NIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE Read online

  ‘In the doorway, fighting madly, the foam flying from her jaws, her eyes bolting out of her head, was Bella—fighting, like me, the Impalpable, the ghastly Invisible, that filled the entrance to that accursed shack! I couldn’t bear it; mortally terrified as I was of going near that devilish place again, I stumbled blindly to my feet and took a blundering step forward, but it was already too late. A shaft of moonlight shone straight on the opening, and I shall never forget that awful picture—the dark square of the room behind, and in mid-air, clawing and foaming as she leapt and fought, mad with fear, my poor bitch, filling the air with her hoarse shrieks of fury . . . the other poor beast was utterly silent—I could not see him. Even as I stumbled forward to help, the end came. Some invisible force suddenly swept the furious creature back into the room, and at the same time, on a dreadful strangled yelp, the barking stopped dead, and the shack stood silent in the gloom again. I tell you, that finished me—not for all the gold in India would I have entered that ghastly place again, and I plunged back to my horse literally sobbing with childish terror, my knees shaking under me. Kwala was gone, of course; somehow I scrambled onto Gaylad, and lying flat along his back, clinging to his mane, I drove my heels into him and let him go. . . .

  ‘Somehow we emerged from that awful valley on to the hilltop, and some time later, wild-eyed and at the last pitch of exhaustion, I tumbled off my horse into the camp. I’ve a faint recollection of Jenks bending over me with a glass of brandy, and a fat, bearded, pleasant fellow, the doctor from Nangi. Then I went off into hysterics and burbled all sorts of nonsense for hours . . . but they brought me round after a bit, and—that’s all, really. . . .’

  Dan Vesey spoke from his corner as he voiced the thoughts of us all.

  ‘Thanks, awfully, Dennison—it’s an amazing yarn—but do tell us. What was it? I mean, the thing that Hill shot at—and whatever happened to the dogs?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Dan—I don’t know. I told you, you know—this yarn has no proper ending at all. It’s one of those things you can’t explain. We tried all we knew to get information about the hut, or the valley or both, but though we interrogated every native for miles around, they either wouldn’t or couldn’t say anything. The most we could get was that it was Death Valley, and that was the Death Hut . . . that there was a white devil that lived there, and it wasn’t good for black boys to talk about it. . . . Whether it was comparatively recently or long ago that the hut was occupied I couldn’t find out either—it was impossible to tell from the state of things there. That air would preserve things for years and years, once in the desiccated state we found them. The most curious thing I heard was from a very old native who said that it was a white devil lived there that killed folks . . . but he said it was a devil that smiled . . . you remember my distinct impression of that stealthy dreadfully faint smile? Odd, very . . .’

  ‘But the dogs,’ I said curiously. ‘What about them?’

  Dennison looked quickly at me and then away again. He spoke in a curiously hushed voice.

  ‘You want to hear? Well—I didn’t mean to tell you—but this is the most ghastly part, I think, of the whole ghastly business. When I’d pulled myself together again we all went down the valley in a body and went into the house . . . it seemed less awful with all the others. Everything was just as I had described it with one exception. Piled on the body of poor Hill, from whose white face the rug had been torn, were the two dogs, stone dead, crouching as they had evidently met their end . . . and their eyes, bulging with terror, were fixed, like his, on the wall with the bullet holes! Dead of fright, like him . . . but the most horrible thing was that all three pairs of eyes, the dead man’s and the great dogs’, seemed to have been swept by a blasting flame that sucked, on the instant, all the colour from them, leaving them blank—white and staring, colourless. . . . I often wonder—sometimes at night particularly—what in hell they all saw. Don’t you?’

  August

  The Egyptologist’s Story

  The Curse of the Stillborn

  ‘Dammit—why can’t you let ’em bury their dead in their own way?’

  The words were blurted out. Mrs Peter Bond raised her sandy eyebrows and stared at the speaker with outraged virtue written large upon her square determined face, burnt brick-red with the Egyptian sun. Little Michael Frith wilted, but stuck to his point.

  ‘I’m sorry—didn’t mean to swear, Mrs Bond—but don’t you see what I mean, really?’ His brown wrinkled brow was lined with distress.

  Mrs Bond pursed her lips disapprovingly. Upright and heavily built, in uncompromisingly stiff white piqué, her thick waist well-belted, her weatherbeaten face surmounted by a pith helmet, she looked impregnably solid and British, reflected Frith exasperatedly—three years among these people and no nearer comprehending them. He tried again.

  ‘You see—Mefren’s a child of the desert . . . and her old mother’s a pure-bred nomad . . . wild as a hawk. Why can’t you let ’em bury their dead in peace?’

  ‘I am surprised at your attitude, Mr Frith! I’m sorry, but I can’t undertake to advise my husband any differently. These people are ignorant, childish, superstitious. . . . I and my husband stand here to try and teach them better. And you actually suggest that I allow Mefren to bury her baby as she likes—presumably in the Desert, with I don’t know what awful sort of heathen rites—when my husband is here a minister of the Lord, ready and anxious to give the poor little thing decent Christian burial! I must say I don’t think this side of it can have struck you, Mr Frith!’

  Mrs Bond’s voice was genuinely shocked. Restlessly little Michael Frith stirred and kicked a booted foot against the whitewashed wall. He frowned—how could he explain? The native point of view . . . and this good-hearted, narrow, stubborn woman!

  Vaguely his mind fled to Mefren, small, slender brown creature, and her mother, Takkari, silent and haggard, with black burning eyes beneath her voluminous haik. Wanderers both, they had appeared at the door of his tent one dawn with a request for food . . . he was encamped on the lip of the Valley of Blue Stones, a deep cleft between two ridges a few miles away from the tiny town of Ikh Nessan, where Peter Bond’s little whitewashed church brooded over the tangle of mud huts like a white hen mothering a scattered handful of brown and alien chicks. Always soft-hearted, Frith had fed them both, and seeing the girl’s condition and obvious exhaustion, had sent them into Ikh Nessan with a note to Mrs Bond—of whose kind heart, despite her irritating ways, none of the tiny colony had the least doubt. Food and shelter were at once forthcoming, and none too soon, for it came to pass, only a few days after the wanderers’ arrival at Ikh Nessan, that the girl’s time came upon her, but too soon . . . and a child was born, but dead—stillborn.

  Full of well-meaning sympathy and a genuine desire to help, Mrs Bond had hurried to inform Takkari, grimly silent, crouched in the shadows of the mud hut that sheltered the weeping girl, that despite the fact that the child, poor little soul, had died too early for baptism, her husband was ready at once to conduct the burial service. She was met by blank silence and a vigorous shake of the head. Dashed, and considerably annoyed, the Englishwoman demanded her reasons. Glowering silence again, but repeated attacks elicited the brusque information, in halting English, that ‘Kistian bury no good. Come night, her bury self—come night, her go aways.’

  Naturally Mrs Bond was outraged, and withdrew to consult her husband. I fear, had it not been for Nature, whose heavy hand on the young mother forbade anything in the way of flight, Takkari and her daughter would have been away, lost in the heart of the Desert they came from, before that night. But the evening brought little Peter Bond, full of anxious sympathy for this frail member of the flock he genuinely loved, though shocked beyond measure at his wife’s report of Takkari’s refusal, and the sullen, stubborn silence with which she faced him. It was while awaiting the result of this, Mrs Bond felt, most momentous interview, standing at the rickety gate of the little walled garden, the evening sun warm on the tamaris
ks that sprawled, green and lusty, across the whitewashed wall, that Michael Frith, dusty and hot, trudged by and paused with a cheery word. Full of her story, she had poured it forth, and her surprise and indignation were great to meet his gaze at the end—a look in which politeness warred with frank disapproval. His sympathies were entirely with Mefren and her dour, free-striding old nomad mother; why should they who were, at best, mere birds of passage, be obliged to conform to the hidebound ideas of this stupid Englishwoman? Left to himself ‘Peterkin’, as the little chaplain was affectionately known, would have been a sympathetic, understanding father to these wayward children of his—it was the insistent domination of this well-meaning, sincerely religious, but supremely narrow-minded wife of his that drove him into insisting on the ‘Church’s rights’. The phrase was on Mrs Bond’s lips as Frith aroused himself from his reverie; she was still talking, her square, hard-featured face stern with strong disapproval as she eyed him.

  ‘Towards a member of his flock—I told my husband he must not admit argument on the subject. As a Father, he must be Firm. . . .’

  ‘But surely, it’s not as if Mefren was a Christian,’ objected Frith drily; ‘if it was a member of your husband’s congregation . . .’

  ‘Oh, but she is!’ Mrs Bond was eagerly assertive. ‘They are both Christians . . . I took care to inquire about that when they came first, and Takkari assured me that both she and Mefren had been baptised!’

  Michael Frith smiled drily. He could see Takkari’s sombre eyes at that first interview, summing up the unconscious Mrs Bond, and assenting gruffly to any suggestion put forward—anything for a shelter and good food for her ewe-lamb in her trouble. But what was there to say? He shrugged, none too politely.

  ‘Well . . . I don’t agree, I’m afraid, Mrs Bond. You see, I know these people pretty well. And frankly, I warn you again—I should let them have their own way.’

  As he spoke there was a quick step from the house, and the Revd. Peter appeared on the threshold. Wiping his moist forehead with a large red handkerchief, he smiled uncertainly on Michael Frith, and turned with a mild air of triumph to his wife. She asked eagerly:

  ‘Well—have you succeeded?’

  ‘With the blessing of the Lord,’ said Peterkin solemnly. ‘Poor child—poor child! I feel for her ignorance, and for her mother, though I fear Takkari is still stubborn. But I wrought mightily with Mefren for the soul of her child, and at last I prevailed. . . .’

  A shadow seemed to fall upon the group. Old Takkari stood behind them, her lean, muscular feet muffled in the dusty earth. From the dark hooding of her brown haik, pulled close about her head, her uncanny eyes shone out, moving from one face to the other in silence. Mrs Bond started and drew a sharp breath—the woman was standing at her elbow before she had seen her, and the grim wrinkled face was pregnant with meaning. There was a moment’s tense silence, then, turning to Frith, Takkari said something in a low tone, ending with a sardonic laugh . . . and was gone, flitting through the open gate and down the dusty road towards the little town. The group moved, and Mrs Bond found her tongue.

  ‘Well, really!’ she began, then curiosity fought indignation and conquered. ‘Whatever did she say to you, Mr Frith?’

  Frith, feeling his patience, like his politeness, nearing its end, moved away in the track of the tireless brown feet that had left delicate tracks, like a greyhound’s, in the white dust.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘only a warning. An old Arabic proverb to the effect that your blood must be upon your own head.’

  As he strode away he saw Mrs Bond beckon to Said Ullah, idling with a few cronies under the nodding palms, to come and dig the grave.

  * * * * *

  Like a lean dark wolf returning to its lair at evening, Takkari crept back to her daughter’s side that night. Burials are not things, in the tropical heat of Egypt, to be postponed, and already a newly-turned mound beneath a clump of aloes marked the cradle—first and last—of the poor little scrap of humanity that never saw the sun. Alone the chaplain and his wife had committed the tiny body to the warm earth, watched Said Ullah, lean and nonchalant, fill in the grave as they prayed. . . . Mefren was still in a semi-delirious state, and the sound of her distant moaning was disturbing. Mrs Bond walked down after supper with offers of help, but was confronted by a silent, scowling Takkari in the doorway, whose determined headshake and glowering expression frankly daunted her. She retired, huffed, but somehow not feeling sufficiently sure of herself to adopt the attitude of dignity she felt the situation needed . . . defeated by the grim silence, the dark hut with its sinister single light spreading a dull red carpet behind the still dark figure of Takkari in her hooded draperies. The stealthy rustle of the bushes that brushed her skirts, the crooning of the faint wind that crept about the garden, combined with the velvet darkness of the night to defeat Mrs Bond completely, and she beat a retreat to the shelter of the little ‘parson-house’ as graceless Said Ullah called it, in a state of nerves very unusual with her. In fact, she took herself severely to task for her weakmindedness in not reproving Takkari for her lack of manners, but a curious feeling of reluctance to face that silent hut again kept her from a second attempt, and with a frown at herself and a mental note to rectify this leniency by increased severity on the morrow, Mrs Bond settled herself down to write.

  She was a most efficient clerk, in truth, and all the financial affairs, indeed the entire organisation of the secular side of her husband’s life, was in her large and capable hands; every evening she set aside an hour at least for checking every item of the day, entering up accounts, engagements made for herself or her husband, requests for help, the thousand and one minor arrangements that make up a parson’s life, who, like a doctor, can scarcely dare to call an hour his own. Laboriously on the opposite side of the table little Peter Bond, his high forehead grotesquely wrinkled under the pushed-up glasses, sat writing out his next Sunday’s sermon; he was a painstaking preacher, and spent days upon one sermon—conscientious, entirely ineffective orations.

  It was a pleasant little room, despite the cheap and horrid ‘Eastern’ bazaar stuff with which it was crammed. An oil lamp with a preposterous red shade, not unlike a rakishly poised hat, stood at the chaplain’s elbow between him and his wife—the contrast between his slowly scratching pen and frequent pauses and her swiftly decisive scribbling was curiously symbolical of both characters. The room was silent, and outside the lazy, fat-bodied, night moths lunged and bumped against the pane. As a rule the intrusion of the insect tribe after lamp-time was the one thing that maddened Mrs Bond, but tonight, oddly enough, the room was entirely empty; the churring of the myriad flies that usually found their way in to circle wildly round the lampshade was absent. It may have been the unwonted silence—one misses even a nuisance quite amazingly at first—but once or twice Mrs Bond stopped her rapid writing, and raising her head, listened intently. The third time she frowned, and spoke.

  ‘Peter—doesn’t it strike you how quiet it is? Is there a storm gathering? I feel there must be.’

  The Revd. Peter raised his large mild blue eyes and regarded her solemnly. In the dead stillness of the room her voice had sounded curiously loud and harsh.

  ‘A storm—I really couldn’t say, my dear. There may be one of those desert storms brewing . . .’ He stared over at the window, screwing up his eyes. ‘You may be correct, my dear. Indeed, I think there is something electrical in the air tonight. For instance, the lamp is burning very badly—very low indeed. Yes.’

  ‘Electricity—rubbish!’ Mrs Bond’s voice was snappy; now she remembered that the unusually poor light had struck her, subconsciously, and for some obscure reason this worried her faintly. After the manner of many women, the inexplicable always had the effect of sharpening her temper; she hated any deviation from the ordinary as a cat hates getting wet. ‘Electric conditions can’t affect an oil lamp, Peter. Don’t be silly—oh!’

  The exclamation was, as it were, wrung o
ut of her, for suddenly the lamp, already perceptibly lower, sank to a mere pool of faint light on the table; even as they both exclaimed, though, it flared up again, and irritably Mrs Bond pulled off the shade to examine it.

  ‘Light the other lamp, Peter. There must be something in the oil, or the wick’s a bad one, or something . . .’ Mrs Bond was an expert at managing a lamp, as she was at most household tasks, and the room sank into silence again as the Revd. Peter resumed his labours beneath a fresh lamp, and his better half wrestled with the internal secrets of the red-shaded one at a little table.

  After ten minutes or so spent in patient analysis of the erring lamp, however, she pushed it on one side with an annoyed ‘Tcha! . . . There’s nothing wrong with it, as far as I can see—it must have been the oil. Well, I can’t waste any more time over it.’

  The Revd. Peter, deep in his sermon, grunted absently, and silence fell again upon the room. Outside the night brooded over the little group of buildings, huts, chapel, the few low-roofed bungalows that, greatly daring, clustered together at the very threshold of the dour, stark Desert. The wind rose among the whispering tamarisks, and the brushing of their green-tufted branches made a dry siffling sound against the low window-sill of the lighted room; the wide sky, a sheet of black-purple velvet, patterned sequin-like with stars, yawned above the Desert, vast, illimitable, a dome of immensity which was at once comforting and menacing. Comforting, at least, it had till now always been to Mrs Bond, a sincerely pious woman in her stern way. Many a night in her first six months in Egypt she had gazed up at that wide dark peace, and telling herself that that same sky had shone above the Birth at Bethlehem—a star like those immense, unwinking stars had led the Wise Men over hill and dale to their goal at last—the same age-old silence shrouded Joseph and Mary on their flight from Herod’s blood-drenched swords. She had gazed up at the stars and felt contentment, peace, a solace in the thought that she, too, lay beneath the Shelter that had made the stars . . . but for the first time, something faint, tiny, unexplained, seemed to have jarred the usual peaceful spell of the night.