Little Lost Lambs From the Colliery Read online

  Yes, Lalli had been stabbed to death that night by the maddened Muharrem worshipers. Her body would be lying in one of those shallow women’s graves without a tombstone down by the river. Perhaps Zobeida had visited it at first. Probably by now nobody in Isfahan could tell you which one it was.

  But all she had ever had in the world, even to the scent of her body and the very words of her mouth were here, un­der that face bending over the pool, with John Royce.

  “Sounds to me,” ventured the lady beside me, “like a child’s ‘Now I lay me.’”

  "Yes," I said, "it does."

  The Watcher

  I WAS on my way to it when I ran into the Aymons. I’d climbed on board the old Patria off Mersina simply to enjoy one of the great nine-course dinners they serve on that veteran steamship. The Patria makes the run down the Syrian coast to Beirut in a night.

  When the second gong sounded I showed up in the dining saloon, and I found the Aymons there. At least Uncle Arthur Aymon was sitting by me at the passengers' table, but Jane had been promoted to the officers’ table. And all the officers were there—captain, first, chief engineer and purser. They had on white dress uniforms with lots of braid. Italian ship’s officers in the Levant seldom have a striking-looking American girl among their few first-class passengers, and the quarter­master probably had the bridge during that dinner hour and a half—for all of the nine courses, coffee and cordials. The Italians are a gallant race and they understand a good dinner.

  Jane Aymon talked to them all im­partially. And you could understand her French. She was twenty-one years of age. She had graduated last spring; she was quiet, seldom smiling, and she had dark gray eyes. You found it hard not to look at her.

  At least I did, after nearly two years of archeological digging in Asia Minor and seeing nothing more feminine and American than the Turkish women at work in the villages. But after a time I discovered that Jane had left the only two men who interested her on the other side of the earth. In fact, she had come away on account of these same two men. She never told me that, but I knew it.

  After dinner Arthur Aymon called Jane over and the three of us went out to look at the dark coast, slipping by just beyond the glow of the Patria’s lights.

  “I wish," Jane said plaintively, “this boat would move a little faster.”

  “Why?” her uncle wondered. “From all I hear there’s not much interesting in Beirut.”

  “There’s mail. Do you realize that I’ve had not one letter since we left India?”

  “Well, I don't see why you expect any, bright child. You refused uncondition­ally to leave any addresses when we left home.”

  NOW this was, to say the least, unusual. The one thing most tourists do before leaving the States is to make out a chart of stopping points so that every­one can write them. But Arthur Aymon and his niece were no ordinary tourists. They appeared to have money enough, and not to care where they went.

  “What is there to see, anyway, in Beirut, Mr. Halliday?” he asked me.

  I told him. “A small bazaar, a couple of mosques. Otherwise, a quite modern and French seaport.”

  “I wish,” Jane put in, “that we could dig up old, forgotten secrets like you, Mr. Halliday. Tyre and Sidon must be just around the corner, and I’m sure the stones of Roman roads still lead off into the desert.”

  “They do,” I agreed. “And if you don’t mind camping out, you can come with me a short way in, to The Watcher.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A crusader’s castle.”

  “I didn’t know,” Jane smiled, “that there were any crusaders nowadays. Real ones, I mean.”

  “I don’t know about nowadays,” I said, “but this is a real castle built by a real crusader about seven hundred years ago when they did such things. You know, once there was a world war out here—one half the world fighting to get Jerusalem away from the other half.

  During that war, which lasted, by the way, about two hundred years, the crusaders built a line of castles back of those hills you’re looking at. And after our ancestors, our crusaders, were licked by all Asia and driven out, these castles waited there in vain for a tenant. No one else has any need of them.”

  “Like a forgotten Western Front,” suggested Uncle Arthur. “Only, I sup­pose it was the first Eastern Front.”

  “For about six centuries,” I ex­plained, “everybody at home forgot that these castles existed. Then, after the last world war, some French officers spotted one of the best of them, this Watcher—as the Arabs call it. I’m going out to it, to take detail pictures and make a rough survey.” And I looked hopefully at Jane, who was so much easier to watch than those Turk­ish pack animals in women’s garments.

  “Jane,” remarked her uncle, “had a small-girl complex about crusaders. You know the Aymons, our ancestors of that time, were out here in those cru­sades—”

  “Forty generations ago," she nodded mischievously, “and Uncle Art secretly thinks he has a lot of derring-do in him.”

  “You used to think so, too, young lady. You made us hang that coat, or shield, of arms in your bedroom."

  “Yes, the Aymon shield of arms, with the castle tucked in one corner. I liked to look at it when I woke up in the morn­ing, aged thirteen. At that age, small Jane believed in jingle bells, jingle bells. She even thought that grown men could be knights in shining armor like Galahad and Godfrey of Bouillon. And the crusaders were her beaux sabreurs.”

  Whereupon she fell silent, studying that shadowy shore without a light on it.

  “The crusaders," I ventured, “were not without fear or reproach. Lots of them were hard adventurers on the prowl. They chucked everything at home to follow—well, to follow a star.”

  “They put up a good fight,” grumbled Arthur Aymon. “Like Richard the Lion Heart. He was a real man.”

  “CERTAINLY, he was a real man,” Jane agreed wickedly. “And he was very brave. He left debts and bodies scattered around whenever he stepped out. Think of what his wife had to put up with. And England had to melt down the family plate to buy him out of hock on his way home. That’s all in the book, if you doubt it. Now, his brother John, who stayed at home, was the better man—not such a glamorous sort, but his wife could live with him.”

  “Well, anyhow," said her uncle, “I'd put my money on Richard, in a scrap.”

  He looked at me. “Did our ancestors leave any souvenirs out here? Tombs and such? Anything to see?”

  “The modern Aymons,” Jane smiled, “rooting among the ruins for relics of the ancestral Aymons whose swords are rust, whose bones are dust. No go, Uncle Art.”

  “Well, I only wanted to look around,” he muttered.

  “And I don’t want to, at all.”

  She made a face at him. But her mind, I noticed, was off somewhere on that dark shore. I wondered why a little thing like Jane should turn her back on a castle. And I wondered why she was afraid of something on that coast she had never visited.

  We men like to talk about a woman’s instinct. But I think men are the ones to do things on instinct. Like placing a bet. Women like to find out first, if they can.

  THE first thing Jane did the next morning, after telling the polite French agents at the douane her moth­er’s maiden name and her own probable length of stay in Beirut, was to ask me to take her to the Cook’s office.

  There she asked if they had any mail for her.

  “No,” said the clerk, “Mademoiselle, there is nothing.”

  She thanked the man, and moved out of the office. Suddenly she smiled up at me. “Do you mind very much if we go out to The Watcher with you, Mr. Halli­day?”

  Mind! . . . Three days later, toward sunset, our hired auto clattered to a stop on the summit of the hill where no auto had ever been before. All around us hills gray with sand and scrub. Overhead the clear Syrian sky, and there beside us, with its white walls tinted red by the sunset, the ghost of a great castle.

  An empty house in a city is just an accident. You
feel that the people just happened to go out for a while. But an empty house miles away from any­thing else affects you another way.

  Now think of a huge castle crouched over an entire hilltop, bare of every­thing except silence. Think of the desert floor below it, veiled in shadow.

  “I think I know,” Jane Aymon said, “why they call it The Watcher. It is waiting here for something to happen, and centuries mean nothing to it.”

  Mind you, The Watcher did not re­semble the little, renovated châteaux of Europe. It had no modern windows cut into it, or nice tile roofing laid over it. No one had tried to alter it since the crusaders abandoned it seven hundred years ago. Of course the moat was half filled with débris, and stones from the parapets littered the courtyard. Here and there scrub pines grew from the broken flagging.

  BECAUSE it was remote from civilized centers, no one had used it as a quarry for building material, and be­cause it was constructed of solid lime­stone blocks it had remained in that dry climate almost intact. The water in its well was still drinkable—coming from a spring deep in the rock. In fact, the Arabs came up from the native village a couple of hundred yards down the hill, to fetch the water.

  “Humph,” grunted Uncle Arthur, “this thing must have been old when America was discovered. Wonder if any Aymons ever were lords of the castle here."

  “If they were,” Jane observed, perch­ing herself in an embrasure, “they probably raised the devil with the coun­tryside.”

  While Khalil—the Arab driver of the car we had chartered in Beirut—and I were carrying in the tents and cooking gear, she made the rounds of the place, from the empty chapel to the half-filled-up underground chambers that had served the knights for stables. It took some time, and when she settled down at last we had dinner cooked and a nice fire going by the tents which we had pitched in a sheltered corner of the courtyard. Of course a dozen older Arabs had arrived from the village below, and were squatting in their robes just be­yond the fire, watching everything we did.

  “Oh,” said Jane, “it’s perfect. It’s better than a movie of the Foreign Legion.” And she went over to scrape acquaintance with our bearded visitors.

  I nudged Arthur Aymon. “Watch,” I whispered. I knew that Jane hadn’t a word of Arabic, and that her French wouldn’t register on these chaps.

  They stirred, uneasy as vultures about to flap into flight; then every man turned his back on her.

  “Embarrassment,” I whispered. “A beautiful and high-born lady appears from nowhere and approaches them un­veiled. The effect upon them is about the same as if they’d seen Venus rising unclad from the sea.”

  Our Venus, unsuspecting, was dis­concerted for a moment. After that she sat down by them, and in another moment she was offering them Ameri­can cigarettes, which they accepted after an agony of shyness.

  When she rejoined us she announced that she wanted to camp in The Watcher for a week.

  FOR two days I did not realize what was happening. I took photographs and measurements, and started work on a ground plan of The Watcher; Aymon smoked his pipe and scraped around for souvenirs. “An Austrian howitzer,” he said to me once, “would make nice crushed stone out of this place.”

  “No howitzer,” I retorted, “was ever within sight of here, and none ever will be.”

  “That’s true,” he laughed. “I forgot.”

  I discovered, after a while, that he had been on the Italian front, at Gorizia, in 1917. Since then, some part of his mind always listened for those big shells. He did not actually think about them, but after sixteen years he would flinch occasionally when he was walk­ing over a street grating in New York and a subway express came under him. He added that these bare Syrian hills under the low-hanging clouds reminded him of that Italian plateau. At times he laughed, he had the jitters when he woke and looked out at the broken parapet of The Watcher against the stars.

  Jane, however, was all over the place. She explored the village and invited the head Arabs up for tea; she made sketches of The Watcher’s towers, and disappeared on long walks alone—at least she thought she went alone. But Khalil or some Arabs always trailed her discreetly.

  “It is not good for her to do that,” Khalil, our driver, told us, “now.”

  And still I did not guess what the danger was.

  I remember how I found her that afternoon, stretched out on the stone flagging of the empty chapel. She was sobbing quietly, and after a moment I tiptoed away. But I couldn’t finish my work.

  That night she talked to me, as if she never wanted to stop—the two of us perched on the outer wall, over the yawning entrance. She seemed to be suffering from a congestion of twenty-year-old ideas. What was love anyway, she demanded, but a natural habit? Men and women really mated like animals, didn’t they? If you shared a sum­mer vacation with a good-looking upper­classman you thought it was romance, for ever and ever—until the vacation ended and you had another man impressing himself on your senses.

  If she and I, Jane argued, were to stick around like this for a whole sum­mer with nothing else to think about, we’d fool ourselves into believing we were madly in love. At least, she added quickly, she might.

  “It wouldn’t take a summer,” I an­swered. “A week would do the trick for me.”

  Fleetingly she glanced up at me—there was a nice young half-moon in the sky and the visibility was good.

  “Then I’ll promise,” she said, “to go away before the seventh day. Now tell me about the knights who lived here ages ago. What made them go away?” Obediently I told her. And it’s really quite a tale. Those knights were be­sieged in The Watcher by the Moslems, after the crusaders had been defeated all down the line. So they were cut off, in the castle. Still, they stuck it out. When half of the garrison were casual­ties, the Moslems swarmed over the un­guarded portions of the walls and took the weapons from the survivors, who were just about able to stand on their feet, weakened by hunger.

  “Heroes,” murmured Jane, “and very perfect fools. I suppose they had that indescribable something we used to call chivalry.”

  “Well, they stuck to their guns,”

  “Yes. Listen. What’s that?” she asked.

  I had heard it for some time, that clink of a horse’s hoofs on stones. However, animals from the village were al­ways wandering under the castle walls, and I thought nothing of it at first. Not until a horse and rider appeared on the path.

  HE WAS a white man, without hat or coat, and he loomed large in the moonlight, being all in white, as he stopped to look at our car. Jane started violently, and little wonder, because he had all the make-up of a ghost. Even his bare head gleamed in the haze below us, when he dismounted and hitched his horse to a headlight of the car.

  “Hullo, child,” he called out.

  And Jane scrambled to her feet. “Why, Tug!” she said. “Why—Tug.”

  When we fed him by the fire a little later, I discovered Tug to be a disheveled six feet of American youth, in need of a haircut and with an old bruise on one cheek. He was tawny as a lion, and as sleepy-looking. Also he carried about as much baggage.

  IT DEVELOPED that he knew the Aymons. He had landed at Beirut the day after we did, had discovered from the Cook's man whither we had flitted, and had hired a horse to follow us. He must have come pretty fast to cover that distance in three days, and I won­dered how he had managed it without knowing any French or Arabic.

  “Why didn’t you get a car?” Arthur Aymon asked.

  “At two thousand piasters a day?” Tug swallowed part of an orange. “No, sir.”

  “How did you get from New York to Beirut?” demanded Jane.

  He named the American freighter that had brought him.

  “And I suppose,” she added, “you made that an excuse to quit whatever job you had.”

  Tug admitted reluctantly that he had got a job on the freighter.

  “Look here,” he said. “The French officers at Beirut are sore as blazes about you. They told me to find you and have y
ou all come back, quick. Their story is that some tribes are on the war path out here, and you all ought not to have come.”

  “What tribes?” I asked.

  Tug was delving into an opened can of pineapple. “Druses, they called ’em.” To Jane he added calmly, “I got your postcard.”

  He fished it out of a shirt pocket. It had a British India stamp on it, with a date of five months ago, and a picture of an elephant on the back. I couldn’t help seeing what she had written, it was so short: “It has been wonderful with­out you, Tug. I'll be in Beirut the first week in October.” There was nothing else.

  “But why did you come?” she asked quickly.

  Tug attacked his pineapple. I don’t suppose he had had much to eat for three days. He looked to be about twenty-three, a couple of years older than Jane, and for the rest he was the type of slow, husky college lad you find working as stevedore at home, or maybe joining the Marines—good jobs for such young­sters being few these days. And his appearance at The Watcher exasper­ated Jane, who seemed to have expected anything but that. She introduced him to me as “Tug Donovan, near-champion weight man. He can push the brass shot fifty feet any day. He’s a heavy­weight on the wrestling mat, too. . . . And—what other qualifications have you, Tug? Did your Irish ancestors go forth on crusade? Who ever heard of a Sir Donovan, Lord of Donovan Castle?”

  But by then I was too busy cursing myself to wonder about Tug Donovan, I took Aymon aside and explained to him that The Watcher was a dangerous place to be, just at present. On account of the Druses.

  The Druses, I told him, were desert Arabs. Fighters. During the dry season they had to migrate with their herds into the hills, to find water and grazing. I’d never heard of them coming so far toward the coast as this; probably a big drought last summer had driven them over this way.