'nit. CRIMINAL TURNED HERO.
AS the Bible justifies particular rejoicing over the recovery of the sheep that went astray, so we may be allowed to find something peculiarly satisfactory in the heroism of the criminal without seeming to encourage the dangerous doctrine that heroism is only another aspect of a criminal's dariag. Mr. Holmes, the well-known and able Police Court missionary, wrote in Blackzeocnre Magazine last June about the wonderful courage and endurance of a former English burglar who had settled near Aden and married an Arab wife. This man served as a spy in the Mesopotamian Campaign, entered the Turkish lines, was discovered and was tortured, being burnt about his body and losing an arm, but he afterwards escaped. His letters revealed a simple passion for the land of his birth. It seemed to him a matter of ordinary routine in the circumstances to do what he could for Britain. His one purpose was to " put in a bit" or " get in another day for England." The fact that he had taken root in Arabia made no difference. The exotic heat of Mocha had done nothing to parch his loving memories of the land whose laws he had once defied, but which he now desired to serve desperately.
The tenacity of the sense and pride of being British is of course nothing new. Literature has many examples of it. We think of the delightful passage in Eoflien in which Kinglake describes the character of Osman Effendi in Cairo. Osman was a Scotsman who had been taken prisoner by the Mohamir.edans when he was a drummer-boy in Fraser's force. Being given the customary choice between death and conversion to Islam, he had no notion of making a profession of Christianity a matter of self-respect and a fearless rebuke to insolence, like the hero of Sir Alfred Lyall's " Theology in Extremis." He therefore clung to life, became a respected Mohammedan, and as though to prove Ids sincerity took to himself two wives. Kinglake after telling this, adds :- " But the strangest feature in Osman's character was his inextinguish- able nationality. In vain they had brought him over the seas in early boyhood—in vain had he suffered captivity, conversion, ciroumeision- in vain they had passed him through fire in their Arabian campaigns— they could not cut away or burn out poor Osman's inborn love of all that was Scotch ; in vain mon called him Effendi—in vain he swept along in Eastern robes—in vain the rival wives adorned his hareem ; the joy of his heart still plainly lay in this, that he had three shelves of books, and that the books were thoroughbred Scotch—the Edinburgh this—the Edinburgh that—and, above all, I recollect he prided himself upon the ' Edinburgh Cabinet Library.' " Readers of Mr. Kipling's stories will also remember the engaging gibberish, sung by the children of an Indian hill tribe, which turned out to bo a dim memory of " The Woarin' o' the Green." The children descended from an Irish soldier. There is nothing sur- prising in the patriotism, as such, of Mr. Holmes's hero. The thing that is surprising is what he was willing to endure for it in his obscure way. Surprising also, as well as beautiful, is the man's intense devotion to his Arab wife and their children. He found with her, not the makeshift home of a " poor white," or the domestic bitterness experienced by the- French colonial soldier who took an Arab wife in Maupassant's story, but a paradise of happiness.
In the February number of Blachoofxre Magazine Mr. Holmes tells us more of Walter Greenway's adventures. They are so strange, and are recorded in the man's letters with what seems to be so much fancifulness and conscious artistry, that one is at first inclined to doubt their genuineness. Would a man who had disappeared into Arabia, and taken up with native modes of life in that backward and generally far from agreeable land really write in a manner that suggests the mind of Burton tinged with the learned playfulness of The Arabian Nigh,. ? But the story is true. The corroboration supplied by Mr. Holmes is all of the undesigned and therefore most powerful sort. Greenway's letters reached Mr. Holmes in pellets distributed among botanical specimens and had to be pieced together with enormous labour. Greenway writes of himself frequently in the third person as though he were an unconcerned speotator of his own deeds. He writes of " that Bedouin mute," for it was as an Arab pretending to be deaf and dumb that he penetrated the Turkish lines. Ho describes his return to his home after his escape :— " That Bedouin mute I told you about—he had a job to get home. The windows of heaven were open day and night. He toiled and waded, slipped and slurred, through mud-bottomed lagoons and miry sloughs. Dysentery returned. He struggled along on hand and knees till strength gave out, and ho was compelled to wriggle along like a snake, groaning in the morning, Would Allah it were even ! and at even, Would Allah it were morning ! ' from sorrow of heart. His pace, when ho crawled out of the region of perpetual rain, was the pace of a snail. -Now, frost by night and a scorching sun by day only varied his misery. Most men would have prayed to die, but not ho. Soft, beautiful brown eyes, blazing with love, peered beseechingly into his own through all. lie pressed on, though it cost him excruciating torture. He was determined to kiss again the sweet brown face those eyes were set in. He would feel once more the rapture of those soft delicious cheeks laid upon his own. The music' of children's voices stirred him to tears. Fancy must be clothed in reality. He would not die till once again those darling heads had nestled their curls upon his breast, and once again those sweetest lips had breathed into his ears the magio word father."
At Basra he fell in with his father-in-law (" an Arab with an English heart "), and was conveyed to Mocha in the father-in-law's ship. As he approached his home, images of which had sustained him through everything, ho saw nothing but a heap of ruins. His all had been destroyed by marauding Turks. Weak from dysentery, wounds, burnings, and other sufferings, he fell senseless. When he recovered he found himself in his wife's arms. She had watched unceasingly by the ruins for his return. Tho children were there too :— " And praise be to Allah for His gift of little children Surely their laughter and their song are His own charms for giving back to a fainting man the youth and buoyancy which else were clean gone from him I lie wakes from a doze : the dark-eyed little Iza stands beside his couch with folded hands and grave face till she sees him smile. Then she stoops, presses a kiss upon his lips, and, mindful of a mother's counsel, waves a hand and steps lightly away. The lingering incense of her breath comforts him. His gladness grows the greater for the swell of joy which rises from sister and brother at Iza's good tidings of father's recovery. In a little while he is conscious of another kitten's presence. The stately Victoria has arrived with stealthy step, bent upon oonfirming with her fawn-like eyes the news her sister has brought. ' Kiss me, my love,' he beseeches. She touches his own with lips of bewitching sweetness, strokes his cheeks lovingly, and then, with all the authority conferred by six years' oxperienoe of life, gods out to gravely announce that father is nearly better."
There is a touch of Byron's lyrical delight in the sensations of life in all this.
Let us summarize the following narrative. Greenway visits Aden one day and there climbs a water-pipe on a high building to rescue a me-wing kitten. As the one-armed adventurer descends among the breathless crowd he overhears some Germans speak dis- paragingly of his folly. Ho tracks them and overhears other things of more importance. They have a store of "clocks" (which are really infernal machines) for placing in British trading vessels. He acts as burglar once more, and at night carries off the clocks as well as a German officer's uniform. He determines to use the clocks to blow up the arsenal at Baghdad, the existence of which ho had also heard mentioned. He went to the Persian Gulf and there borrowed a motor-boat which his father-in-law had bought from an Englishman before tho war. From Basra his objective was three hundred miles away up the Tigris. He completed the dangerous journey with his clocks to a spot near Baghdad :— " Marching to the Turkish colonel in charge, he was received with true Oriental courtesy, but little real favour. A few German junior officers who hung about enabled him to demonstrate his importance. They were suspicious at first. It was fortunate he remembered German tastes and had brought strong drink with him. By nightfall he was master there. None, he knew, would dare to disobey-certain directions be gave for the safe-keeping of his additions to the stores. Be was not disappointed when he paid a visit of inspection at eight o'clock. The day had passed pleasantly. His clocks were wound up and going beautifully, and the guard slept off their liquor. He betook himself to Baghdad for an hour or two, as he said, on urgent business. About midnight the arsenal blew up with a tremendous roar which shook the earth, whilst flames ascended hundreds of yards to illuminate an inky sky."
The rest of the letters tell of Greenway, at his father-in-law's home at Mocha, slowly dying of dysentery. It is known that he died. And the faithful Arab wife has disappeared, perhaps never to be traced. The reader may say, as we felt inclined to say at 'first. that it is all too akange to be Mt. But let ua get to the corroboration. There is a letter to Mr. Holmes from a doctor at the mission hospital where Greenway died :—
" A fortnight yesterday an Arab woman brought her husband, as Englishman. to this hospital. He was suffering from acute dyeen#17. from which he died en August 23. . . . He had lost an arm recently, and his body was badly scarred by burnings. His wife, whose English is very imperfect, made us understand that he had served for some twelve months with the British Forces in Mesopotamia. She had a letter which you had written to her husband, but she showed it me so jealously that I was unable to make much of it. It was evident the poor creature prized it too highly to let it leave her hands. As far as I could make out, it told of toys or dolls sent out for their children, and it might include a reference to a necklace or apron, or ribbons— all of which she wore, and kept perpetually fingering, with great pride and gratitude, whilst she allowed me to glance at the letter. No doubt, though, the intended me to thank you for gifts to the children if not for tho things she kept fingering. I am dreadfully sorry for the little woman—very pretty and refined for an Arab. She was. devoted to her husband—she must have been—for she carried him somehow, since he was fax too weak to walk, or to it on horseback (at best she must have held him on a horse) for more than seventy miles. She was the picture of despair when he died, and for eighteen hours she mourned at his grave. It quite affected and saddened us all to see hor grief. A few hours ago her father, an Arab sheikh, who seems to have conveyed the children to his own home, came and took her away. She thanked us with tears for what wo had done fttIhmerr husband—little enough—then ran to the graveyard, and her
had a hard task to coax her away."
Another letter is corroboration of the trip up the Tigris in the motor-boat. The writer says that he saw Greenway in Bedouin dress in a motor-boat. Asked what this strange conjunction of dress and occupation meant, Greenway answered that he was trading. Since then a missionary friend at the request of Mr. Holmes visited Mocha to try to trace the Arab wife. Ho found only the ruined home, which ho was told had been destroyed by Turks—another corroboration. Mr. Holmes has little hope of ever hearing again of this woman who figures beautifully in these written fragments. Ho adds :-
" But Walter has painted a picture of her which will last. He was a strange person, a hero if ever man deserved the term—how far a hero because of the wife he so fortunately met it would be difficult to estimate. That he was a good man at last, for all his early faults, I have no difficulty in understanding through her of whom he was so justly proud, and the children also so lovingly entwined about his heart."
Blackwood's Magazine never fails us in stories of adventure, but it and Mr. Holmes have now given us one of the best on record. The much-abused word " romantic " may be applied to it without shame or falseness.
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