Kabanata Kabanata 4 · THE BOTTOMLESS WELL

. THE BOTTOMLESS WELL

In an oasis, or green island, in the red and yellow seas of sand

that stretch beyond Europe toward the sunrise, there can be found a

rather fantastic contrast, which is none the less typical of such a

place, since international treaties have made it an outpost of the

British occupation. The site is famous among archaeologists for

something that is hardly a monument, but merely a hole in the

ground. But it is a round shaft, like that of a well, and probably a

part of some great irrigation works of remote and disputed date,

perhaps more ancient than anything in that ancient land. There is a

green fringe of palm and prickly pear round the black mouth of the

well; but nothing of the upper masonry remains except two bulky and

battered stones standing like the pillars of a gateway of nowhere,

in which some of the more transcendental archaeologists, in certain

moods at moonrise or sunset, think they can trace the faint lines of

figures or features of more than Babylonian monstrosity; while the

more rationalistic archaeologists, in the more rational hours of

daylight, see nothing but two shapeless rocks. It may have been

noticed, however, that all Englishmen are not archaeologists. Many

of those assembled in such a place for official and military

purposes have hobbies other than archaeology. And it is a solemn

fact that the English in this Eastern exile have contrived to make a

small golf links out of the green scrub and sand; with a comfortable

clubhouse at one end of it and this primeval monument at the other.

They did not actually use this archaic abyss as a bunker, because it

was by tradition unfathomable, and even for practical purposes

unfathomed. Any sporting projectile sent into it might be counted

most literally as a lost ball. But they often sauntered round it in

their interludes of talking and smoking cigarettes, and one of them

had just come down from the clubhouse to find another gazing

somewhat moodily into the well.

Both the Englishmen wore light clothes and white pith helmets and

puggrees, but there, for the most part, their resemblance ended. And

they both almost simultaneously said the same word, but they said it

on two totally different notes of the voice.

"Have you heard the news?" asked the man from the club. "Splendid."

"Splendid," replied the man by the well. But the first man

pronounced the word as a young man might say it about a woman, and

the second as an old man might say it about the weather, not without

sincerity, but certainly without fervor.

And in this the tone of the two men was sufficiently typical of

them. The first, who was a certain Captain Boyle, was of a bold and

boyish type, dark, and with a sort of native heat in his face that

did not belong to the atmosphere of the East, but rather to the

ardors and ambitions of the West. The other was an older man and

certainly an older resident, a civilian official--Horne Fisher; and

his drooping eyelids and drooping light mustache expressed all the

paradox of the Englishman in the East. He was much too hot to be

anything but cool.

Neither of them thought it necessary to mention what it was that was

splendid. That would indeed have been superfluous conversation about

something that everybody knew. The striking victory over a menacing

combination of Turks and Arabs in the north, won by troops under the

command of Lord Hastings, the veteran of so many striking victories,

was already spread by the newspapers all over the Empire, let alone

to this small garrison so near to the battlefield.

"Now, no other nation in the world could have done a thing like

that," cried Captain Boyle, emphatically.

Horne Fisher was still looking silently into the well; a moment

later he answered: "We certainly have the art of unmaking mistakes.

That's where the poor old Prussians went wrong. They could only make

mistakes and stick to them. There is really a certain talent in

unmaking a mistake."

"What do you mean," asked Boyle, "what mistakes?"

"Well, everybody knows it looked like biting off more than he could

chew," replied Horne Fisher. It was a peculiarity of Mr. Fisher that

he always said that everybody knew things which about one person in

two million was ever allowed to hear of. "And it was certainly jolly

lucky that Travers turned up so well in the nick of time. Odd how

often the right thing's been done for us by the second in command,

even when a great man was first in command. Like Colborne at

Waterloo."

"It ought to add a whole province to the Empire," observed the

other.

"Well, I suppose the Zimmernes would have insisted on it as far as

the canal," observed Fisher, thoughtfully, "though everybody knows

adding provinces doesn't always pay much nowadays."

Captain Boyle frowned in a slightly puzzled fashion. Being cloudily

conscious of never having heard of the Zimmernes in his life, he

could only remark, stolidly:

"Well, one can't be a Little Englander."

Horne Fisher smiled, and he had a pleasant smile.

"Every man out here is a Little Englander," he said. "He wishes he

were back in Little England."

"I don't know what you're talking about, I'm afraid," said the

younger man, rather suspiciously. "One would think you didn't really

admire Hastings or--or--anything."

"I admire him no end," replied Fisher. "He's by far the best man

for this post; he understands the Moslems and can do anything with

them. That's why I'm all against pushing Travers against him, merely

because of this last affair."

"I really don't understand what you're driving at," said the other,

frankly.

"Perhaps it isn't worth understanding," answered Fisher, lightly,

"and, anyhow, we needn't talk politics. Do you know the Arab legend

about that well?"

"I'm afraid I don't know much about Arab legends," said Boyle,

rather stiffly.

"That's rather a mistake," replied Fisher, "especially from your

point of view. Lord Hastings himself is an Arab legend. That is

perhaps the very greatest thing he really is. If his reputation went

it would weaken us all over Asia and Africa. Well, the story about

that hole in the ground, that goes down nobody knows where, has

always fascinated me, rather. It's Mohammedan in form now, but I

shouldn't wonder if the tale is a long way older than Mohammed. It's

all about somebody they call the Sultan Aladdin, not our friend of

the lamp, of course, but rather like him in having to do with genii

or giants or something of that sort. They say he commanded the

giants to build him a sort of pagoda, rising higher and higher above

all the stars. The Utmost for the Highest, as the people said when

they built the Tower of Babel. But the builders of the Tower of

Babel were quite modest and domestic people, like mice, compared

with old Aladdin. They only wanted a tower that would reach heaven--

a mere trifle. He wanted a tower that would pass heaven and rise

above it, and go on rising for ever and ever. And Allah cast him

down to earth with a thunderbolt, which sank into the earth, boring

a hole deeper and deeper, till it made a well that was without a

bottom as the tower was to have been without a top. And down that

inverted tower of darkness the soul of the proud Sultan is falling

forever and ever."

"What a queer chap you are," said Boyle. "You talk as if a fellow

could believe those fables."

"Perhaps I believe the moral and not the fable," answered Fisher.

"But here comes Lady Hastings. You know her, I think."

The clubhouse on the golf links was used, of course, for many other

purposes besides that of golf. It was the only social center of the

garrison beside the strictly military headquarters; it had a

billiard room and a bar, and even an excellent reference library for

those officers who were so perverse as to take their profession

seriously. Among these was the great general himself, whose head of

silver and face of bronze, like that of a brazen eagle, were often

to be found bent over the charts and folios of the library. The

great Lord Hastings believed in science and study, as in other

severe ideals of life, and had given much paternal advice on the

point to young Boyle, whose appearances in that place of research

were rather more intermittent. It was from one of these snatches of

study that the young man had just come out through the glass doors

of the library on to the golf links. But, above all, the club was so

appointed as to serve the social conveniences of ladies at least as

much as gentlemen, and Lady Hastings was able to play the queen in

such a society almost as much as in her own ballroom. She was

eminently calculated and, as some said, eminently inclined to play

such a part. She was much younger than her husband, an attractive

and sometimes dangerously attractive lady; and Mr. Horne Fisher

looked after her a little sardonically as she swept away with the

young soldier. Then his rather dreary eye strayed to the green and

prickly growths round the well, growths of that curious cactus

formation in which one thick leaf grows directly out of the other

without stalk or twig. It gave his fanciful mind a sinister feeling

of a blind growth without shape or purpose. A flower or shrub in the

West grows to the blossom which is its crown, and is content. But

this was as if hands could grow out of hands or legs grow out of

legs in a nightmare. "Always adding a province to the Empire," he

said, with a smile, and then added, more sadly, "but I doubt if I

was right, after all!"

A strong but genial voice broke in on his meditations and he looked

up and smiled, seeing the face of an old friend. The voice was,

indeed, rather more genial than the face, which was at the first

glance decidedly grim. It was a typically legal face, with angular

jaws and heavy, grizzled eyebrows; and it belonged to an eminently

legal character, though he was now attached in a semimilitary

capacity to the police of that wild district. Cuthbert Grayne was

perhaps more of a criminologist than either a lawyer or a policeman,

but in his more barbarous surroundings he had proved successful in

turning himself into a practical combination of all three. The

discovery of a whole series of strange Oriental crimes stood to his

credit. But as few people were acquainted with, or attracted to,

such a hobby or branch of knowledge, his intellectual life was

somewhat solitary. Among the few exceptions was Horne Fisher, who

had a curious capacity for talking to almost anybody about almost

anything.

"Studying botany, or is it archaeology?" inquired Grayne. "I shall

never come to the end of your interests, Fisher. I should say that

what you don't know isn't worth knowing."

"You are wrong," replied Fisher, with a very unusual abruptness, and

even bitterness. "It's what I do know that isn't worth knowing. All

the seamy side of things, all the secret reasons and rotten motives

and bribery and blackmail they call politics. I needn't be so proud

of having been down all these sewers that I should brag about it to

the little boys in the street."

"What do you mean? What's the matter with you?" asked his friend.

"I never knew you taken like this before."

"I'm ashamed of myself," replied Fisher. "I've just been throwing

cold water on the enthusiasms of a boy."

"Even that explanation is hardly exhaustive," observed the criminal

expert.

"Damned newspaper nonsense the enthusiasms were, of course,"

continued Fisher, "but I ought to know that at that age illusions

can be ideals. And they're better than the reality, anyhow. But

there is one very ugly responsibility about jolting a young man out

of the rut of the most rotten ideal."

"And what may that be?" inquired his friend.

"It's very apt to set him off with the same energy in a much worse

direction," answered Fisher; "a pretty endless sort of direction, a

bottomless pit as deep as the bottomless well."

Fisher did not see his friend until a fortnight later, when he found

himself in the garden at the back of the clubhouse on the opposite

side from the links, a garden heavily colored and scented with sweet

semitropical plants in the glow of a desert sunset. Two other men

were with him, the third being the now celebrated second in command,

familiar to everybody as Tom Travers, a lean, dark man, who looked

older than his years, with a furrow in his brow and something morose

about the very shape of his black mustache. They had just been

served with black coffee by the Arab now officiating as the

temporary servant of the club, though he was a figure already

familiar, and even famous, as the old servant of the general. He

went by the name of Said, and was notable among other Semites for

that unnatural length of his yellow face and height of his narrow

forehead which is sometimes seen among them, and gave an irrational

impression of something sinister, in spite of his agreeable smile.

"I never feel as if I could quite trust that fellow," said Grayne,

when the man had gone away. "It's very unjust, I take it, for he was

certainly devoted to Hastings, and saved his life, they say. But

Arabs are often like that, loyal to one man. I can't help feeling he

might cut anybody else's throat, and even do it treacherously."

"Well," said Travers, with a rather sour smile, "so long as he

leaves Hastings alone the world won't mind much."

There was a rather embarrassing silence, full of memories of the

great battle, and then Horne Fisher said, quietly:

"The newspapers aren't the world, Tom. Don't you worry about them.

Everybody in your world knows the truth well enough."

"I think we'd better not talk about the general just now," remarked

Grayne, "for he's just coming out of the club."

"He's not coming here," said Fisher. "He's only seeing his wife to

the car."

As he spoke, indeed, the lady came out on the steps of the club,

followed by her husband, who then went swiftly in front of her to

open the garden gate. As he did so she turned back and spoke for a

moment to a solitary man still sitting in a cane chair in the shadow

of the doorway, the only man left in the deserted club save for the

three that lingered in the garden. Fisher peered for a moment into

the shadow, and saw that it was Captain Boyle.

The next moment, rather to their surprise, the general reappeared

and, remounting the steps, spoke a word or two to Boyle in his turn.

Then he signaled to Said, who hurried up with two cups of coffee,

and the two men re-entered the club, each carrying his cup in his

hand. The next moment a gleam of white light in the growing darkness

showed that the electric lamps had been turned on in the library

beyond.

"Coffee and scientific researches," said Travers, grimly. "All the

luxuries of learning and theoretical research. Well, I must be

going, for I have my work to do as well." And he got up rather

stiffly, saluted his companions, and strode away into the dusk.

"I only hope Boyle is sticking to scientific researches," said Horne

Fisher. "I'm not very comfortable about him myself. But let's talk

about something else."

They talked about something else longer than they probably imagined,

until the tropical night had come and a splendid moon painted the

whole scene with silver; but before it was bright enough to see by

Fisher had already noted that the lights in the library had been

abruptly extinguished. He waited for the two men to come out by the

garden entrance, but nobody came.

"They must have gone for a stroll on the links," he said.

"Very possibly," replied Grayne. "It's going to be a beautiful

night."

A moment or two after he had spoken they heard a voice hailing them

out of the shadow of the clubhouse, and were astonished to perceive

Travers hurrying toward them, calling out as he came:

"I shall want your help, you fellows," he cried. "There's something

pretty bad out on the links."

They found themselves plunging through the club smoking room and the

library beyond, in complete darkness, mental as well as material.

But Horne Fisher, in spite of his affectation of indifference, was a

person of a curious and almost transcendental sensibility to

atmospheres, and he already felt the presence of something more than

an accident. He collided with a piece of furniture in the library,

and almost shuddered with the shock, for the thing moved as he could

never have fancied a piece of furniture moving. It seemed to move

like a living thing, yielding and yet striking back. The next moment

Grayne had turned on the lights, and he saw he had only stumbled

against one of the revolving bookstands that had swung round and

struck him; but his involuntary recoil had revealed to him his own

subconscious sense of something mysterious and monstrous. There were

several of these revolving bookcases standing here and there about

the library; on one of them stood the two cups of coffee, and on

another a large open book. It was Budge's book on Egyptian

hieroglyphics, with colored plates of strange birds and gods, and

even as he rushed past, he was conscious of something odd about the

fact that this, and not any work of military science, should be open

in that place at that moment. He was even conscious of the gap in

the well-lined bookshelf from which it had been taken, and it seemed

almost to gape at him in an ugly fashion, like a gap in the teeth of

some sinister face.

A run brought them in a few minutes to the other side of the ground

in front of the bottomless well, and a few yards from it, in a

moonlight almost as broad as daylight, they saw what they had come

to see.

The great Lord Hastings lay prone on his face, in a posture in which

there was a touch of something strange and stiff, with one elbow

erect above his body, the arm being doubled, and his big, bony hand

clutching the rank and ragged grass. A few feet away was Boyle,

almost as motionless, but supported on his hands and knees, and

staring at the body. It might have been no more than shock and

accident; but there was something ungainly and unnatural about the

quadrupedal posture and the gaping face. It was as if his reason had

fled from him. Behind, there was nothing but the clear blue southern

sky, and the beginning of the desert, except for the two great

broken stones in front of the well. And it was in such a light and

atmosphere that men could fancy they traced in them enormous and

evil faces, looking down.

Horne Fisher stooped and touched the strong hand that was still

clutching the grass, and it was as cold as a stone. He knelt by the

body and was busy for a moment applying other tests; then he rose

again, and said, with a sort of confident despair:

"Lord Hastings is dead."

There was a stony silence, and then Travers remarked, gruffly: "This

is your department, Grayne; I will leave you to question Captain

Boyle. I can make no sense of what he says."

Boyle had pulled himself together and risen to his feet, but his

face still wore an awful expression, making it like a new mask or

the face of another man.

"I was looking at the well," he said, "and when I turned he had

fallen down."

Grayne's face was very dark. "As you say, this is my affair," he

said. "I must first ask you to help me carry him to the library and

let me examine things thoroughly."

When they had deposited the body in the library, Grayne turned to

Fisher and said, in a voice that had recovered its fullness and

confidence, "I am going to lock myself in and make a thorough

examination first. I look to you to keep in touch with the others

and make a preliminary examination of Boyle. I will talk to him

later. And just telephone to headquarters for a policeman, and let

him come here at once and stand by till I want him."

Without more words the great criminal investigator went into the

lighted library, shutting the door behind him, and Fisher, without

replying, turned and began to talk quietly to Travers. "It is

curious," he said, "that the thing should happen just in front of

that place."

"It would certainly be very curious," replied Travers, "if the place

played any part in it."

"I think," replied Fisher, "that the part it didn't play is more

curious still."

And with these apparently meaningless words he turned to the shaken

Boyle and, taking his arm, began to walk him up and down in the

moonlight, talking in low tones.

Dawn had begun to break abrupt and white when Cuthbert Grayne turned

out the lights in the library and came out on to the links. Fisher

was lounging about alone, in his listless fashion; but the police

messenger for whom he had sent was standing at attention in the

background.

"I sent Boyle off with Travers," observed Fisher, carelessly; "he'll

look after him, and he'd better have some sleep, anyhow."

"Did you get anything out of him?" asked Grayne. "Did he tell you

what he and Hastings were doing?"

"Yes," answered Fisher, "he gave me a pretty clear account, after

all. He said that after Lady Hastings went off in the car the

general asked him to take coffee with him in the library and look up

a point about local antiquities. He himself was beginning to look

for Budge's book in one of the revolving bookstands when the general

found it in one of the bookshelves on the wall. After looking at

some of the plates they went out, it would seem, rather abruptly, on

to the links, and walked toward the old well; and while Boyle was

looking into it he heard a thud behind him, and turned round to find

the general lying as we found him. He himself dropped on his knees

to examine the body, and then was paralyzed with a sort of terror

and could not come nearer to it or touch it. But I think very little

of that; people caught in a real shock of surprise are sometimes

found in the queerest postures."

Grayne wore a grim smile of attention, and said, after a short

silence:

"Well, he hasn't told you many lies. It's really a creditably clear

and consistent account of what happened, with everything of

importance left out."

"Have you discovered anything in there?" asked Fisher.

"I have discovered everything," answered Grayne.

Fisher maintained a somewhat gloomy silence, as the other resumed

his explanation in quiet and assured tones.

"You were quite right, Fisher, when you said that young fellow was

in danger of going down dark ways toward the pit. Whether or no, as

you fancied, the jolt you gave to his view of the general had

anything to do with it, he has not been treating the general well

for some time. It's an unpleasant business, and I don't want to

dwell on it; but it's pretty plain that his wife was not treating

him well, either. I don't know how far it went, but it went as far

as concealment, anyhow; for when Lady Hastings spoke to Boyle it was

to tell him she had hidden a note in the Budge book in the library.

The general overheard, or came somehow to know, and he went straight

to the book and found it. He confronted Boyle with it, and they had

a scene, of course. And Boyle was confronted with something else; he

was confronted with an awful alternative, in which the life of one

old man meant ruin and his death meant triumph and even happiness."

"Well," observed Fisher, at last, "I don't blame him for not telling

you the woman's part of the story. But how do you know about the

letter?"

"I found it on the general's body," answered Grayne, "but I found

worse things than that. The body had stiffened in the way rather

peculiar to poisons of a certain Asiatic sort. Then I examined the

coffee cups, and I knew enough chemistry to find poison in the dregs

of one of them. Now, the General went straight to the bookcase,

leaving his cup of coffee on the bookstand in the middle of the

room. While his back was turned, and Boyle was pretending to examine

the bookstand, he was left alone with the coffee cup. The poison

takes about ten minutes to act, and ten minutes' walk would bring

them to the bottomless well."

"Yes," remarked Fisher, "and what about the bottomless well?"

"What has the bottomless well got to do with it?" asked his friend.

"It has nothing to do with it," replied Fisher. "That is what I

find utterly confounding and incredible."

"And why should that particular hole in the ground have anything to

do with it?"

"It is a particular hole in your case," said Fisher. "But I won't

insist on that just now. By the way, there is another thing I ought

to tell you. I said I sent Boyle away in charge of Travers. It would

be just as true to say I sent Travers in charge of Boyle."

"You don't mean to say you suspect Tom Travers?" cried the other.

"He was a deal bitterer against the general than Boyle ever was,"

observed Horne Fisher, with a curious indifference.

"Man, you're not saying what you mean," cried Grayne. "I tell you I

found the poison in one of the coffee cups."

"There was always Said, of course," added Fisher, "either for hatred

or hire. We agreed he was capable of almost anything."

"And we agreed he was incapable of hurting his master," retorted

Grayne.

"Well, well," said Fisher, amiably, "I dare say you are right; but I

should just like to have a look at the library and the coffee cups."

He passed inside, while Grayne turned to the policeman in attendance

and handed him a scribbled note, to be telegraphed from

headquarters. The man saluted and hurried off; and Grayne, following

his friend into the library, found him beside the bookstand in the

middle of the room, on which were the empty cups.

"This is where Boyle looked for Budge, or pretended to look for him,

according to your account," he said.

As Fisher spoke he bent down in a half-crouching attitude, to look

at the volumes in the low, revolving shelf, for the whole bookstand

was not much higher than an ordinary table. The next moment he

sprang up as if he had been stung.

"Oh, my God!" he cried.

Very few people, if any, had ever seen Mr. Horne Fisher behave as he

behaved just then. He flashed a glance at the door, saw that the

open window was nearer, went out of it with a flying leap, as if

over a hurdle, and went racing across the turf, in the track of the

disappearing policeman. Grayne, who stood staring after him, soon

saw his tall, loose figure, returning, restored to all its normal

limpness and air of leisure. He was fanning himself slowly with a

piece of paper, the telegram he had so violently intercepted.

"Lucky I stopped that," he observed. "We must keep this affair as

quiet as death. Hastings must die of apoplexy or heart disease."

"What on earth is the trouble?" demanded the other investigator.

"The trouble is," said Fisher, "that in a few days we should have

had a very agreeable alternative--of hanging an innocent man or

knocking the British Empire to hell."

"Do you mean to say," asked Grayne, "that this infernal crime is not

to be punished?"

Fisher looked at him steadily.

"It is already punished," he said.

After a moment's pause he went on. "You reconstructed the crime

with admirable skill, old chap, and nearly all you said was true.

Two men with two coffee cups did go into the library and did put

their cups on the bookstand and did go together to the well, and one

of them was a murderer and had put poison in the other's cup. But it

was not done while Boyle was looking at the revolving bookcase. He

did look at it, though, searching for the Budge book with the note

in it, but I fancy that Hastings had already moved it to the shelves

on the wall. It was part of that grim game that he should find it

first.

"Now, how does a man search a revolving bookcase? He does not

generally hop all round it in a squatting attitude, like a frog. He

simply gives it a touch and makes it revolve."

He was frowning at the floor as he spoke, and there was a light

under his heavy lids that was not often seen there. The mysticism

that was buried deep under all the cynicism of his experience was

awake and moving in the depths. His voice took unexpected turns and

inflections, almost as if two men were speaking.

"That was what Boyle did; he barely touched the thing, and it went

round as easily as the world goes round. Yes, very much as the

world goes round, for the hand that turned it was not his. God, who

turns the wheel of all the stars, touched that wheel and brought it

full circle, that His dreadful justice might return."

"I am beginning," said Grayne, slowly, "to have some hazy and

horrible idea of what you mean."

"It is very simple," said Fisher, "when Boyle straightened himself

from his stooping posture, something had happened which he had not

noticed, which his enemy had not noticed, which nobody had noticed.

The two coffee cups had exactly changed places."

The rocky face of Grayne seemed to have sustained a shock in

silence; not a line of it altered, but his voice when it came was

unexpectedly weakened.

"I see what you mean," he said, "and, as you say, the less said

about it the better. It was not the lover who tried to get rid of

the husband, but--the other thing. And a tale like that about a man

like that would ruin us here. Had you any guess of this at the

start?"

"The bottomless well, as I told you," answered Fisher, quietly;

"that was what stumped me from the start. Not because it had

anything to do with it, because it had nothing to do with it."

He paused a moment, as if choosing an approach, and then went on:

"When a man knows his enemy will be dead in ten minutes, and takes

him to the edge of an unfathomable pit, he means to throw his body

into it. What else should he do? A born fool would have the sense to

do it, and Boyle is not a born fool. Well, why did not Boyle do it?

The more I thought of it the more I suspected there was some mistake

in the murder, so to speak. Somebody had taken somebody there to

throw him in, and yet he was not thrown in. I had already an ugly,

unformed idea of some substitution or reversal of parts; then I

stooped to turn the bookstand myself, by accident, and I instantly

knew everything, for I saw the two cups revolve once more, like

moons in the sky."

After a pause, Cuthbert Grayne said, "And what are we to say to the

newspapers?"

"My friend, Harold March, is coming along from Cairo to-day," said

Fisher. "He is a very brilliant and successful journalist. But for

all that he's a thoroughly honorable man, so you must not tell him

the truth."

Half an hour later Fisher was again walking to and fro in front of

the clubhouse, with Captain Boyle, the latter by this time with a

very buffeted and bewildered air; perhaps a sadder and a wiser man.

"What about me, then?" he was saying. "Am I cleared? Am I not going

to be cleared?"

"I believe and hope," answered Fisher, "that you are not going to be

suspected. But you are certainly not going to be cleared. There must

be no suspicion against him, and therefore no suspicion against you.

Any suspicion against him, let alone such a story against him, would

knock us endways from Malta to Mandalay. He was a hero as well as a

holy terror among the Moslems. Indeed, you might almost call him a

Moslem hero in the English service. Of course he got on with them

partly because of his own little dose of Eastern blood; he got it

from his mother, the dancer from Damascus; everybody knows that."

"Oh," repeated Boyle, mechanically, staring at him with round eyes,

"everybody knows that."

"I dare say there was a touch of it in his jealousy and ferocious

vengeance," went on Fisher. "But, for all that, the crime would ruin

us among the Arabs, all the more because it was something like a

crime against hospitality. It's been hateful for you and it's pretty

horrid for me. But there are some things that damned well can't be

done, and while I'm alive that's one of them."

"What do you mean?" asked Boyle, glancing at him curiously. "Why

should you, of all people, be so passionate about it?"

Horne Fisher looked at the young man with a baffling expression.

"I suppose," he said, "it's because I'm a Little Englander."

"I can never make out what you mean by that sort of thing," answered

Boyle, doubtfully.

"Do you think England is so little as all that?" said Fisher, with a

warmth in his cold voice, "that it can't hold a man across a few

thousand miles. You lectured me with a lot of ideal patriotism, my

young friend; but it's practical patriotism now for you and me, and

with no lies to help it. You talked as if everything always went

right with us all over the world, in a triumphant crescendo

culminating in Hastings. I tell you everything has gone wrong with

us here, except Hastings. He was the one name we had left to conjure

with, and that mustn't go as well, no, by God! It's bad enough that

a gang of infernal Jews should plant us here, where there's no

earthly English interest to serve, and all hell beating up against

us, simply because Nosey Zimmern has lent money to half the Cabinet.

It's bad enough that an old pawnbroker from Bagdad should make us

fight his battles; we can't fight with our right hand cut off. Our

one score was Hastings and his victory, which was really somebody

else's victory. Tom Travers has to suffer, and so have you."

Then, after a moment's silence, he pointed toward the bottomless

well and said, in a quieter tone:

"I told you that I didn't believe in the philosophy of the Tower of

Aladdin. I don't believe in the Empire growing until it reaches the

sky; I don't believe in the Union Jack going up and up eternally

like the Tower. But if you think I am going to let the Union Jack go

down and down eternally, like the bottomless well, down into the

blackness of the bottomless pit, down in defeat and derision, amid

the jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry--no I won't, and

that's flat; not if the Chancellor were blackmailed by twenty

millionaires with their gutter rags, not if the Prime Minister

married twenty Yankee Jewesses, not if Woodville and Carstairs had

shares in twenty swindling mines. If the thing is really tottering,

God help it, it mustn't be we who tip it over."

Boyle was regarding him with a bewilderment that was almost fear,

and had even a touch of distaste.

"Somehow," he said, "there seems to be something rather horrid about

the things you know."

"There is," replied Horne Fisher. "I am not at all pleased with my

small stock of knowledge and reflection. But as it is partly

responsible for your not being hanged, I don't know that you need

complain of it."

And, as if a little ashamed of his first boast, he turned and

strolled away toward the bottomless well.