him suddenly. Those verses were youth, and youth was gone, with all its flushed and spirited dalliance and reckless expenditure of feeling. Youth was behind him, and love was none of his, nor any cares of home, nor wife nor children; nothing but ambition now, and the vanity of successful labour.

Sitting on the deck of the Séfi at El Wasta, he looked round him. In the far distance was the Maydoum Pyramid, “the Imperfect One,” unexplored by man these thousands of years, and all round it the soft yellowish desert, with a mirage quivering over it in the distance, a mirage of trees and water and green hills. A caravan lounged its way slowly into the waste. At the waterside, here and there devout Mahommedans were saying their prayers, now standing, now bowing towards the east, now kneeling and touching the ground with the forehead. Then, piercing and painfully musical, came the call of the Muezzin from the turret of the mosque a quarter of a mile away. Near by the fellah worked in his onion-field; and on the kiassas loaded with feddan at the shore, just out of the current, and tied up for the night, sat the riverine folk eating their dourha and drinking black coffee. Now Flinders noticed that, nearer still, just below the Séfi, on the shore, sat a singing-girl, an a'l'meh, with a dark-faced Arab beside her, a kemengeh in his lap. Looking down, Flinders caught their eyes, nodded to them, and the singing-girl and the kemengeh-player got to their feet and salaamed. The girl's face was in the light of evening. Her dark skin took on a curious reddish radiance, her eyes were lustrous and her figure beautiful. The kemengeh-player stood with his instrument ready, and he lifted it in a kind of appeal. Flinders beckoned them up on deck. Lighting a cigarette, he asked the a'l'meh to sing. Her voice had the curious vibrant note of the Arab, and the words were in singular sympathy with Flinders's thoughts:

For the moment Flinders ceased to be the practical scientist—he was all sentimentalist. He gave himself the luxury of retrospection, he enjoyed the languorous moment; the music, the voice, the tinkle of the tambourine, the girl herself—sinuous, sensuous. It struck him that he had never seen an a'l'meh so cleanly and so finely dressed, so graceful, so delicate in manner. It struck him also that the kemengeh-player was a better-class Arab than he had ever met. The man's face attracted him, fascinated him. As he looked it seemed familiar. He studied it, he racked his brain to recall it. Suddenly he remembered that it was like the face of a servant of Imshi Pasha—a kind of mouffetish of his household. Now he studied the girl. He had never seen her before; of that he was sure. He ordered them coffee, and handed the girl a gold-piece. As he did so, he noticed that among several paste rings she wore one of value. All at once the suspicion struck him: Imshi Pasha had sent the girl—to try him perhaps, to gain power over him maybe, as women had gained power over strong men before. But why should Imshi Pasha send the girl and his mouffetish on this miserable mission? Was not Imshi Pasha his friend?

Quietly smoking his cigarette, he said to the man: “You may go, Mahommed Melik; I have had enough. Take your harem with you,” he added quickly.

The man scarcely stirred a muscle, the woman flushed deeply.

“So be it, Saadat,” answered the man, rising unmoved, for his sort know not shame. He beckoned to the girl. For an instant she stood hesitating, then with sudden fury she threw on the table beside him the gold-piece Flinders had given her.

“Magnoon!” she said, with blazing eyes, and ran after the man.

“I may be a fool, my dear,” Flinders said after her; “but you might say the same of the Pasha who sent you here.”

Flinders was angry for a moment, and he said some hard words of Imshi Pasha as he watched the two decoys hurry away into the dusk. He thought it nothing more serious than an attempt to know of what stuff he was made. Presently he forgot all about it in the contemplation of his plan for building the great dam at Assouan, and a great reservoir in the Fayoum; and he went to bed with dreams of vast new areas watered for summer rice, of pumping-stations lifting millions of cubic metres of water per day; of dykes to be protected by bulrushes and birriya weeds; of great desert areas washed free of carbonates and sulphates and selling at twenty pounds an acre; of a green Egypt with three crops, and himself the Regenerator, the Friend of the Fellah.

In this way he soon forgot that he had remembered Lucy Gray, and the incident of Mahommed Melik and the girl. His progress up the river, however, was marked by incidents whose significance he did not at once see. Everywhere his steamer stopped, people came with backsheesh in the shape of butter, cream, flour, eggs, fowls, cloths, and a myriad things. Jewels from mummy cases, antichi, donkeys, were offered him: all of which he steadfastly refused, sometimes with contumely. Officials besought his services with indelicate bribes, and by devious hospitalities and attentions more than one governor sought to bring his projects for irrigation in line with their own particular duplicities.

“Behold, effendi,” said one to whom Flinders' honesty was monstrous, “may God preserve you from harm—the thing has not been known, that all men shall fare alike! It is not the will of God!”

“It is the will of God that water shall be distributed as I am going to distribute it; and that is, according to every man's just claim. And in another three years there'll be no corvée either, save what you rich pashas have to pay for,” answered Flinders stubbornly, and he did not understand the vague smile which met his remark.

It took him a long time to understand it, and even at the last he did not realise how all along the Nile from Assouan to Cairo, and from Cairo to Alexandria, his way had been ruthlessly beset with traps; that, from the first, Imshi Pasha had tried to corrupt him into the likeness of a good Egyptian, after the fashion of others who had gone before him, in many branches of the Egyptian service. It took him a long time to realise that his plans, approved by Imshi Pasha, were constantly coming to naught; that after three years' work, and extensive invention and travel, and long reports to the Ministry, and encouragement on paper, he had accomplished nothing; and that he had no money with which to accomplish anything. Day in, day out, week in, week out, month in, month out, when the whole land lay sweltering with the moist heat of flood-time, in the period of the khamseen, in the dry heat which turned the hair grey and chapped the skin like a bitter wind, he slaved and schemed, the unconquerable enthusiast, who built houses which immediately fell down.

Fifty times his schemes seemed marching to fulfilment; but something always occurred.

He wrote reams of protest, he made many arid journeys to Cairo, he talked himself hoarse; and always he was met by the sympathetic smiling of Imshi Pasha, by his encouraging approval. There was no money for “immediate action”; or the sums set apart for irrigation had been diverted; or the assent of the nations, through the Caisse de la Dette, had not been obtained. Money came to him in driblets where it ought to have come in a steady stream. His achievements were confined to adapting such schemes of irrigation as had been previously in use. The old game of unequal distribution, the old terror of the corvée, went on just the same. His reforms, his plans, his noble designs for the benefit of a country were still upon paper.

“Ah, my dear friend, may god smooth your path! It is coming right. All will be well. Time is the friend of all. The dam shall be built. The reservoirs shall be made. But we are in the hands of the nations. Poor Egypt cannot act alone—our Egypt that we love. The Council sits to-morrow—we shall see.” This was the fashion of the Pasha's speech.

After the sitting of the Council, Flinders would be sent away with unfruitful promises. Meanwhile the rich man robbed the poor, and the man with five feddans of land preyed on the man with one feddan, and when the man with one feddan was at the corvée the tax gatherer came and seized his land, and the rich man harvested it, and made no return.

Futility was written over the Temple of Endeavour, and by-and-by Flinders lost hope and health and heart. He had Nilotic fever, he had ophthalmia; and hot with indomitable will, he had striven to save one great basin from destruction, for one whole week, without sleeping or resting night and day: working like a navvy, sleeping like a fellah, eating like a Bedouin.

Then the end came. He was stricken down, and lay above Assouan in a hut by the shore, from which he could see the Temple of Philæ, and Pharaoh's Bed, and the great rocks, and the swift-flowing Nile. Here lay his greatest hope, the splendid design of his life—the great barrage of Assouan. With it he could add to the wealth of Egypt one-half. He had believed in it, had worked for it and how much else! and his dreams and his working had come to naught. He was sick to death—not with illness alone, but with disappointment and broken hopes and a burden beyond the powers of any one man.

He saw all now: all the falsehood and treachery and corruption. He realised that Imshi Pasha had given him his hand that he might ruin himself, that his own schemes might overwhelm him in the end. At every turn he had been frustrated—by Imshi Pasha: three years of underground circumvention, with a superficial approval and a mock support.

He lay and looked at the glow, the sunset glow of pink and gold on the Libyan Hills, and his fevered eyes scarcely saw them; they were only a part of this last helpless, senseless dream. Life itself was very far away-practical, generous, hot-blooded life. This distance was so ample and full and quiet, this mystery of the desert and the sky was so immense, the spirit of it so boundless, that in the judgment of his soul nothing mattered now. As he lay in reverie, he heard his servant talking: it was the tale of the Mahdi and British valour and hopeless fighting, and a red martyrdom set like a fixed star in a sunless sky. What did it matter—what did it all matter, in this grave tremendous quiet wherein his soul was hasting on?

The voices receded; he was alone with the immeasurable world; he fell asleep.

When he woke again it was to find at his bedside a kavass from Imshi Pasha at Cairo. He shrank inwardly. The thought of the Pasha merely nauseated him, but to the kavass he said: “What do you want, Mahommed?”

The kavass smiled; his look was agreeably mysterious, his manner humbly confidential, his tongue officially deliberate.

“Efendina chók yasha—May the great lord live for ever! I bring good news.”

“Leave of absence, eh?”—rejoined Flinders feebly, yet ironically; for that was the thing he expected now of the Minister, who had played him like a ball on a racquet these three years past.

The kavass handed him a huge blue envelope, salaaming impressively.

“May my life be thy sacrifice, Saadat,” he said, and salaamed again. “It is my joy to be near you.”

“We have tasted your absence and found it bitter, Mahommed,” Flinders answered in kind, with a touch of plaintive humour, letting the envelope fall from his fingers on the bed, so little was he interested in any fresh move of Imshi Pasha. “More tricks,” he said to himself between his teeth.

“Shall I open it, Saadat? It is the word that thy life shall carry large plumes.”

“What a blitherer you are, Mahommed! Rip it open and let's have it over.”

The kavass handed him a large letter, pedantically and rhetorically written; and Flinders, scarce glancing at it, sleepily said: “Read it out, Mahommed. Skip the flummery in it, if you know how.”

Two minutes later Flinders sat up aghast with a surprise that made his heart thump painfully, made his head go round. For the letter conveyed to him the fact that there had been placed to the credit of his department, subject to his own disposal for irrigation works, the sum of eight hundred thousand pounds; and appended was the copy of a letter from the Caisse de la Dette granting three-fourths of this sum, and authorising its expenditure. Added to all was a short scrawl from Imshi Pasha himself, beginning, “God is with the patient, my dear friend,” and ending with the remarkable statement: “Inshallah, we shall now reap the reward of our labours in seeing these great works accomplished at last, in spite of the suffering thrust upon us by our enemies—to whom perdition come!”

Eight hundred thousand pounds!

In a week Flinders was at work again. In another month he was at Cairo, and the night after his arrival he attended a ball at the Khedive's Palace. To Dicky Donovan he poured out the wonder of his soul at the chance that had been given him at last. He seemed to think it was his own indomitable patience, the work that he had done, and his reports, which had at last shamed the Egyptian Government and the Caisse de la Dette into doing the right thing for the country and to him.

He was dumfounded when Dicky replied: “Not much, my Belisarius. As Imshi Pasha always was, so he will be to the end. It wasn't Imshi Pasha, and it wasn't English influence, and it wasn't the Caisse de la Dette, each by its lonesome, or all together by initiative.”

“What was it—who was it, then?” inquired Flinders breathlessly. “Was it you?—I know you've worked for me. It wasn't backsheesh anyhow. But Imshi Pasha didn't turn honest and patriotic for nothing—I know that.”

Dicky, who had known him all his life, looked at him curiously for a moment, and then, in a far-away, sort of voice, made recitative:

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Flinders gasped. “Lucy Gray!” he said falteringly.

Dicky nodded. “You didn't know, of course. She's been here for six months—has more influence than the whole diplomatic corps. Twists old Imshi Pasha round her little finger. She has played your game handsomely—I've been in her confidence. Wordsworth was wrong when he wrote:

“For my wife's been her comrade. And her mate—would you like to know her mate? She's married, you know.”

Flinders's face was pale. He was about to reply, when a lady came into view, leaning on the arm of an Fielding Pasha. At first she did not see Flinders, then within a foot or two of him she suddenly stopped. Fielding Pasha felt her hand twitch on his arm; then she clenched the fingers firmly on her fan.

Fielding knew all he had any right to know—and more—about Lucy Gray, Imshi Pasha, the Caisse de la Dette, and Flinders.

“Ah, Flinders,” said this Pasha of many tales, “you must let me introduce you to Mrs. Ashley St. John.”

Flinders behaved very well, the lady perfectly. She held out both her hands to him.

“We are old, old friends, Mr. Flinders and I. I have kept the next dance for him,” she added, turning to Fielding, who smiled placidly and left with Dicky Donovan.

For a moment there was silence, then she said quietly: “Let me congratulate you on all you have done. Everybody is talking about you. They say it is wonderful how you have made things come your way. … I am very, very glad.”

Flinders was stubborn and indignant and anything a man can be who has had an unpleasant shock.

“I know all,” he said bluntly. “I know what you've done for me.”

“Well, are you as sorry I did it as I am to know you know it?” she asked just a little faintly, for she had her own sort of heart, and it worked in its own sort of way.

“Why this sudden interest in my affairs? You laughed at me when I made up my mind to come to Egypt.”

“That was to your face. I sent you to Egypt.”

“You sent me!”

“I made the old General talk to you. The inspiration was mine. I also wrote to Donovan Pasha—and at last he wrote to me to come.”

“You—why”

“I know more about irrigation than any one in England,” she continued illogically. “I've studied it. I have all your reports. That's why I could help you here. They saw I knew.”

Flinders shook a little. “I didn't understand,” he said.

“You don't know my husband, I think,” she added, rising slowly. “He is coming yonder with Imshi Pasha.”

“I know of him as a many times millionaire,” he answered, in a tone of mingled emotions.

“I must introduce you,” she said, and seemed to make an effort to hold herself firmly. “He will have great power here. Come and see me to-morrow,” she added in an even voice. “Please come—Harry.”

In another minute Flinders listened to the great financier, Mr. Ashley St. John, praising his irrigation schemes, and assuring him that the name of Flinders would be for ever honoured in Egypt.