Jim spent the night at the police-station, where a military camp-bed was provided for him in an empty whitewashed room. Late in the evening his overcoat, guitar-case and kit-bag were brought to him from the hotel, the latter containing a few clothes and necessaries; and, pinned to his pyjamas, was a sheet of notepaper upon which, in Monimé’s handwriting, were the pencilled words: “Keep up your spirits. I shall come to England with you, my beloved.” A surprising languor had descended upon him after the excitements of the evening, and it was not long before he fell into a profound sleep, from which he was aroused before daybreak by the entrance of a native policeman, who deposited a candle upon the cement floor and informed him that he was to be taken down to Cairo by the day train due to depart at dawn. A cup of native coffee was presently brought in, together with a pile of stale sandwiches, which, he was told, had been sent from the hotel on the previous evening; but, having no appetite, he placed these in the pocket of his coat.
After the lapse of a dreary and bitterly cold half hour, the Consul entered the cell, bluntly bidding him good morning. “I have orders,” he said, “to bring you down to Cairo myself.”
“That will be jolly,” Jim answered gloomily.
The Consul adjusted his eyeglasses and stared at[305] him coldly. “I must warn you,” he mumbled, “that anything you say may be taken down in evidence against you.”
“That’ll make the journey jollier still,” said Jim. Now that Monimé knew all, and had declared that she loved and trusted him, he was in much happier mood, and could face the shadow of death with sufficient equanimity to permit him to jest with his captors. But exasperation returned to his mind when in answer to his inquiry he was told that his wife had not been informed of his immediate departure, nor had the authorities any concern with her or her movements.
“‘The sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one,’” quoted the Consul, to whom Kipling was as the Bible.
“Oh, shut up!” said Jim. “Get out your notebook and write down that I declare I’m innocent and that the police are bungling fools.”
On the journey down to Cairo he and the Consul occupied a compartment which had been reserved for them. A policeman was stationed in the corridor, and the windows on the opposite side were screened by the wooden shutters which serve as blinds in Egyptian railway trains. There was nothing to do except smoke the cigarettes he had been permitted to buy at the station, or doze in his corner, while his companion complacently read a novel and smoked his pipe on the opposite seat, occasionally glancing at him over the top of his eyeglasses.
Fourteen hours of this sort of thing was enough to reduce him to a condition of complete desperation, and when at last the train jolted over the points[306] into the terminus at Cairo, he had almost made up his mind to bolt and to attempt to return to England on his own account. He was well guarded, however, and soon he was deposited for the night at the Consulate. Next day he was taken, handcuffed, to the station, where he was pushed into the train for Port Said under the eyes of a gaping crowd. He was now in the charge of a Scotch ex-sergeant serving in the Egyptian Police, who had been lent for the purpose; and on the following morning this man, assisted by native policemen, conveyed him to the liner which was to carry him to England.
Here an interior cabin had been assigned to him, a small glass panel in the door having been removed so that he might be at all times under observation; and here for the twelve weary days of the journey he was confined, with nothing to relieve the tedium except an occasional visit from the kindly captain, a nightly breath of fresh air on the deserted deck, the reading of the novels which were considerately sent down to him from the ship’s library, and the playing of his guitar, which by favour of the Cairene authorities he had been allowed to retain.
His depression was deepened by his inability to obtain any news of Monimé, but he presumed that she would know his whereabouts, and she had said that she would follow him to England. At any rate there would be no lack of money for her journey and the ultimate expenses of the trial; for he was now, of course, once more owner of the Eversfield property, and Tundering-West was again his name.
During these days his mind dwelt for hours together upon the problems of life as they presented[307] themselves to a man of his Bedouin temperament, and clearly he began to see that it was not enough merely to live and let live. As he lay sprawling upon his berth, staring at the white-painted walls and at the locked door of the cabin, or as he paced the narrow area of flooring or sat listening to the rhythmic throbbing of the engines, it became apparent to him that the recognition of some sort of obligation to society at large was essential, if only for the sake of his son.
He had always been an outlaw, hating organized society, and naming it, like the wise Giacomo Leopardi, “that extoller and enjoiner of all false virtues; that detractor and persecutor of all true ones; that opponent of all essential greatness which can become a man, and derider of every lofty sentiment unless it be spurious; that slave of the strong and tyrant of the weak.”
Yet he saw now that to some extent it was necessary to conform to its ways. The art of life, in fact, was to conform without being consumed, to submit without being submerged. But in his case he had, by his inconsideration, managed to put people’s backs up on all sides, and now, when he needed their friendship, for his wife and his child if not for himself, he was friendless.
He had contributed nothing, he felt, to his fellow men. He had carried his dreams locked in his head, and only occasionally had he troubled to write them down in the form of verse. He had squandered the gifts with which he was endowed; he had wasted the years; and now, in his desperate plight, there was no one to come forward to say a[308] word in his defence. Public opinion would declare him guilty, and he would have to fight for his life not only against an absence of sympathy, but against a bias in his disfavour.
Monimé, too, had gone her own way, ignoring the conventions, following with him the law of nature and not respecting that law in the form into which man has had to twist and limit it to meet the conditions of civilized society. And now they and their son would be the sufferers. They were a pair of outcasts; and yet she, as individually he understood her, was a personification of the glory of womanhood. They were vagrants; their love, at the outset, had been Bedouin love; and how they must pay the price.
The troubles by which he was surrounded had had a salutary effect upon his character, and had aroused him to his shortcomings. Before he had inherited the family property his life had been of an indefinite and dreamy character; at Eversfield he had been suppressed and rendered ineffectual; but since he had come to love Monimé he had emerged from this stagnation, and in the strongly contrasted turmoil of his subsequent life he had, as the saying is, found himself.
As the vessel passed up the Thames and approached its moorings at Tilbury, he had the feeling that, grasped in the relentless tentacles, he was being drawn in towards the cold, fat body of the octopus against which he had always fought. Perhaps he would be devoured, perhaps he would be vomited forth unharmed; but, whatever the issue, he had no power to resist, and must assuredly be sucked[309] into that horrible mouth. There had been times during the voyage when he lay in his berth, sick with the dread of it; but now that his destination was nearly reached he felt an eager desire to be up and fighting for his life and liberty.
There had been times, too, when he had turned with aching heart to his guitar, and had sat for hours on the edge of his berth, playing and singing melancholy ditties and songs of love. He was ever unaware of the beauty of his voice, and he would have been surprised had he been able to see the wrapt faces of the stewards and others who used to gather at the door to listen, and who would sometimes peep at the wild figure bending over the strings.
At Tilbury he had to face an army of cameramen who ran before him snapping him as he came down the gangway in charge of two policemen. A motor police-van conveyed him thence to the prison where he was to await the formal proceedings in the magistrate’s court; and here at last he experienced the full rigour of the criminal’s lot. Until now he had been confined in rooms not intended for imprisonment; but here he found himself in an actual cell, designed and built to cage the arbitrary and the recalcitrant. The iron bars, the ingenious mechanism of the lock and bolt, the inaccessible window, the uniformed warder in the passage outside—these were all instruments of the great octopus, and obedient to its word: “Thou shalt have none other gods but me.”
In the late afternoon he lay upon his bed in a comatose state, due to his nervous exhaustion; but whenever sleep came upon him his active brain[310] created a picture of his coming trial, so dreadful that he had to fight his way, so it seemed, back to consciousness to avoid it. He saw the crowded court, and the hundreds of eyes that watched him as he stood in the dock, and it appeared to him that the judge was none other than the fat, leering spectre which at Eversfield had come to represent his married life and its respectable surroundings. But now the creature no longer coaxed and wheedled; it was impelled only by malice and revenge, and the flabby hand was pointed at him in cold accusation, or raised with a sweeping gesture to indicate the all-embracing power of the great octopus.
In momentary dreams and in half-conscious thought his fevered brain gradually formed into words this monstrous judge’s summary of his actions, so that he seemed to be listening to the story of his life as interpreted by his fellow men. “Vile creature,” the voice droned, “coward, bully, and assassin, let me recount to you the steps which have led you to the scaffold. As a young man you deserted the post at which your good father had placed you, and, unable to do an honest day’s work, you fled over the seas and attached yourself to the world’s riff-raff, thereby breaking the parental heart. Having squandered your patrimony, you came at last to some low haunt in the city of Alexandria, and there, meeting a woman of loose morals, you cohabited with her, but deserted her when she was with child.”
“It’s a lie!” he heard himself screaming, as he struggled to loose himself from the grip of the attendant policemen.
“The facts speak for themselves,” the accusing[311] voice continued. “You deserted her because you had inherited your uncle’s money, and were lured back to England by the love of gold. In your own ancestral village you used your position to bully your tenants; you assaulted one of your honest farmers, you insulted the saintly vicar, and the local medical officer; you incurred the mistrust of the simple villagers. Your only friend was a filthy poacher and thief. You pursued the most comely maiden in the neighbourhood, and did not desist until you had encompassed her downfall. But, having married her, you treated her like a bully, and at length you deserted her, too, as you had deserted your former mistress.”
“Lies! Lies!” he shouted. “I will not listen!”
“Returning to your disreputable life in low haunts, you were involved in a cut-throat affray in Italy; and, escaping from this, you pretended to have been murdered, and allowed your assailant to stand his trial on that charge. Thus you thought to escape from the bonds of wedlock, and with a lie upon your lips you returned to the arms of your mistress, proposing to her a bigamous marriage. But, fearing detection, and needing money, you sneaked home; lured into the woods the sorrowing woman who, deeming herself a widow, mourned your memory; and there did her to death.”
“I am innocent!” he gasped, looking about him in desperation at the hard faces which surrounded him and hemmed him in. “Of her death at any rate I am innocent.”
“You fled, then, back to your lover,” the voice went on, “and ruthlessly involved her in your coming[312] débacle. When the officers of the law had hunted you down you threatened them with death; but presently, running from them like a coward, and being too craven to take your own life, you were ignominiously captured, and brought trembling to this place of justice. Enemy of society, lazy and useless member of the community, wretched victim of your own lusts, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?”
Wildly he struggled to free himself, and so awoke, bathed in perspiration and shaking in every limb. “O God!” he cried, beating his fists upon the bed, “take away from me this vision of myself as others see me. Because I have turned in contempt from the Great Sham, because I have dared to be independent, must I pay the penalty with my life, and go accursed to my grave? Must Monimé, must Ian suffer for my mistakes, and bear the burden of my sins?”
For an hour and more he paced his cell in torment; but at last the door was opened and a clergyman entered, announcing himself as the prison chaplain, and politely asking whether he might be of service.
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