Читать книгу Moses and Mrs. Aintree - Talbot Mundy - Страница 4

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PASSENGERS began invading the smoking-room, but nobody interfered with us.

"It wasn't too late to preserve the temple," Brice resumed.

"Galbraith sent for a police guard, after we had once more blocked up the entrance, and the three of us returned to Cairo to see what could be done."

"There are two ways of getting anywhere in Egypt—the railway and the Nile. They're both easy to police," said Allison. "If we had acted when we fir-r-st discovered the theft, the police might have—"

"I've had dealings with Gyppy policemen," I interrupted.

"The size of the bribe is the only question. How did Grim get wind of this?"

"The heads of departments did their best," said Brice. "But all the subordinates are Gyppies, and the Gyppies haven't learned anything in forty years. The police didn't lose the trail, because they never as much as pretended to pick it up. They said it was a mystery, and shrugged their shoulders."

"And meanwhile," said Allison, "we had to submit to sar-r-castic r-remar-r-ks from men who never found more than imitation scarabs in second-century tombs, if ye know what that means."

"At last we had a talk with the High Commissioner," Brice resumed. "It was he who suggested our seeing Grim about it."

"Ye've a genius in that man Grim," said Allison. "We found Mr. Grim's quarters in Cairo occupied by a Sikh named Narayan Singh, who said he was Grim's confidential assistant. He asked us for the story, and—you know how they bring you coffee in Egypt at the least excuse? Well, almost before I'd started a servant brought in coffee. He didn't seem to know any English; when I asked him in English for some cold water he didn't understand me. But instead of leaving the room after serving coffee the man squatted on the mat by the door and went into a sort of day-dream.

"When I'd finished telling the story to Narayan Singh, the servant collected the coffee cups and left the room. I asked if that was another of Grim's confidential assistants.

"'Why, no,' the Sikh answered. 'That is Jimgrim sahib himself!'

"He came in presently in European clothes and apologized, explaining that we had caught him unawares, and that for the sake of practice he habitually stood and faced even little, unimportant emergencies. As he wisely remarked, big events are only little ones projected on a larger scale."

"Mon, the mon's a genius!" said Allison.

"Fortunately for us he knows the Near East like a book," Brice continued. "He analyzed what we had given him and boiled it down to the essential fad that Gulad is an Abyssinian, who was educated in the U.S.A. He found other Abyssinians in Cairo, and discovered that most of them regarded Gulad as a religious heretic, or backslider or something. Following that trail, Grim took a quick trip to Jerusalem, where there is an Abyssinian church. He was gone four days and returned with a light in his eye. Those Abyssinians had told Grim all they knew about him."

"That's the beauty of rel ee gion," explained Allison. "Ye've always a thousand corel ee gionists getting ready to expose ye at the proper time."

"Well, it seems that after Gulad's return from the United States he became a minor official of that Abyssinian church in Jerusalem. However, the seniors were jealous of him. He had studied Mormonism in the U.S.A., with particular reference to its success along business lines; and he pointed out that the colored people in the U.S.A. would prove a fertile field for propaganda of the sort he had in mind. But they turned him down; and the more he argued, of course, the more points he provided them on which to denounce him as a heretic."

"Ye see," explained Allison, "all novelty is heresy, new ways of getting rich included."

"At any rate, they turned him out of the church," said Brice, "and between that time and the day when he joined us he made various unsuccessful efforts to become a religious leader.

"Your friend Grim's reasoning was marvelous. He said to me that he considered one point obvious. 'If this fellow Gulad were a petty grafter, he would have stolen from you long ago. But he didn't steal. He has had charge of your petty cash for years, and actually saved you lots of money. If he were a petty grafter he might try to sell a goose that should lay golden eggs. Being a patient schemer, he'll set that goose to laying eggs instead. He'll play for power. You remember the plates of gold that the Mormons are said to have?' That was all Grim said to me for several days."

"But ye'll recall no doubt that I said things to ye," said Allison.

"Ye'll remember my mentioning a per-r-fect catalogue o' new religious movements started by some chiel possessing a relic."

Brice ignored the interruption.

"Grim discovered in Jerusalem that Gulad's heresy, for which the Abyssinian elders excommunicated him, hinged on his interpretation of the law of Moses. That's important in the circumstances, Gulad has in his possession thirty-one gold plates covered with ancient writing, each of them bearing a portrait of a contemporary of Moses, and found in a temple in which Moses officiated. Even if he can't read Sanskrit, which is a practical certainty, he can show them to ignorant people and interpret them to suit his plans."

"And it becomes in consequence a verra reasonable theory," said Allison, "that Gulad entered our service because he knew we were sear-r-ching for evidence of Moses' actual existence. He persisted for about nine years. Ye can't restrain a measur-r-e of admir-r-ation for the r-rascal's deliber-r-ate per-r-tinacity."

"I still don't see where Grim, Ramsden, and Ross enter into it," I said.

"Grim saw at once. You'll see presently," said Brice. "Just listen. Grim pursued his inquiries day and night, not overlooking the important point that Gulad was educated in the U.S.A. He made another flying trip to Jerusalem, and this time I went with him.

"There was an American woman in Jerusalem, about whom nobody knew much. She was posing as a woman of wealth and making a clever display with what small private means she had. You know how a certain sort of enthusiast worships the very stones of Jerusalem? Well, she was that kind. But she seemed to want to own Jerusalem.

"Grim and I called on her after making a few inquiries. The U.S. consul knew more than he cared to tell, for in answer to Grim's questions he merely pursed his lips and shook his head. One or two Americans declared she was a rank impostor, but that was very likely personal pique. She was apparently more of a social climber than a politician. Impostor hardly seemed the right word.

"She was living in a pretty good house outside the city walls that she had coaxed from the Administration at a low rent. She had a way of worshiping a handsome British officer that some of them couldn't easily resist.

"Forty, I should say she is—forty-two—somewhere around that age. A big, handsome woman with unusual blue eyes and fine teeth. She had quite a household—four or five men and women from the States —nonentities, who did her bidding meekly. They seemed to consider her almost as important as she thought herself, and it was from a very mild, hen-pecked-looking man of sixty that Grim learned an important point while we waited in the sitting room. She kept us waiting. She is the kind of person who does that.

"When she came down at last Grim had pumped the henpecked person dry, and after a few of the usual banalities about the weather and the Zionists Grim mentioned the name of a mutual acquaintance in Cairo. The personage being rather important she claimed to know him better than she really did, which suited Grim's purpose exactly. In that apparently purposeless way of his he touched on the subject of her home town somewhere in West Virginia and said untruthfully that the mutual acquaintance had told him that she was the leader of quite an important sect there. According to Grim, this mutual acquaintance had said that in West Virginia, Isobel Aintree was a name to conjure with. It was the hen-pecked person who had said that really.

"She was visibly disturbed, but walked straight into the trap. He had touched her vanity. She couldn't resist showing off. She had never mentioned this sect of hers to anybody in Jerusalem, but once she was under way Grim wouldn't let her stop. He pretended to find it the most interesting subject in the world, and under his fire of questions she admitted rather vaguely that her teaching was based on the Law of Moses.

"She came down finally under his persistent questioning to the bald fact that her sect has twenty-seven white adherents, and several hundred colored, none of whom were with her in Jerusalem. She said she felt that her mission in life was to benefit the colored people and she had hopes that the sect would grow. That brought up the subject of Gulad.

"She admitted that she knew Gulad. She had received correspondence from him. She had met him in Egypt on her way to Palestine. Grim pinned her down again by saying he knew Gulad intimately. He spoke rather as if Gulad were somebody whom only discerning people knew how to appreciate, and the rather subtle flattery of that proved too much for her discretion. She admitted that Gulad's correspondence had provided the main incentive for her journey to Jerusalem. She had hoped with his assistance to make Jerusalem headquarters of a sect that would some day include hundreds of thousands of colored people in all quarters of the world.

"There was nothing superficially vicious about that, of course. Scores of people have tried the same sort of thing, and a few have succeeded. Most of them go to the wall sooner or later. It looked like a single case of personal ambition masquerading as divine fire. But Grim asked her quite casually when she had seen Gulad last, and her whole character lay bare that instant.

"She wanted to lie, but that hen-pecked person was watching her as if pearls of price were pouring from her lips. She hesitated palpably, flushed red, tried to laugh it off, and floundered:

"'Really, Mr. Grim, I'd rather not answer that question. I must ask you to excuse me.'

"From the look on his face you'd have thought Grim was shocked by the very idea of being inquisitive. She hinted it was time to go, but he sat still and flattered her a little more. That woman can eat up flattery like a furnace swallowing coal. He said that he should think she was the very woman to make something of Gulad.

"'The fellow needs a guiding hand,' he told her. 'They say he has great plans. Do you know anything of them?'

"She flushed and refused to commit herself. Grim asked her how long she expected to remain in Jerusalem, and she answered that she felt her work in the holy city was about done; she might go at any time. Then we took our leave, and discovered that evening by asking questions all over the place that she was planning to leave for the States as soon as she could get passage.

"Still, we hadn't really connected her up with Gulad. We merely had strong suspicions, amounting in Grim's case to intuition. We'd no ground on which to accuse her, and as Grim remarked, she was likely to be careful of herself.

"'She's the kind of person,' he said, 'who likes to save the world by making her followers take chances. She's a kind of spiritual politician. If an idea works, it's hers; if it fails, it's the other fellow's, and she'll be the first to blame him.'

"A great student of character is your friend Grim. Everything turned out the way he said it would.

"We went up to Headquarters and dropped a hint that she might be intending to smuggle antiquities out of the country, and then Grim thought of another idea:

"'Gulad,' he said, 'isn't likely to trust that plunder to another's keeping. She's probably much too wise to risk being caught with the goods at present. If they're in "cahoots" (as he called it) there'll be some slick work done.'

"We went back to Egypt and searched the files of permits to travel and found to our astonishment that a passport had been issued to a man named Gulad, described as a French subject of Abyssinian origin, who had already left from Port Said by a steamer that called nowhere short of Boston. There was a warrant out; so we sent a cablegram and arranged to have Gulad arrested as soon as the ship reached port in about seventeen days' time. Now I'd have sat down and waited after that, but Grim didn't. He inserted a few lines in the newspaper, and sent a marked copy to Mrs. Isobel Aintree in Jerusalem. Also, he tipped off all the customs officials to keep a bright look-out, and arranged by telegraph to have word sent to us of all her plans. You see, we thought she'd have to engage passage and apply for a travel permit.

"But that woman is a wily one. She had obtained her permit two months before, available for six months, entitling her to travel in any direction she pleased. She sent a man down to book tickets on the train for Egypt, and we got word of that within two hours, over the Government wire. Then, if you please, she shipped the bulk of her luggage by freight to the United States, including nothing in it, of course, that was objectionable, and left northward for Syria in two motorcars with her household. Didn't use the train at all on British territory!

"The Arab government had fallen, and the French had not yet secured control; there were no officials at the border to hold her up. Once over the border she took train for Damascus, where the French were only too glad to put her on the train for Beirut with every facility for leaving Syria at once.

"The motor-cars were hired ones. When they returned from over the border the news was out. There were two separate accounts, from two drivers, and copies of both were wired to Grim; checking them up he reached the conclusion that a colored man, described as her kavass, who traveled with the party, might be Gulad. He went to Jerusalem in a hurry for the third time, and decided that the fellow certainly was Gulad; so the plot began to clear decidedly. Gulad was in her house when we first called on her! Another man traveling in Gulad's name had shipped from Port Said to the United States with a French passport; and that's the point that baffled us.

"You see, the original warrant for Gulad's arrest had been issued over the French consul's signature. When we went to the consulate again to ask to have the French authorities in Beirut arrest that whole party, Gulad included, we found ourselves in check-mate. The man in charge was a typical bureaucrat, who asked whether there were two Gulads. A warrant had already been issued. Gulad was on his way to Boston, where he would be arrested by the United States police. No man could possibly be in Beirut and on the high seas simultaneously; and therefore he would not issue another warrant, because he did not propose to make himself absurd.

"Well, we tried to approach the French in Beirut more directly. But the cable was out of order. It is when international incidents are taking place. The overland wire by way of Palestine had been cut—by Bedouins, the French said; a coincidence that must have saved their censor a lot of trouble. The long and short of that was that Mrs. Aintree and her party, Gulad included, got clear away from Beirut. And in spite of all the ridiculous passport formalities at every frontier they contrived to cross Europe without our being able to learn which route they had taken until the information was too belated to be any use. So much for passports!

"We finally traced them to London, and Grim cabled to Jeremy Ross to pick the trail up there. He cabled back the same day to the effect that he had got in touch.

"Meanwhile," Brice continued, "Grim's assistant, the Sikh Narayan Singh, proceeded on the assumption that Gulad could not be wholly without intimates after nine years in Egypt."

"That was my idea," explained Allison. "It appealed to my sense of the rid ee culous that any man should ignore the cir-rcum-stance of Gulad having fr-r-equently received v-ee-sitors in camp; and the equally impor-r-tant cir-r-cumstance, that every one o' the v-ee-sitors was black. They used to spend days at a time in our camp. I was at some pains on more than one occasion to discover whether they were being enter-r-tained at our expense, and was gr-ratified as well as surpr-r-ized to ascertain that they paid their own footing.

"As long as he accounted in full for our stores and petty cash it was only reasonable to accord him the pr ee vileges due to any selfrespecting man. Nevertheless, the unprecedented meticulousness of his honesty—in such a land as Egypt, mind ye, with Brice and me not scr-r-upling to feed our own guests from the expedition's stores—aroused my curiosity. So I discussed the matter with Narayan Singh, and he and I together ar-r-ived at certain definite conclusions. However, ye were speaking, Brice. Continue."

"Well," said Brice, "Narayan Singh discovered quite a little colony of U.S. darkies, more or less distributed in Alexandria, Port Said, and Cairo. Quite a number were sailors, who had deserted under your peculiar shipping law. Some were harder to account for on any theory of lawful activity, but they all seemed to eke out a living, and a few were prosperous. They were distinctly possessed of class-consciousness, mainly evidenced by insolence toward white men who chanced into contact with them.

"Among them were quite a number of the missionarypreacher type. Narayan Singh found at least a dozen who were living off the rest in fairly easy circumstances. Four or five seemed to be well educated, and at least one —a man named Moses Miles—had a bank account. I want you to notice that name Moses; it proved to be an important clue.

"We let Moses Miles carefully alone at first, and made a study of the others. It would not have been the slightest use for a white man to approach any of them. But their distrust and resentment, directed at all white men, apparently made them all the more inclined to accept the confidence of the Sikh. I don't pretend to explain it, but there's the fact. They seemed to despise the native African, to loathe the white man, and to regard the Indian as a possible friend.

"Narayan Singh discovered that Moses Miles was preaching a new brand of religion among those darkies. His name, it appears, was not originally Moses, but Horatio Augustus. He changed it when he adopted the new creed. The doctrine hinges on Mosaic law, and every initiate into its mysteries has to change his first name to Moses. Only initiates are allowed to preach. Other members are known as aspirants, and their chief duty seems to be to contribute handsomely to the support of the initiates. But there is an intricate ritual that—"

"Verra heathenish, abominable rites!" growled Allison, changing his position restlessly.

"—a ritual that is much too cleverly devised to have been worked out by Moses Miles, who possesses a dominant personality, and education of a kind, but no really high order of intelligence. Narayan Singh sought admission to the sect—People of Pisgah they call themselves. He failed, but he found out this: That these People of Pisgah through Moses Miles, were momentarily awaiting instructions from the United States, on receipt of which and accompanying funds four of their initiates and eight aspirants were to leave for South Africa and begin an intensive all-black campaign among the natives there—a campaign consisting of religion mixed with politics. And the interesting point is this: That the name of the great high-priestess whose orders they awaited is Isobel Aintree."