The Mating of the Blades/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
Striking a simon-pure romantic note, showing, as it does, or rather tries to do, that a blade can have a soul. Also giving another glimpse of the charming young Oriental princess whom the reader has doubtless forgotten by this time.
Years later, when The Honorable Hector Wade spoke of that period of his eventful life, he would add, by way of ruminating, psychological commentary, that the home-spun self-possession in which he considered Ali Yusuf Khan's offer was really the strangest part of the whole incident.
“You musn't forget," he would add, “that I carried a chip on my shoulder and was as quick to smell offense as a mouse smells cheese. The whole sordid, miserable affair was only a few days old, and I hadn't been in London more than seven or eight hours. But you know how it is, how you don't meet people when you want to meet them, and how they seem to pop out of the nowhere when you want to avoid them. There was—what was her name? Oh, yes, Victoria de Bunsen, girl I used to dance with, and, of course, I ran into Vic at Waterloo Station. She was with Jamie Black of the Highland Light Infantry, a sort of second cousin of mine, and both cut me dead, sent me to Coventry, greeted me with an emphatic chorus of unfeigned, contemptuous silence.
“And, on the train up from Sussex, I had seen a copy of Reynolds' Weekly. They had stuck my picture on the front page with a border all round of cards and dice and diaphanously dressed chorus girls and a jolly old headline about 'Younger Son of Earl of Dealle Implicated in Disgraceful Card Scandal.' I fancy you can imagine the rest. So I was rather thin-skinned. Noli me tangere—how's that for Latin? Everything touched me on the raw, and I was more afraid of people's pity than of their contempt. You can sidestep contempt by shutting up. But pity … Why, it leaves you helpless.
“And then Ali Yusuf Khan's offer. As much money as I wanted, and yet it did not seem like charity. It seemed perfectly proper, and sort of on the cards, you see, preordained. Kismet, and all that, that at a moment's notice, at midnight, a few doors from Drury Lane, a mysterious incarnation out of the Arabian Nights whom I had never seen before should offer to lend me an exorbitant sum on a dusty old sword whose blade and hilt was inlaid with a blurred gold pattern. Rum, don't you think?”
“As much as you want, saheb,” repeated the old man. “It is for you to say.”
Hector was about to suggest fifty pounds, the amount that had dropped from his pocket, when he had a sudden revulsion of feeling. He took the blade from the other's hand.
“No!” he said, steadfastly. “Come what may, I shall not part with this. It would be like parting with …” he slurred and stopped; blushed slightly.
“Like parting with a piece of your soul?” the Asian gently suggested.
Hector inclined his head.
“Yes,” he said. “It would be like giving up something that I have waited for … through the centuries …”
He stood there, staring into the fretwork of delicate purple and heliotrope shadows that cloaked the room like a silken veil.
In the corner was a pedestal of ebony and nacre which supported a great Persian incense bowl. Heavy smoke clouds floated and twisted about like a vaporous, gigantic furnace of opal colors wreathing up to the ceiling, with a hot, honey-sweet scent of lilies and lotus buds and sandalwood, and it seemed to Hector as if he were on the borderland of dim, half-forgotten things, on the frontier of a new life—new, yet, somehow, subconsciously remembered—which was remote, not in years nor in distance, but in codified, standardized principles of civilization, from the life, the personal experiences, the very physical and psychical reactions he had known heretofore; as if the ancient blade that was throbbing in his hand were a guidon pointing the way to a Life of To-morrow beside which his Life of Yesterday and To-day faded to a wretched, meaningless dream.
It was like a rush of giant splendor that threatened to overwhelm his mind, his sober, prosy, saving British commonsense and prejudices. … And then, out of the trooping shadows where Ali Yusuf Khan had squatted down on a heap of pillows, came the words, in gentle, purring Persian:
“Take the money, saheb, and keep the blade. No, no, no!” as Hector, recalled to earth, was about to flare up. “You must forget your petty, withering pride. Go where your heart calls you. Follow the feet of your soul … out there! to Asia!”
And he rose, crossed the shop, drew up the window blind with an impatient gesture, and pointed to where already the moon was growing fainter and fainter and paling into the drab cosmos of the London morning and where, low in the eastern heaven, between the ragged cleft of Drury Lane, the sun was rising like a ball of somber, crumpled rose-pink.
Then, as if the sordid glimpse of London had broken the spell, he added:
“I am not altogether unselfish. You see, saheb, I am an Asian, and Asia is old and worn and tired. It needs fresh, strong blood. It needs men like yourself. We do not need the sahebs who simply go there to make money and who return to their own country to spend it. We need men who are willing to be one with us—unhappy men to whom their own country denies a chance. Here! Call it a loan!”
He drew a purse filled with sovereigns from the voluminous folds of his waist shawl and gave it to Hector, who weighed it in his palm and laughed, rather disagreeably.
“All right,” he said. “I agree to the bargain. But I give you fair warning you'll lose by it. I thought of going to India even before I read your advertisement. But—sober second thoughts …” he shrugged his shoulders. “It's really useless, you know. India is only an imperial suburb after all. It's just around the corner from Belgravia and Bond Street and Marlborough House. I—oh—I am mixed up in a scandal over here, and every scandal that reeks in the London Westend stinks to heaven by the time it reaches Calcutta and some deputy assistant commissioner's mother-in-law's ear—and tongue. I have not the fluttering ghost of a chance in India.”
“India is not the only land East of Suez,” the other rejoined gently.
“I know. But it is the only part of Asia where I would fit in. I was born there, and my people have lived for generations between the Himalayas and Cape Comorin. I know all sorts of people there, in the army, the civil service, and, of course, they'll give me the cold shoulder as their brethren do in England—not that I can blame them for it. But what's the use? I have half a mind to go West, to Canada, instead of East, and so …”
He was about to toss the purse on the low taboret, when Ali Yusuf Khan stopped him with a stiff, wooden gesture and a show of flaming passion.
“I thought you were a gentleman—an English gentleman!”
“I am!” quickly, boyishly.
“Then live up to your bargain. You took the money. Now you must go.”
“But don't you understand? I don't want to bore you with the whole, long, mean story of the particular scandal in which I am mixed up. Wouldn't interest you anyway. Only—I tell you I haven't a chance over there.”
“You have something else!”
“What?”
“The blade!” Ali Yusuf Khan's words came out with a tremendous, cold enthusiasm. “The blade!” he repeated, in a hushed, flat voice.
He picked the weapon up and pressed it to his lips.
“The blade will never fail you, saheb,” he went on, “though men will and women may. Its soul is old—old and wise and strong and just a little cruel—and loyal, for it came out of Asia. The rest … man and woman—your friends? What do they matter? For you know the ancient Persian saying: 'Let none confide in the sea, nor in whatever has horns or claws, or who carries deadly weapons; neither in a king, nor in a woman, nor in a priest.' But this blade you can trust!”
“Hm … it has played me one dirty trick already,” Hector smiled grimly, reminiscently. “It cut through my pocket and lost me my money.”
The other, too, smiled.
“Not the blade, saheb, but the sheath. The sheath is old and tired, like Asia, like my own country. And so we will give the sword a new house in which to throb and pulse and weave mighty spells.”
For several minutes he rummaged in a carved sandalwood box, finally drawing out a jewel-studded shagreen scabbard into which, slowly, carefully, with his back to his visitor, he fitted the weapon.
“Here, saheb. Never draw the blade in sport, nor in a wrong cause. But trust it. It will speak to you when man fails you—or Fate!”
He said it with a certain note of finality; and Hector muttered clumsy words of thanks and walked out into the gray, haggard London morning.
The great beast of a city was already stirring its steel-and-concrete limbs with the dull rubbing of tackle and rope and crate, the symphony of more tongues than Babel ever knew of. Trucks and buses rumbled past. Trolley cars shot in all directions, clanking and shrieking. Trumpeting automobiles whirred by with gleaming brasses. An odor rose from the pavement as of sweat and blood and singed shoe leather—the odor of hectic, neurotic, ever hustling Europe—
And, over to the southeast, were the Docks—the wash and heave of the outer sea—India—Asia …
Hector hailed the first taxicab.
“To the Peninsular & Oriental Steamship office,” he directed.
“A bit early, guv'nor, ain't you? Them city chaps don't open shop until they 'ad their nine o'clock nip of brandy & soda”
“That's all right.” A wave of glorious impatience was surging through Hector's soul. “I shall wait outside the steamship office. At least I'll imagine that I can smell India there.”
“Right-oh, guv'nor,” said the impassive driver; then, to himself: “Bloomin' rum go, I calls it. Smell—India! What the …”
And “bloomin' rum go” were the words which Sergeant Horatio Pinker of the metropolitan police was just then whispering into his martial black mustache as, passing through Coal Yard Street, he saw a light in Ali Yusuf Khan's shop, found the door blinds drawn up, and looked in, as the city regulations and his private curiosity prescribed.
“I don't think the old josser's exactly a crook,” he reported to Police Captain Hodges half an hour later. “But—my word! He fair gave me the creeps. Standing there with his arms above his head like—like—oh—one of them red plush monkeys on a stick we used to play with when we was kids—and his whole body swinging to and fro—and the expression on his face! Looking straight at me he was, but never saw me, no, sir! Looked through me, that's what he did. And then—well”—Sergeant Pinker coughed, and continued a little diffidently, like a man who knows that his word is going to be doubted—“he goes somewhere in the back of his shop, and I hears a snick and a twirl as if he was opening a safe, and back he comes and round his scrawny old neck he wears a necklace with about fifty diamonds each as big as my thumb-nail … and I knows twinklers! I knows when they're glass and when they ain't. I used to walk the Bond Street beat, sir, and I tell you them pieces of ice is worth a cool hundred thousand pound sterling and … No, sir!” indignantly, “I signed the Good Templar's pledge over three years back. No! I had nothing all morning except a cup of that hog wash Harry Snooks sells over at his stand near Drury Lane and calls it coffee—blast his eyes! Well—to go back to that Oriental josser—a jolly rum go, that's what it is …”
“Well, sergeant, keep an eye on him.”
“Yes, sir.”
And that night, sipping his stone ginger at his favorite tavern, the Running Footman near Berkeley Square, he spoke about it to his friend Jimmy Hawden, reporter—though he was still youthful and unsophisticated enough to call himself special writer—of the Daily Chronicle who in turn, dropping in at Dolly's Chop House for a bite, an hour later, mentioned it to a sandy-haired gentleman—who whistled and snapped his fingers.
Meanwhile, had Sergeant Horatio Pinker transplanted his astral body via the Magic Carpet route a matter of a few thousand miles east and looked, like the Devil in Madrid, through the bulbous, painted dome of the palace at Tamerlanistan, he would have seen the Princess Aziza Nurmahal facing a clamorous, mutinous, sneering mob of courtiers and soldiers and palace officials grouped, respectively, about the black-robed, fur-capped figure of Gulabian, the Armenian treasurer, and Tagi Khan, Master of Horse, resplendent in peach-colored trousers, loose, crimson, silver-embroidered coat, and voluminous turban of cloth-of-gold, with Koom Khan, the commander-in-chief, playing the role of sardonic, mischief-making middleman. From group to group he shifted, with soft words and soft gestures, and he left behind him a spluttering, minatory trail of discontent.
The princess was pale, frightened, nervous. A sob rose to her lips, and the governor of the eastern marches pointed a rude, derisive thumb.
“A well is not to be filled with dewdrops,” he said in a stage whisper, “nor is a turbulent land to be ruled by a woman's tears.”
“As soon drag for the moon reflected in the water,” chimed in his twin brother, governor of the western marches, stroking his scarlet beard.
“As soon lift a hand to catch Time,” Koom Khan suggested, unsmilingly.
And then laughter, while the princess turned appealingly to Ayesha Zemzem, the shriveled old nurse, whom she had raised to the rank of Zil-i-Sultana, “Shadow of the Queen.”
“Ayesha,” she said, rising, “I am sick of all this leaky-tongued clacking and twaddling and babbling. Thou art regent. Do thou tell them that, in this as in all other matters, I have decided to follow in the foot-steps of my dead father until Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh, returns from the far places.”
“Thou art wrong, piece of my soul,” the hill woman rejoined bluntly.
“Wrong? Thou sayest that … even thou?”
Resolutely, Ayesha inclined her head.
“I love thee, little soul,” she said. “I would make my heart a floor cloth for thy white feet. But—I have thought over the matter since last we had speech with that dog of a Babu, and to-day I tell thee that thou art wrong.”
“Ayesha!” exclaimed the princess, the hot tears welling again in her eyes.
“Wrong and unwise!” stolidly repeated the other, amidst an excited chorus of assent. “Tamerlanistan is poor—and money is money.”
“Right!” agreed Gulabian, surprised as well as pleased that here was a new, and powerful, adherent of the cause of foreign “concessions.” “Money is indeed money!”
“Money is on the lips of the liar,” cried Aziza Nurmahal, while the Sheik-ul-Islam murmured piously, clicking the wooden beads of his rosary, that money is an infidel sect and the pavement on the bitter, jagged road to damnation.
“Money is a most evil stench in the nostrils of man kind,” he added, with a Moslem's unblushing hypocrisy, “but it is sweet ambergris when handled by a wise and good priest, familiar with the lessons of the Koran.” He coughed, rather self-consciously, as he caught Koom Khan's stony eye.
The princess leaned forward. Her left hand clutched the scepter of the Gengizkhani, while her right was about the hilt of the straight, simple sword that had rested across the knees of the dead Ameer during the funeral procession, and the soul of the naked steel seemed to reach out and touch her own soul, to sluice it with an ancient and crunching energy.
“Right or wrong,” she said, “I have decided. I do not want to grant concessions. I do not want the money of the foreigners without the advice of the Itizad el-Dowleh. It is wicked money—money that fills our ears with the raucous clamor of strife …”
“Speaking about ears,” sententiously from the Armenian, “it has been said that a hungry belly has no ears.”
“Right,” said the governor of the eastern marches; “without money, I am a rogue; with money, I am God.”
“Thou art always a rogue—with money, or without,” gently opined his twin brother.
“And thou hast pig's ears,” came the civil rejoinder, while Koom Khan, to keep the assembly from degenerating into an unseemly brawl and perhaps the swishing of swords, rose, gathered eyes like a hostess, and walked straight up to the peacock throne.
“Aziza Nurmahal,” he said, with drawling, slow arrogance, “statecraft waits on facts, a mere hand-maiden, and does not invent them; and the fact is that we, the princes and nobles and soldiers of Tamerlanistan, have decided in full durbar that our land needs the money and wisdom and energy of the sahebs. The Babu Bansi has made a fair offer …
“Indeed!” cried the Armenian to whom, that very morning, Bansi, who had returned from Teheran, had given a certified check on the Anglo-Persian Bank for a goodly number of rupees, signed “Preserved Higgins”; while Tagi Khan, the leader of the other faction, boomed out that the Babu Chandra's offer was every bit as fair.
Koom Khan shrugged his massive shoulders.
“It makes no difference to me,” he went on, “to which of the two Babus thou grantest the concession …”
“Right!” chimed in the nurse who, though opposed to the princess' steadfast refusal of opening the land to European exploitation, had nowise lost her dislike for the courtiers nor learned to bridle her tongue. “Right, by Allah! Either Babu will well grease thy thieving hand.”
“Peace, O noseless one!” from Koom Khan; then, to the princess: “It seems that thy path is clear. For we have decided.”
“We?” echoed Aziza Nurmahal.
She flared up. Her nostrils quivered. A light like a slow-eddying flame came into her black eyes.
A woman she was, young, tender, unable to cope with the tortuous, shifting undercurrents of palace and bazaar and mosque; not yet weaned from the silken, scented harem peace; alone. But in her veins raced the stormy, conquering blood of the Gengizkhani, the descendants of that Genghiz Khan who, the son of a rough Central Asian shepherd, clouted an empire together with brain and brawn; and, abruptly, her flaming pride of race burnt away the soft dross of her youth.
“I am the ruler of this land,” she said, in a voice as dry and keen as a new-ground sword. “My word is law. My gesture is a code. My whim is a decree. No decision shall be made about the matter of the concessions until the return of the Itizad el-Dowleh. Such is my command.”
“Thy—command?” Koom Khan guffawed. “And how then wilt thou enforce thy—command?”
“Thus,” cried Aziza Nurmahal.
And, with utter, dramatic suddenness, she jerked out the ancient, straight sword, and brought it down on the wrist of the commander-in-chief.
“Allah! Allah!” Koom Khan screamed in pain.
Blood squirted like a thick, crimson whip. He fell, fainting, to the ground.
Came silence; silence that bloated like a balloon of evil anticipations, while the crowd rose, like one man, shifted forward, intense, venomous, holding its breath like a beast of prey about to pounce and tear … and while something like a tremendous lassitude swept over Aziza.
She stared at them.
Knowing the Orient by right of birth and race, she realized that her psychological moment had arrived.
Now or never! Mastery or death! There lay her choice, her chance.
So she jerked her wandering, trembling mind back into the control of her senses. She held herself erect and motionless except for her right arm which grasped the dripping blade.
“I am the ruler of this land,” she said again; and there was in her soft, low voice an enormous, metallic resonance, the ring of utter conviction.
“Thus shall I enforce my commands—thus—and thus—and thus!”
And, tightly pressing her lips together, her heart writhing in revolt at her own unwomanly brutality, she stepped down from the peacock throne and dealt blow after blow with her sword, right, left, indiscriminately, pricking, slashing, cutting, wounding …
And the reaction on the mob was instantaneous, and typical.
For these men were Asians; men inherently callous; men devoid of that weakening outgrowth of the imagination which the Occident calls sympathy; men in whom ruthlessness and cruelty excite a certain kind of admiration as a conspicuous and unmistakable exhibition of energy.
“By the red pig's bristles!” cried the governor of the eastern marches, as he tied a handkerchief about his bleeding left arm. “A true daughter of the dead Ameer!”
“Brood of the spotted tiger's brood!”
“A real Gengizkhani, by Allah and by Allah!”
“Her father was the sickle, and she is the hoe!”
“Admirable!”
The last from the Sheik-ul-Islam who was rubbing an ear that the sword had nicked, and Gulabian, who had hid behind Tagi Khan's broad back, stepped forward and kowtowed low; the others followed suit, and again Aziza Nurmahal seized the psychological moment.
“We understand each other—now!” she said, and a smile ran from lip to lip, a smile of admiration, this time, of affection even. “There will be no granting of concessions until the return of Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh. Nor will there be discussing, nor criticizing, nor wondering, nor speculating. Is that understood?”
“Listen is obey, O sultana!” came the groveling chorus.
“Good!”
She turned to the nurse.
“Since thou dost not agree with me in the matter of the concessions, and since thou art too old to be beaten and since I love thee too dearly to give thee the point of the sword when it is red, I shall send thee back to the harem, where thou belongest. Thou art no longer regent—no longer the Shadow of the Queen. But thou shalt live out thy life in the shadow of the queen's affection.”
By this time, Gulabian, the Armenian, had regained the insolent, wheedling resiliency of his race.
“If thou shouldst need another regent in place of Ayesha Zemzem,” he suggested, “then I …”
“I have already thought of that,” replied the princess. “Step forth, Wahab al-Shaitan!”
And a shiver of apprehension ran through the crowd, while from a far corner of the hall where he had stood a motionless onlooker, dressed in motley black and scarlet, his immense hands crossed on the hilt of his beheading ax, the executioner, a gigantic, plum-colored negro, stalked forward with a sinister majesty of movement.
“Wahab al-Shaitan,” continued the princess, “thou art regent until further orders. Rawan-i-Sultana, 'Killer for the Queen,' shall be thy honorable title. Thy motto shall be: 'Do not trust the living; do not fear the dead.' And thy ax shall be thy staff and seal of office.”
Then, abruptly:
“The audience is ended, nobles and gentles.”
An immediate consequence of Aziza Nurmahal's sudden assertion was that the Babu Chandra, local manager of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company, decided suddenly that his head would be more safely on his shoulders if he delivered the cablegram which, addressed to the princess, had arrived that morning from London and which, at first, he had felt inclined to suppress—not because he understood the cryptic wording, but for the sake of general principles.
It was dated from London, bore no signature, and said: “The blade is on its way to Calcutta. Go there, and wait in the house of my younger brother.”
The princess was alone in a tower room of the palace when she opened the message and read it.
“The ancient prophecy she murmured. “The ancient prophecy of the Gengizkhani!”
And as she stepped to the window and looked south toward India, where, under the sweep of the twilight, the bunched mass of the town reddened to russet, then chilled to flat, silvery gray, while, in the office of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company, at the corner of the Nahassim Street, Chandra's busy brown fingers were clicking a message to a gentleman from New York, temporarily at the Savoy, London.
“Wahab al-Shaitan,” said Aziza Nurmahal to the regent-executioner, “as soon as my preparations are made, I shall go south, to Calcutta. Rule thou the land in my absence, and—if thou shouldst not know what to do—consult thy beheading ax. And the rest shall be as Allah willeth!”
“My dear,” said Mr. Ezra W. Warburton to his daughter, “I have to go to Calcutta, and thence up into Central Asia on business. Would you like to come with me?”
“You just bet, you dear old dad!”
And she gave him a hug and a large, moist kiss.