The Complete Works of H. C. McNeile "Sapper". Sapper
not to let him draw her too close: he didn't notice the horror which had come into her eyes again."
Jim laughed savagely.
"'Was it possible to do too much for the sick and suffering?'" he mimicked. "Great heavens! Dick, I tell you that woman was wild with terror at the thought of getting infected herself. She knew it was consumption: no one could help knowing it. And, as I say, the soul of the philanthropic lady who opened our hospital this afternoon was sick with fear.
"Then they disappeared—she and the man called Brown. What happened at that interview I cannot tell you, but it lasted about an hour. And then she came out of the bungalow alone, and came towards me.
"'Ibrahim,' she said, 'we will start back tomorrow.'
"Then she went to her tent, which the boys had just erected. I waited till she had disappeared: then I walked across to the bungalow. And the man sitting at the table, with a face grown suddenly old, stared at me for a while uncomprehendingly. Then he recognised me, and his shoulders shook a little.
"'Thank you for all you've done,' he said, and his voice was dead. 'I'm sorry to have troubled you uselessly.'
"'Why uselessly?' I asked.
"'It would have been better if I had left her to think I was dead,' he went on. 'I shall be pretty soon: and I realise now that I was asking too much of any woman. It's exposing her to too great a risk: it was selfish of me—damned selfish. But, you see, it was for her sake that I defrauded the firm I was employed with in London of several thousand pounds, and I thought, somehow, that—' He broke off, and buried his face in his hands. 'Oh, God! Maitland—what that woman has meant to me through these four years! I got away—out of the country: I buried myself here. And I used just to picture the time when she would join me. When I saw her arrive today, I thought I'd go mad with joy.' He raised his face and stared at me sombrely. 'Of course, I ought to have known better. Her coming here would inevitably lead to questions. And besides—there's my health.'
"'And what does Mrs. Dallas propose?' I inquired curtly.
"He looked at me with a strange smile.
"'She proposes to join me,' he remarked quietly, 'as soon as I am well again—in some other country, under some other name. So if you would be good enough to escort her back to Cairo tomorrow we will await that happy day.'
"I looked at him quickly, but his face was inscrutable.
"'There comes a time, my friend,' he went on, when one ceases to see through a glass darkly.'
"And that time had come to the man called Brown. At the moment I didn't realise the full meaning to him of the quotation—later I did. For I hadn't gone ten steps from his bungalow when I heard the crack of a revolver in the room behind me. It's not much good waiting to die of consumption in the back of beyond when the woman you've built your life on turns out rotten to the core.
"I took her to see him," went on Jim, after a while. "I dragged her there—whimpering: and I held her there while she looked on the man who had blown his brains out. He'd done it with a big-calibre service revolver, and she stood it for about five seconds. Then she fainted."
Jim Maitland gave a short laugh.
"Which is very near the end of the story—but not quite. I have sometimes wondered whether I would have told Hounslow if I hadn't gone down with fever at Khartoum. If I'd gone straight back to Cairo with her— well, I might have, and I might not. The situation, in parliamentary parlance, did not arise. It only arose considerably later, when Ibrahim the Arab emerged from hospital in European clothes, with eyeglass complete. Astonishing how quickly the colour fades away when you're indoors; astonishing how an eyeglass alters a man. So Ibrahim went in with fever, and yours very truly came out—a little sunburnt perhaps, but otherwise much as usual. And yours very truly went back to Cairo."
Once again Jim laughed.
"I went to see Toby Bretherton as soon as I arrived, and the first thing he said to me was, 'Pity you had your trip in vain, old man.'
"I grunted non-committally.
"'Dashed plucky thing on her part, going off to see her brother like that.'
"'Dashed plucky,' I agreed.
"'And then to find he'd blown his brains out. Bad show. Glad you were there, Jim. By the same token—you kept your identity pretty dark. She has no idea who you are. Why not come and dine tonight, and I'll ask her and Hounslow. She's going tomorrow. It will be rather interesting to see if she recognises you.'
"'It undoubtedly will,' I remarked. 'Eight o'clock?'
"She didn't recognise me; as I say, a boiled shirt and an eyeglass alter a man. But she was very charming and very sweet, and quite delightfully modest when Hounslow told me of her trip at great length.
"'It was nothing,' she said. Ibrahim—the wonderful Ibrahim had made everything easy. And she would rather not talk about it: it was all too horrible.
"'I do hope he's better, Major Bretherton,' she said gently. 'He looked so ill when he went into hospital at Khartoum. If only I wasn't going tomorrow I would have so liked to thank him again.'
"Toby Bretherton smiled.
"'You can thank him tonight, Mrs. Dallas,' he remarked, and she gave a little gasp and stared at him.
"'You surely don't suppose, do you,' he went on, 'that I would ever have allowed you—quite ignorant of the country as you are—to go a long trip like that alone with an Arab?'
"His smile expanded; it really was a devilish good joke. It was such a good joke in fact that her tortoiseshell cigarette-holder snapped in two in her hand.
"'There is your Ibrahim.' He waved his hand at me, and positively laughed.
"Even George was tickled to death and remarked, 'Well, I'm blowed!'
"As a situation it had its dramatic possibilities, you'll admit, and I've sometimes wondered how one would have ended it if one had been writing a story. The actual truth was almost banal. George had turned to speak to a man passing the table; Toby was giving an order to the waiter. She leant across to me and spoke.
"'What are you going to do?'
"And my answer was, 'George is waiting. It is quite safe. And may God help George!'
"I haven't seen her from that day till this afternoon."
X. — THE POOL OF THE SACRED CROCODILE
SO much for Jim's doings on his own while I kicked my heels in Cairo and waited for him. As for mine during that period, sufficient let it be said that I met She who must be Obeyed. And the rest of these chronicles are concerned with her, and that other She who completed Jim's half-section.
By rights, I suppose, with the advent of the ladies the course of our lives should have at once developed a certain tranquillity. Only things don't always happen according to order. Certain it is that the narrowest shave of all we had occurred through my She: a shave when for a brief space the curtain was lifted on dark and horrible things—things it is better to forget, though, once seen, they are unforgettable.
I know that to the man who catches the 8.30 train every morning and spends the day in his office in the City, the mere mention of such a thing as Black Magic is a cause for contemptuous laughter.
It is as well that he should think thus. And yet, surely to even the most prosaic of train-catchers, motoring maybe over Salisbury Plain, there must come some faint stirring of imagination as he sees the vast dead monument of Stonehenge. Can he not see that ancient temple peopled with vast crowds of fierce savages waiting in silence for the first rays of the rising sun to touch the altar? And then the wild-eyed priests; the human sacrifice; the propitiation of strange gods?
Thus it was in England two thousand years ago; thus it is today in