SCENE OUTSIDE SHEPHEARD’S HOTEL, CAIRO: TOMMY ATKINS ABOUT TO QUIT EGYPT.
First, leaping in a frantic dance such as one sees here at weddings and religious festivals, came some score of sayces, their lawn sleeves flaunting as they waved their arms, and their gold-broidered waistcoats gleaming bravely in the moonlight. Their usual cry of ‘Shmarlek, Gemeelek,’ was interrupted now by hoarse shouts of ‘Inglis, Inglis, long live the Inglis!’—shouts which the crowd readily took up. Immediately behind them paced a tall, half-naked negro, who—such is the length to which enthusiasm will carry these fanatics—held outstretched before him (a sacrifice to friendship), his brawny right arm transfixed by a long knife, from whose blade his blood dripped freely to the ground. A carriage followed—an ordinary hack victoria, captured, doubtless, close by—round which a frenzied mob surged, yelling and gesticulating madly. There was no driver on the carriage. The box-seat was occupied by a mandolin player and a harpist, whose fingers were very busy, though of their music not one note could be heard. In the victoria were the objects of the demonstration, two English soldiers, one of whom, while preserving his good temper, was struggling manfully though vainly against a dozen pair of hands that held him in his place, and loudly declaring in words as unavailing as they were forcible that he was due in barracks at midnight and could not ‘stay fooling’ any later. His protest was disregarded, and his comrade, who had apparently succumbed to the hospitality of a burly Greek who faced the pair, on the Strapontin, nursing a huge demijohn of some pernicious liquor, gave him no help, expressing neither approval nor condemnation of the proceedings, and, indeed, but for the tender ministrations of an old äalem in a saffron robe, who stood on the step beside him, he would probably have fallen out into the road.
The motley carnival passed slowly into the night; the shouts softened in the distance and then died away; but the crowd, silent again, remained staring vacantly at the hotel windows. As I turned from the balcony railings a quiet native spectator on the pavement beneath me looked up and spoke in Arabic: ‘Ah, Hawaga,’ he said, ‘Toufik Pasha has gone; Allah rest him! Now the English are going—evil days are coming.’
Throughout Sunday night and during the whole of yesterday the great crowd filled the streets. Even the announcement made yesterday afternoon that, although the English soldiers were called suddenly away, their Indian brothers-in-arms would replace them, failed to satisfy the public mind, or to remove the painful impression it had received. In some vague way the feeling of the native populace was that, though the Indian troops might be soldiers of England’s Queen, they were not the English they had known; the English who wore yellow clothes, and blue goggles, and hats with towels on them, and who paid so well for donkey hire, and bought so freely in the bazaars, and were so easily persuaded to accept bits of imported blue glass as valuable turquoises, ‘and wonderfully cheap.’
With very few exceptions all British troops were confined to barracks yesterday—not so much on account of their preparations for departure, for ever since the reinforcement of the garrison the commanders of regiments have been held in readiness to entrain in two hours after receipt of orders—but in order to avoid the repetition, on probably a very large scale, of Sunday night’s demonstrations. The natives, therefore, were fain to be content with standing in thousands outside the barrack-yard gates gazing at the busy scene within, while from time to time some English-speaking donkey-boy would accost the impassive sentries on behalf of himself and friends with some such speech as, ‘You going, Missa Soja, Arab prenty solly.’
Thanks to the energy and foresight of the Commander-in-Chief in carefully policing the whole length of the canal with troops from Suez to Port Said to prevent any such apt accident as the sinking of a dredger in a narrow part, the transports suffered no delay. Each ship—there were eight (chartered vessels of the P. and O., British India and Orient Lines)—on reaching Suez landed the troops she had brought from Bombay and passed on into the Canal, employing the time of her passage in cleaning up for the reception of the English regiments at Alexandria. The Indian brigades are for the moment encamped on the Sweet Water Canal, pending dispatch to their several stations.
The British troops were entrained to-day at noon. Two Soudanese and one Egyptian regiment lined the entry to the railway station as a guard of honour. The young Khedive himself, accompanied by his brother, Mehemet Ali Bey, and followed by Zulfikar Pasha and many of the court functionaries, drove to the station to bid them farewell, and arriving a few moments before the first of the departing regiments, caused his carriage to be so placed that the men must march past it. As each regiment passed him, His Highness, who had alighted and stood beside the victoria, saluted, and said repeatedly ‘Good-bye, gentlemen,’ in English. To entrain the troops took, of course, some little time, and the —— remained a while in the small square outside the station while their comrades were taking their places in the coaches. His Highness, who looked very grave and had spoken but briefly with Sir Evelyn Baring and other English gentlemen present, had entered his carriage, and the sayces had leapt to their places before it, when suddenly a voice shouted, ‘Three cheers for Abbas Pasha.’ Who the enthusiast was I do not care to guess; but the cry was taken up eagerly. Despite discipline, despite etiquette, against propriety even though it was, a mighty cheer burst from the waiting troops round the royal carriage, and was echoed from within the station with redoubled volume.
The Khedive seemed for a moment overcome. Then he drove quickly away. The farewell of the native populace to the troops as they marched through the streets was pathetic in its earnestness. By a purely spontaneous motion all Cairo had gathered wherever it could to wish the Englishmen ‘God go with you.’ The passage of the regiments was marked by innumerable incidents showing the affection in which the men were held and the genuine distress of the people at their loss. A typical instance of this native enthusiasm is worth recording. In the —— regiment—I purposely avoid naming it—for some time quartered in the Citadel, is a turbulent giant known as ‘Mad Donald’—a long service man, greatly liked, known for gallantry in the field, and steady enough on parade; but who has twice lost his stripes for drunkenness. For he is not content to be passively drunk, but must also be violent. Under the influence of alcohol destruction becomes his ruling passion. In his periodical outbursts Donald has been a terror to the many street merchants whose displays of fragile wares cumber the Er Rumeyleh Square, at the head of the Mooskee. He has overturned their tables, made wholesale havoc of their goods, and fought the crowd with the trestles of the spoiled. His chief enemy and victim has been an old dealer in gaudy crockery and glass ornaments, whose entire stock he has several times reduced to shivers, and then danced upon the wreck, defying the police. Yet to-day as the —— marched by, with stalwart Donald leading man of his company, this old man dragged his table forward, crying, ‘Ya, Donal; ya, Donal; break something for luck’—and was quite distressed at the tall soldier’s smiling disregard.
When the last train had steamed out of the station the immense concourse of people who, on either side of the line, had for an hour yelled farewells, fell once more to silently pacing the streets, where they still remain at this late hour. I have been for long among them and am forced to say that what was indicated to me on Sunday night by one man is now the prevailing sentiment of the multitude, ‘The English have gone—the Effendina will go soon—evil days are coming.’