Romance Island

by Zona Gale

  CHAPTER XVI

  GLAMOURIE

  There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep grass; andover these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairyscissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it lookslike a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangelysilver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have beenpainted in Spring-wind.

  "Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such amoon as that!"

  "But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer--it is not recordedwhether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it--"wouldn'tyou like to?"

  Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king'spalace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life thingsnever happen like that. Ah--do they not so? You have only to go backto the days when young love and young life were yours to recalldistinctly that the most impossible things were every-dayoccurrences. What about the time that you went down one streetinstead of up another and _that_ changed the entire course of yourdays and brought you two together? What about the song, the June,the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes andcaught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it isquite impossible to assert that any charming thing whatever wouldnot have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? Andis not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that commonwonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.

  But if the Most Vehement--who are as thick as butterflies--stillremain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of thingsfallen out thus, there is left this triumph:

  "Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"

  * * * * *

  A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept throughthe palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had anhundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely itsown tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.

  For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of thelong stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother toHiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, andthis cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of thepalace--dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. HereOlivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of teain a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels thatresembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George andAmory praised the admirable English muffins which some one hadtaught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothinghamtip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits andqueer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amorywondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and becameultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully askedfor a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:

  "Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besideseggs--pineapples, very likely."

  "I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectlyintuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll knowbeforehand exactly how they both taste."

  "A _reductio ad absurdum_, my young friend," said the lawyersternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for everunchanged."

  Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on theterrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss theweather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young peoplewith Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. ForSt. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with someclearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every nicheand corner of the great pile where one--say a king--might be hiddenwith twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.

  What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part ofthe story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumesthat even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinkingdelicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, avery temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries werebecome homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yetbe well.

  To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, alloctagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity andamazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raisedthose massive blocks of stone to that great height no one canguess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palacehad originally been built upon level ground and had had itssurroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all eventsthere were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the nakedstone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with theplanetary deities--Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by whitebulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column inthe form of a rising flame--types taken from the heavens and fromthe abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carvencornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and littlecircular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images ofBaal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth,with the lion's skin.

  From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep stepof which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasingsize, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the paintedceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his giganticpaws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filledwith vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with mostluxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palacewas curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than twothousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advanceof this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of thatelder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where theycame upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and toolsand empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallicplate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in onelight, slightly fluorescent.

  "It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adon," said Jarvo. "She wasthe daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touchedin this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago--Ihave forgotten. Every one has forgotten."

  They went down among the very roots of the palace, three fullstoreys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lightingthe way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages,and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones hadbeen hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber ofthe tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, nowhollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hallwere lined with _loculi_ or niches, each as deep as the length of aman. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the longflags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven onthe stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was alofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was theresting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal ofTyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when thePhoenicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits ofGibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastingswhen they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and theWashingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they werenothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wallwas a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, whereslept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king ofPersia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket oflove-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probablyat one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in thevery palace. And if this is true the story of his omission toconquer the island may one day divert the world.

  Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored withwinged circles.

  "Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnappedEgyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Phoenicianmerchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Herelie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holyoffic
e."

  Nothing was unbelievable--nothing had been unbelievable for so longthat these four had almost learned that everything is possible.Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly youlearn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world ofpossibilities. It is one of our two magics.

  "And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant nicheopposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle forthe present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace ofGod."

  Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in theghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while,the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But herinvoluntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. Georgewith tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.

  They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, andcrossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of themountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northernslope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice wherethe supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the livingrock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain,and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a flyon the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king ofYaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himselffrom this observatory in a rage because his court electrician haddied, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because solittle is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite themost wonderful part of the king's palace.

  Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart ofthe treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably fromthe wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost andbut half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made inthe days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined thewalls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of thatlater day when Phoenicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic andglyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, inbrass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which thosecourtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these,from year to year, had been added the treasure of privatechests--necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases ofglass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, nowsometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath analtar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought fromAmathus, its ogive lid carved with _bigae_ or two-horsed chariots,and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the HereditaryTreasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered withbas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of thePhoenician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about wereset the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for theTemple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to daysremote, for it was there that the king's library had been collectedin case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copiedfrom age to age. What might not be there, they wondered--annals,State documents, the Phoenician originals of histories preservedelsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, thesecrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whosenames have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido andJopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joyand love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These werechambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing ofno unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to thePast, watching lonely on the mountain.

  "Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to thecemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"

  "No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted togo somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure andyou thought Clusium was the name of it."

  "I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names forit. But it's always the same thing. _Excepting this_."

  "Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned togo; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sangthat, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faintvoices from every shelf in the room,--voices that of old hadthrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.

  Woke now to the eternal echo--an echo that touched delicatelythrough the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on allthat happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a littleecho-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face ofdanger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found timefor the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, becausethey hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event isa clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail andpervade and possess. In the king's palace there must have beenshrines to intangibilities--as there should be everywhere--for theyseemed to come there, and belong.

  The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. Georgehad with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon,in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he hadvirtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face wasbetrayingly eager as he told about it. It was, briefly, thatinasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain werenow on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were therealso, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque,were in a perfectly impregnable position--counting out FifthDimension contingencies, which of course might include appearingsas well as disappearings--and why shouldn't they stay there, andlet the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? Andwhen the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound tosay, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, bynoon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvowould get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. OthoHolland, the king, if he were on the island. And when "Well, butmy dear fellow" occurred again, St. George replied with deferencethat he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship hefancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in theharbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore noone need even set foot on the island who didn't wish. And Mr.Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw backhis head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at thepalace--that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air--andsaid, "Nothing in all my experience--" and St. George left him,deep in thought.

  On the way back he chanced upon Mrs. Hastings, seated on a bench oflapidescent wood in the portico--and a Titanic portico it looked byday--and, having sent for the palace chef, she was attempting towrite down the recipe for the salad of that day's luncheon, althoughit was composed chiefly of fowls now extinct everywhere excepting inYaque.

  "But my poultry man will get them for me," she urged withdetermination; "I have only to tell him the name of what I want, andhe can always produce it in tins, nicely labeled."

  Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at thepallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The facewas stranger by day than it had been by night--this St. George hadfelt when he went that morning to release him, and the old manleaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle goodmorning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen ofthe fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live tohis incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearingthe ruby ring.

  "I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakhanswered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and atother things.

  To everything that he asked him the old man returned only hisurbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia wouldconsent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. Georgehimself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, Iwould far rather talk with one madman with this madman's mannersthan to sup
with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murderus, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Oliviahad no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could onepossibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.

  All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing asonly that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that wentbefore. St. George was saying to himself that at last the _Here_ andthe _Now_ were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for themorrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noonthey all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leavesabove carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. Theyleaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the gloryof the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings ofgulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did notknow they gave--ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind toldabout that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their youngcourage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility oftheir understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. Forthe wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, andone has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spiteof the little wing-like moments that hold not history butrevelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendentsword of "To-morrow, at noon."