Be allowed
to furnish Sir Frederick GRATIS with all the means at his
disposal for a tour through the Holy Land. The liberal and
highly complimentary offer was gratefully acknowledged, but
at once emphatically declined. The old soldier, (at least,
this was my guess,) brave in all else, had not the courage to
face the tourists' profanation of such sacred scenes.
Dr. Bird told me a nice story, a pendant to this, of Mr.
Thomas Cook's liberality. One day, before the Gordon
Expedition, which was then in the air, Dr. Bird was smoking
his cigarette on the terrace in front of Shepherd's Hotel, in
company with four or five other men, strangers to him and to
one another. A discussion arose as to the best means of
relieving Gordon. Each had his own favourite general.
Presently the doctor exclaimed: 'Why don't they put the
thing into the hands of Cook? I'll be bound to say he would
undertake it, and do the job better than anyone else.'
'Do you know Cook, sir?' asked one of the smokers who had
hitherto been silent.
'No, I never saw him, but everybody knows he has a genius for
organisation; and I don't believe there is a general in the
British Army to match him.'
When the company broke up, the silent stranger asked the
doctor his name and address, and introduced himself as Thomas
Cook. The following winter Dr. Bird received a letter
enclosing tickets for himself and Miss Bird for a trip to
Egypt and back, free of expense, 'in return for his good
opinion and good wishes.'
After my General's departure, and a month up the Nile, I -
already disillusioned, alas! - rode through Syria, following
the beaten track from Jerusalem to Damascus. On my way from
Alexandria to Jaffa I had the good fortune to make the
acquaintance of an agreeable fellow-traveller, Mr. Henry
Lopes, afterwards member for Northampton, also bound for
Palestine. We went to Constantinople and to the Crimea
together, then through Greece, and only parted at Charing
Cross.
It was easy to understand Sir Frederick Stephenson's
(supposed) unwillingness to visit Jerusalem. It was probably
far from being what it is now, or even what it was when
Pierre Loti saw it, for there was no railway from Jaffa in
our time. Still, what Loti pathetically describes as 'une
banalite de banlieue parisienne,' was even then too painfully
casting its vulgar shadows before it. And it was rather with
the forlorn eyes of the sentimental Frenchman than with the
veneration of Dean Stanley, that we wandered about the ever-
sacred Aceldama of mortally wounded and dying Christianity.
One dares not, one could never, speak irreverently of
Jerusalem. One cannot think heartlessly of a disappointed
love.
