Complete weird tales of.., p.1289
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1289
“I’m not afraid,” said young Leeds, rather pallid, but straightening up in his chair.
Our host laughed; then his face changed, and he raised his eyes to Shannon:
“Where is Harrod?” he asked slowly.
“At Bar Harbor,” replied Shannon, “I believe.”
“I thought so. And — remember one thing — there is a certain law which governs the validity of a check drawn to a man’s order when that check has been signed by a man no longer living. But, Shannon, the intention is the important thing in such a matter.”
“What, exactly, do you mean?” asked Shannon, astonished.
But our host had already turned to Escourt: “Captain,” he said, “you sail — when?”
“I have no sailing orders,” laughed Escourt.
“Not yet?” Our host looked quietly at the young officer. “Well, it isn’t the length of a voyage that counts, Escourt — nor the size of the troopship. No; you will anchor, some day, in a smaller craft than you started in, in the Port of the Golden Pool.”
Escourt, still smiling, waited; but our host sat silent, head bent, one hand on the edge of the tablecloth.
“Not one of you,” he said, without raising his eyes, “not one among you but who shall come face to face with what you still consider miracles.... Even Hildreth, yonder” — Hildreth jumped— “even Hildreth shall learn from the Swastika.”
“Swa — swat? What — what?” stammered Hildreth.
“Nothing to alarm you,” smiled the other; then again the swift shadow fell across his face.
“Not one man among you who has not proven his friendship for me,” he said, looking up and around. And to me he added: “You must prove it still further by telling fearlessly to the world what there will be to tell after I have gone, and after my words have been proven — the words I have spoken here to-night — and which no one among you understands.... But you all will understand them. And when the last man among you has understood” — turning again to me—” you must bear witness to the world, bear witness in printed page and over your own signature. Do you promise?”
“Yes,” I said.
Then very quietly he looked around the table, and leaned forward, regarding each man in turn.
“I think,” he said, “that it is time you understood exactly the facts about which you have forborne to question me. And I mean to tell you before we part; I mean to tell you the truth concerning Westover and — all that happened.... And when you know these facts, then you may begin to surmise why I went to Trebizond, why I remain, and — and — what miracle of happiness I have found there — for the third time reincarnated.”
He leaned back in his chair; his clear eyes became fixed and dreamy. Then he began to speak, in a low voice, as though to himself:
* * * * *
Time, and the funeral of Time, alas! — and the Old Year’s passing-bell! Whistles from city and river, deep horns sounding from the foggy docks; and under my window a voice and a song — ah! that young voice in the street below calling me through the falling snow!
If it be true that Time makes all hurts well, I do not know; and “a thousand years in Thy sight is but as yesterday when it is passed, and as a watch in the night”; a thousand years! And this also is true; the flames of love make hot the furnace of Abaddon.
We were in the gallery as usual, Geraldine and I — the gallery where the carpets of the East were hung along the shadowy walls. For lately it was my pleasure to acquire rare rugs, and it was my profession to furnish expert opinion upon the age and origin of Oriental carpets, and to read and interpret the histories of forgotten emperors and the mysteries of long-forgotten gods from the colors and intricate flowery labyrinths tied in silk or wool to the warps of some dead sultan’s lustrous tapestry.
Here in the long sky gallery hung my own rugs against the arabesque incrusted-ivory panels — Tabriz, Shiraz, Sehna, and Saruk — a somber blaze of color shot with fire — all rare, some priceless; Turkish Kulah, softly silky as a golden lion’s hide, Persian Sehna, shimmering with rose and violet lights, fiercely brilliant rugs from Sarnarkand, superbly flowered, secreting deep in every floral thicket traceries of the ancient Mongol conqueror; Feraghans glowing like jewel-sewn velvets set with the Herati and the lotus — symbols of Egypt or of China, as you please to interpret the oldest pattern in the world.
Far in the gallery’s amber-tinted gloom the red of Ispahan dominated, subduing fiery vistas to smoldering harmony through which, like a vast sapphire set in opals, glimmered the superb lost Persian blue.
There was one other rug, an Eighur, the famous so-called “Babilu,” or “Carpet of Belshazzar”; but it hung alone in imperial magnificence behind the locked doors of a marble room, which it seemed to fill with a soft luster of its own, radiating from the mystic “Tree of Heaven” woven in its center.
We were, as I say, in this gallery; Geraldine poring over an illuminated volume on cuneiform inscriptions, I, with pad and pencil, idly shifting and reshifting the Kufic key to the ancient cipher, which always left me stranded where I had begun with the stately repetition:
“King of Kings —
King of Kings —
King of Kings—”
As for Westover, my cousin, he was, as usual, in the laboratory fussing with his venomous extracts — an occupation which, to my dismay, he had taken up within the year, working, as he explained, on the theory that every poison has its antidote. Yet it seemed to me that he was more anxious to invent some new and subtle toxic than to devise the remedy.
From where I sat I could not see him, but the crystalline tinkle of his glass retorts and bottles distracted my attention from the penciled calculations. Without moving my head, I glanced across the room at Geraldine. She looked up immediately, raising her level eyebrows in mute inquiry as though I had moved or spoken; then, realizing that I had not, she bent above the book once more, the warm color stealing to her cheeks.
Within the year a wordless intimacy had grown up between us; we never understood it, never acknowledged it, and at times it disconcerted us.
I sat silent, tracing with my pencil series after series of futile Kufic combinations with the cuneiforms, but ever the first turn of the ancient key creaked in my ears,
“King of Kings —
King of Kings—”
until the triverbal reiteration wore on my nerves.
Geraldine leaned back abruptly, closing her book.
“I’m tired and nervous,” she said. “You may wear out your eyes and temper if you choose — and you’re doing the latter, for I’m as restless as an eel. Besides, I’m lonely, and I’m going back to the East — if you’ll come, too.”
I laughed, understanding what she meant by the “East.”
“Will you come with me?” she insisted.
“Yes,” I said, “whenever you are ready.”
She sprang to her feet, scattering the illuminated pages over the floor, and stood an instant facing me, tall, dark-eyed, smiling, brushing back the lustrous hair from her cheeks.
“Where is Jim?” she asked — although we both knew.
“In the laboratory,” I replied mechanically.
Still busy with her hair, she regarded me dreamily out of those dark, sweet eyes of hers.
“It would be wonderful,” she mused, “if Jim should find an antidote to death; but I wish it were not necessary to kill so many little helpless creatures. Did you hear that pitiful sound in there yesterday? Was it something he was killing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And after a silence: “What are you going to do?”
She shook her head vaguely and leaned against the window, looking out into the rain.
“Shall we go back to our inscriptions?” I suggested.
She shook her head again. After a while she turned away from the window, stifling a dainty yawn, and stretched out, languidly straightening up to the full height of her young body.
“I feel stupid,” she said; “I’m tired of cryptograms and the pages of dusty books. I’m tired of the rain, too. The languor of April is in me. I’m homesick for lands I never knew. So come back to the East with me, Dick.”
She held out her hand to me with a confident little smile; and knowing what she meant, I acquiesced in her caprice, and conducted her solemnly to the piano, leaving her before it.
She stood there for a space, musing, her lovely head bent; then, still standing, she struck a sequence of chords — chords pulsating with color; and through them flashed strange little trills like threads of tinsel.
“This is an Eighur carpet I am dreaming of,” she murmured, as the music swelled, glowing as tints and hues glow in the old dyes of the East.
Wave on wave of color seemed to spread from the keys under her fingers; she looked back at me over her shoulder with a warning nod.
“I shall begin to weave very soon. Khiounnou horsemen may appear and frighten me for a moment — but I shall finish. Listen! I am at the loom.”
Seating herself, she developed out of the flowing, somber harmony a monotonous minor theme, suddenly checked by a distant rattle like the clatter of nomad lances on painted stirrups; then she picked up the thread of the melody again, dropped it, breathless for a moment’s quivering silence, resumed it, twisting it into delicate arabesques, threading it across the dull, rich harmonies, at first slowly, then faster, faster, swift as the flying fingers of a nomad maid tying fretted silver in a Ghiordes knot. The whirring tempo was the cadence of the loom; soft feathery notes flew like carded wool; thicker, duller, softer grew the fabric, dense, silky, heavily lustrous.
Suddenly she broke the thread off short, the whole fabric falling with a muffled shock.
“Why did you do that?” I demanded wrathfully.
“The rug is woven; the weaver is dead,” she said.
“Oh, go on, Geraldine,” I insisted; “don’t stop half way in a thing like that. It’s the East — it’s the real East, I tell you. How you do it — you who have never seen the East — Heaven only knows!”
“U Allah Aalem,” she murmured;”it’s in me.” Then she looked back at me, laughing. “Centuries ago you and I heard that music along the Arax — or I sang it among the Tcherkess roses for you, perhaps — perhaps in the gardens of Trebizond.”
“That might explain it,” I said gravely. Lately she had found pleasure in a fancy that she and I had lived together in the East, centuries since, and that we were soon to return forever.
“You and I,” she mused, touching the keys lightly— “and Jim, of course,” she added.
“Of course,” I said.
She dropped her head, striking chord on chord with nervous precision; and hanging in the wake of every ringing harmony a frail melody floated like the Chinese cloud band in a Kirman tapestry.
“What’s that air?” I asked, fascinated.
“I don’t know; it sounds pagan, doesn’t it? — like the wicked beauty of Babylon. Do you hear how it beats on and on like the rhythm of naked feet — little, delicate, naked feet ablaze with gems — the feet of Herodiade perhaps — thud — thud — tching! — don’t you hear them, Dick? And now listen to those silky, flowery trills! They’re Asiatic; ancient Cathay is awaking — camel bells in the hazar of the Golden Emperor! Hark! — now you hear trumpets, don’t you? Well, of course that must be the Mongols marching with the Prince of the Vanguard. Hark! How savagely the brutal Afghan theme breaks in with its fierce trampling and the staccato echo of Tekke drums! It’s frightening me out of the East. I think we had better come home, Dick,” she added, mischievously running into the latest popular street song.
“How on earth could you do that!” I exclaimed wrathfully. “You’re a futile mixture of feather brain and genius!”
But where was the genius hidden under that laughing and exquisite mask confronting me? Suddenly the delicate mask became grave.
“Let me laugh when I can, Dick,” she said. “It is not often I laugh.”
I was silent.
“Of course you may be horrid if you choose,” she observed with a shrug, running a brilliantly inane series of trills from end to end of the keyboard. “But it’s no use scolding, for I won’t study, I won’t compose, I won’t ‘try to do something,’ and I won’t be serious. I’m shallow, I’m frivolous, I’ve the soul of a Trebizond dancing girl, and I like it. Now what are you going to do?”
“I’m going out,” I said ungraciously.
“Oh — alone?”
“Not if you’ll come. It’s stopped raining. Will you come? Oh, get your hat, Geraldine, and stop that torment of idiotic trills!”
“If Jim doesn’t mind, I think I’ll go and sit in the laboratory with him,” she observed carelessly. I looked at her without comment.
“I have a curious idea,” she continued, “that he might like to have me around to-day while he is working.”
I stared at her, but there was no bitterness in her tranquil smile as she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the polished rosewood case.
“So I won’t go with you, Dick,” she said slowly. One of those intervals of restless silence, which within the year we had learned to dread, menaced us now. Mute, motionless, I watched the soft color deepening in her face, then, impatient, roused myself and walked over to the laboratory. Westover looked up as I pushed aside the screen.
“Will you drive with us?” I asked. “The sun’s out.”
He declined, peering at me through his glass mask.
“Come on, Jim,” I urged. “You’ve inhaled enough poison for one day. Take off your mask and wash your hands and drive us out to High Bridge. I’ll telephone to the stable if you say the word, and they’ll hook up the new four. Is it a go?”
“No,” he said coldly, and turned on his heel, lifting a test tube to the light.
He was more taciturn and a trifle uglier than usual. I watched him for a moment warming the test tube over a burner, then without further parley replaced the screen, closed the double glass doors, and walked back to Geraldine.
“Doesn’t Jim care to come?” she asked.
I said that her husband appeared to be absorbed in his work.
“Very well,” she said, with airy composure; “trot along, Dicky — and if you see a bunch of jonquils growing on Fifth Avenue, you may pick them for me — or for that pretty girl you met at Lakewood—”
“I’ll send you a bunch as big as a bushel.”
“A bushel of flowers is as compromising as a declaration,” she said. “Send them to her.”
“There’s only one way to settle it,” I said; “I’ll send them to the loveliest girl in the world — shall I?”
She assented, laughing uncertainly.
“I think I’ll pay Jim a little call,” she said, rising from the piano and walking slowly toward the laboratory.
A few moments later as I passed down the broad stairway I heard Westover’s penetrating voice: “Let that glass tube alone, Geraldine! Why the devil can’t you keep your hands off things when you come in here?”
I lingered for a while in the hallway, thinking that she might change her mind and come down, for she had left the laboratory to her husband, and I heard her moving about in her own apartment. She did not come, and after a little while I left the house, a sense of apprehension depressing me.
The asphalt of Fifth Avenue was still wet with the first warm rain of April, but the sun glittered on window and pavement and flashed along the polished panels of carriages crowding the avenue from curb to curb. A breath of spring had set the sparrows chattering and chirping; the movement of the throng, the bright gowns, the fresh faces of young girls, and the endless façades of glass reflecting it — all were pleasant to me, a man sensitive to impressions.
And so in the pale sunshine I sauntered on through the throng, now idling curiously by some shop window whither a display of jewels or curios attracted me, now strolling on again content with the soft color in sky and sunlight.
I found a florist whose shop windows were filled with thickets of fragrant, fragile spring flowers; and every little scented blossom that I touched, choosing the freshest, nodded to the voiceless cadence of a name repeated — and: “Geraldine! Geraldine!” they nodded, so confidently, so sweetly, that what was I to do but send them to her?
And so I sauntered on again, threading the throng, half-minded to turn back, yet ever tempted on by idleness, until above me the twin spires of the cathedral glimmered, all silvered in the shimmering blue.
Halting, undecided, I presently became aware of an old man, his withered hands crossed before him, standing quite patiently under the cathedral terrace. Before him on the sidewalk rested a basket draped with a brilliant rug or two and heaped with tawdry rubbish — scarlet fezzes, slippers of spangled leather, tasseled charms of gilt, flimsy striped fabrics — all the worthless flummery known as “Oriental” to the good peoples of the West.
Few stopped to look; no one bought. As I passed him his dimmed gaze met mine; all the wistfulness of the very poor, all the mystery of the very, very old, was in his eyes. Moved by impulse, perhaps, I spoke to him in a low voice, using the Turkish language.
A dull animation came into his misty eyes.
“Allahou Ekber,” he muttered, in a trembling voice; “it is sweet to hear your words, my son.”
“Mussulman,” I said, “who are you who recite the Tekbir here under the spires of a Roman church?”
“Is there harm in bearing witness to the glory of God here under the minarets of your cathedral?” he asked humbly.
“Spire and minaret are one to Him,” I said. “Who are you, Mussulman?”
