“I give him written instructions in Arabic.”
“That so? I’ll look at his ears—tell you in a minute whether it’s worth while to come to me.”
He took my head between strong, authoritative hands and tilted it sidewise.
“Hello! What’s this?”
The Arab head-dress I was wearing shifted and showed non-Arab symptoms.
“Open that bag of mine, will you, Grim, and pass me that big pair of forceps you’ll find wrapped in oiled paper on top of everything. There’s something I can attend to here at once.”
It was an uncomfortable moment. Grim never cracked a smile. He dug out the instrument of torture and gave it to Templeton. But there were two points that occurred to me, in addition to the knowledge that nothing whatever was the matter with my ear. Doctors in good standing, who are usually gentlemen, don’t operate without permission; and the forceps were much too big for any such purpose. So I sat still.
“Um-m-m! What he really needs is a red-hot needle run down close to the ear-drum. It wouldn’t take five minutes, or hurt him— much. After that I think he’d be able to hear perfectly. Suppose we try.”
“I can wait ten minutes yet,” Grim answered.
“Very well. I’ve a platinum needle in the bag. I’ll get out the spirit-lamp and we’ll soon see. To be candid with you, I don’t believe the man’s any more deaf than you or I.”
“If you run a hot needle through the lobe of his ear well find out whether he can really talk or not,” said Grim in his pleasantest voice. “If he’s shamming I don’t mind. What we need in this service is a man who can endure without betraying himself.”
“Well, we’ll soon see.”
I began to hate Grim pretty cordially. I hated him more when Suliman came in, dressed for the street in a rather dirty cotton smock, with a turban in place of his fez. He told the boy to hold the wooden handle of a paper-knife behind my ear to prevent the hot needle from going too far on its sizzling journey. It didn’t seem to me the way to reciprocate volunteer secret service. Suliman’s grin at the prospect of seeing a man tortured was enough to provoke murder. I brushed the boy aside, fly-fashion, got up, crossed the room, and sat down again in the corner.
“Good enough!” laughed Grim. “You’ll do.”
“Yes, I think he’ll do,” agreed Templeton.
But I took no notice. I had seen too many games lost and won with the last card. Templeton looked down at Suliman:
“Tell him the game’s over. He may talk now.”
“Mafish mukhkh[15]!” the boy answered, grinning and tapping his own forehead. “Magnoon[16]!”
“I think I can trust them both,” said Grim, smiling in my direction. “All right, old man; time out! If you’d spoken once there’d have been nothing more between you and a life of safety and respectability!”
“Whereas,” said Templeton, “you may now be unsafe and an outlaw and enjoy yourself! Are you sure they haven’t marked him?” he asked Grim.
“Sure! Why should they suspect a tourist? But I’ve taken precautions. Word is on the way to the hotel to forward all his mail to Jaffa until further notice.” He laughed at me again. “I hope you’re not expecting important letters!”
Suliman had evidently been well schooled in advance, for at a nod from Grim he came over and took my hand, as if I were blind in addition to the other supposed infirmities. He led me out by a back-door, across a yard into an alley, which we followed as far as a main road and then turned toward the Jaffa Gate. Looking back once I saw Grim in his Shereefian uniform striding along behind us; but where the road forked he took the other turning.
There is contentment in walking disguised through crowded streets, even when you are in tow of eight-year-old iniquity that regards you as a lump of baggage to be pushed this and that way. Suliman plainly considered me a rank outsider, only admitted into the game on sufferance. Having said I was “magnoon” he lived up to the assertion, and warned people to make way for me if they did not want to be bitten and go mad, too; so as a general rule I received a pretty wide berth. But it was fun, in spite of Suliman. It was like seeing the world through a peep-hole. Men and women you knew went by without suspecting they were recognized, and in a puzzling sort of way the world, that had been your world yesterday, seemed now to belong wholly to other people, while you lived in a new sphere of your own.
We had to go slowly as we approached the Jaffa Gate, for the crowd was dense there, and a line of Sikhs was drawn across the gap where the street passes through the city wall. It was the gap the Turks once made by tearing down the wall to let the Kaiser through, when he made that famous meek and humble pilgrimage of his. The Sikhs were searching all comers for weapons, and we had to wait our turn.
Outside the gate, on the left-hand as you faced it, was the usual line of boot-blacks—the only cheap thing left in Jerusalem—a motley two dozen of ex-Turkish soldiers, recently fighting the British gamely in the last ditch, and now blacking their boots with equal gusto, for rather higher pay. Some of them still wore Turkish uniforms. Two or three were redheaded and blue-eyed, and almost certainly descended from Scotch crusaders. (The whole wide world bears witness that when the Scots went soldiering they were efficient in more ways than one.)
The rest of the crowd were mainly peasantry with basket-loads of stuff for market; but there was a liberal sprinkling among them of all the odds and ends of the Levant, with a Jew here and there, the inevitable Russian priest, and a dozen odd lots, of as many nationalities, whom it would have been difficult to classify.
And there was Police Constable Bedreddin Shah. You could not have missed noticing him, although I did not learn his name until afterwards. He came swaggering down the Jaffa Road with all the bullying arrogance of the newly enlisted Arab policeman. He shoved me aside, calling me a name that a drunken donkey-driver would hesitate to apply to a dog in the gutter. He was on his way to the lock-up that stands just inside the gate, and I wished him a year in it.
As he plunged into the crowd that checked and surged immediately in front of the line of Sikhs, a small man in Arab costume with the lower part of his face well covered by the kaffiyi,[17] rushed out from the corner behind the bootblacks and drove a long knife home to the hilt between the policeman’s shoulder-blades. I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t even sorry.
Bedreddin Shah shrieked and fell forward. Blood gushed from the wound. The crowd surged in curiously, and then fell back before the advancing Sikhs. A British officer who had heard the victim’s cry came spurring his horse into the crowd from inside the gate. In his effort to get near the victim he only added to the confusion.
The murderer, who seemed in no particular hurry, dodged quietly in and out among the swarm of bewildered peasants, and in thirty seconds had utterly disappeared. A minute later I saw Grim offering his services as interpreter and stooping over the dying man to try to catch the one word he was struggling to repeat.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
“WINDY BELLIES WITHOUT HEARTS IN THEM.”
Djemal’s coffee shop is run by a Turkish gentleman whose real name is Yussuf. One name, and the shorter the better, had been plenty in the days when Djemal Pasha ran Jerusalem with iron ruthlessness, and consequent success of a certain sort. When Djemal was the Turkish Governor, every proprietor of every kind of shop had to stand in the doorway at attention whenever Djemal passed, and woe betide the laggard!
It would not have paid any one, in those days, to name any sort of shop after Djemal Pasha. Even the provider of the rope that throttled the offender would have made no profit, because