by Sax Rohmer
I
It was high noon of a perfect summer’s day. Beneath green sun blinds, upon the terrace overlooking the lawns, Paul Mario, having finished his lunch, lay back against the cushions of a white deck-chair and studied the prospect. Sloping turf, rose-gay paths, and lichened brick steps, hollowed with age, zigzagging leisurely down to the fir avenue, carried the eye onward again to where the river wound its way through verdant banks toward the distant town.
A lark wooed the day with sweet music. Higher and ever higher rose the little sun-worshipper, pouring out his rapturous hymn to Apollo. Swallows, who but lately had crossed the battlefields of southern Europe, glided around Hatton Towers, describing mystic figures in the air, whilst the high feeble chirping of the younger generation sounded from the nests beneath the eaves. Amid the climbing roses bees were busy, their communal labours an object-lesson for self-seeking man; and almost at Mario’s feet a company of ants swarmed over the yet writhing body of an unfortunate caterpillar, who had dropped from an apple-tree to fall a prey to that savage natural law of death to the weak. The harsh voice of a sentinel crow spoke from a neighbouring cornfield, and a cloud of dusky marauders took the air instantly, and before the sharp crack of the farmer’s fowling-piece came to confirm the warning. In the hush of noon the tones of some haymakers at their patriarchal labours in a meadow beyond the stream were clearly audible — and the atmosphere constantly vibrated with remote booming of guns on the Western front.
Paul Mario was sufficiently distinguished in appearance to have been a person of no importance. His virile, curling black hair had the raven’s-wing sheen betraying remote Italian forebears, and for that matter there was in his entire cast of countenance and the poise of his fine head something statuesquely Roman, Southern, exotic. His large but deep-set eyes were of so dark a blue as very generally to pass for “black”; and whilst in some moods they were soft and dreamy, in others, notably in moments of enthusiasm, they burnt darkly fierce in his pale olive face. In profile there was a certain resemblance to the Vatican head of Julius Caesar, save for the mouth, which had more gentle curves, and which was not unlike that of Dante; but seen full-face, and allowing for the fact that Paul Mario was clean-shaven, the likeness of feature to the traditional Christ was startling. This resemblance is equally notable in the face of Shakespeare.
Rather above medium height, well but slightly proportioned, the uneasy spirit of the man ever looking out of those arresting eyes so wholly dominated him as to create a false impression of fragility, of a casket too frail to confine the burning, eager soul within. His emotions were dynamic, and in his every mannerism there was distinction. The vein of femininity which is found in all creative artists betrayed itself in one item of Mario’s attire: a white French knot, which slightly overlay the lapels of his well-worn Norfolk jacket.
To the world’s caricaturists, when Paul Mario, at the age of twenty-six, had swept across the literary terrain, storming line after line, the white knot had proved a boon. Delilah, a lyrical drama, written in French, and first published in Paris, achieved for this darling of Minerva a reputation which no man is entitled to expect during his lifetime. Within twelve months of the date of publication it had appeared in almost every civilised language, and had been staged in New York, where it created a furore. Of Madame Caligula, a novel, which followed it, thirty-one editions were subscribed in six days!
The miracle of Paul Mario’s success was perhaps to be explained by the neutrality of his genius. A passionate, elemental sympathy with all nature, a seeming capacity to hear the language of the flowers, the voices of the stars and to love and understand the lowliest things that God has made, bore him straight to the heart of England as surely as it swept his name into the holy of holies of artistic France, spoke to Russia’s sombre soul and temporarily revolutionised the literature of the United States. His work belonged to no “school,” and its charm was not due to “style”; therefore his books lost little in translation, for true genius speaks to every man in his own tongue.
Sympathetic atmosphere was as necessary to Paul Mario as pure air to the general. Deliberate ugliness hurt him, and the ugliness which is the handiwork of God aroused within him a yearning sorrow for poor humanity who might be of the White Company, were it not for avarice, hate and lust. The war, even in its earlier phases, stirred the ultimate deeps of his nature, and knowing himself, since genius cannot be blind, for what he was, a world power, a spiritual sword, he chafed and fretted in enforced inactivity, striving valiantly to reconcile himself to the ugliness of military life. Courted as only poets and actors are courted, he was offered posts and commissions in bewildering variety; but all of them he scornfully rejected. The insane injustice of such selection enraged him.
A severe nervous lesion freed him from the galley-bench of a training-camp, and sent him on a weary pilgrimage through the military hospitals to discharge — and freedom; freedom, which to that ardent nature proved to be irksome. For whilst the very springs of his genius were dammed by the agony of a world in travail, he found himself outside the mighty theatre, a mere bystander having no part in the rebirth of humanity.
II
Someone was approaching along the path consecrated by a million weary feet and still known as the Pilgrim’s Way, someone who wore the ugly uniform of a Guards officer (which is a sort of du Maurier survival demanding Dundreary whiskers). He seemed to hesitate ere he turned aside, opened the gate and began to mount those hundred and twenty mossy steps which led up to the terrace.
The newcomer, whose tunic had seen much service, was a man perhaps two or three years Paul Mario’s senior, and already the bleaching hand of Time had brushed his temples with furtive fingers. He was dark but of sanguine colouring, now overlaid with a deep tan, wore a short military moustache and possessed those humorous grey eyes which seem to detect in all creation hues roseate and pleasing; eyes made for laughter and which no man other than a good fellow ever owned.
Gaining the terrace and raising his hand to his cap in salute, the officer smiled, and his smile fulfilled all the promise of the grey eyes and would have brought a ray of sunshine into the deepest and darkest cell of the Bastille itself.
“I believe I am trespassing,” he began — then, as Paul Mario rose: “By all that’s gracious and wonderful, it’s Paul!”
“Don!” exclaimed the other, and sprang forward in his own impetuous fashion, grasping the newcomer by both shoulders and staring eagerly into the suntanned face. “Dear old Don! A thousand welcomes, boy!” And releasing his grip on the shoulders, he seized both hands and shook them with a vigour that was not assumed but was merely an outlet for his brimming emotions.
“Some kindly coy dryad of the woods has guided my footsteps to this blessed spot,” declared Don. “The last inn which I passed — observe my selection of the word, passed — known, I believe, as the ‘Pig and Something-or-other,’ is fully three sunny miles behind me. From the arid and dusty path below I observed the siphon on your table — —”
“And you determined to become a trespasser?” cried Paul Mario joyously, pushing his friend into the cane rest-chair and preparing a drink for him. “I will build an altar to your dryad, Don; for there is certainly something miraculous in your appearance at Hatton Towers.”
“When I have suitably reduced my temperature I will explain. But I have yet to learn what you are doing here. I had always understood that Hatton Towers — —”
“My dear fellow, it’s mine!” cried Paul excitedly. “My Uncle Jacques dramatically bequeathed this wonderful place to me, altering his will on the day that I renounced the pen and entered an officer’s training corps. He was a remarkable old bachelor, Don — —”
Don raised his hand, checking Paul’s speech. “My dear Paul, you cannot possibly amplify your own description of Sir Jacques, with which you entertained us one evening in a certain top set at Oxford. Do you remember those rooms, Paul?”
“Do I remember them!”
“I do, and I remember your account of
the saintly Uncle, for your acquaintance had begun and terminated during a week of the previous long vacation which you had spent here at Hatton. ‘Uncle Jacques,’ you informed us, ‘is a delightful survival, bearing a really remarkable resemblance to a camel. Excepting his weakness for classic statuary and studies in the nude, his life is of Mayflower purity. He made his fortune on the Baltic Exchange, was knighted owing to a clerical error, and built the appalling church at Mid Hatton.’”
Paul laughed boyishly. “At least we were sincere in our youthful cynicism, Don. You may add the note to your very accurate recollections of Sir Jacques that on the publication of Delilah he instructed his butler to say that he was abroad whenever I might call!”
Fascinated as of old by his whimsical language, the cap-and-bells which he loved to assume, Paul watched affectionately the smiling face of Donald Courtier. Momentarily a faint tinge of melancholy had clouded the gaiety of Don’s grey eyes; for this chance meeting had conjured up memories of a youth already slipping from his grasp, devoured by the all-consuming war; memories of many a careless hour treasured now as exquisite relics are treasured, of many a good fellow who would never again load his pipe from Paul Mario’s capacious, celebrated and hospitable tobacco jar, as he, Don, was doing; of days of sheer indolent joy, of nights of wild and carefree gladness.
“Good old Paul,” he murmured, raising his glass. “Here’s to the late Sir Jacques. So you are out of it?”
Paul Mario nodded and took from the pocket of his threadbare golf jacket the very twin of Don’s curved and blackened briar, drawing towards him the tobacco jar upon the table — a Mycenæan vase from the tomb of Rameses III. A short silence fell between them.
“Frankly, I envy you,” said Don suddenly, breaking the spell, “although I realise that actually you have suffered as deeply as many a man who has spent two years in the trenches. One cannot imagine the lyre of Apollo attuned to What’s-the-name’s marches.”
“Two years,” echoed Paul; “is it really two years since we met?”
“Two years on June the twenty-second. On June the twenty-second, nineteen hundred and fifteen, you saw me off from Victoria of hateful memory. I have been home six or seven times in the interval, but somehow or other have always missed you. I was appalled when I heard you had joined. God knows we need such brains as yours, but they would be wasted on the Somme; and genius is too rare to be exposed to the sniper’s bullet. What are you doing?”
The sympathy between the two was so perfect that Paul Mario knew the question to refer not to his private plans but to his part in the world drama.
“Beyond daily descending lower in my own esteem — nothing.”
“Yet you might do so much.”
“I know,” said Paul Mario. “But — it awes me.”
If his work had not already proved him, the genius of the man must have been rendered apparent by his entire lack of false modesty. Praise and censure alike left him uninfluenced — although few artists can exist without a modicum of the former: he knew himself born to sway the minds of millions and was half fearful of his self-knowledge. “I know,” he said, and pipe in hand he gazed wistfully across the valley.
A faint breeze crept through the fir avenue, bearing with it a muffled booming sound which was sufficient to raise the curtain of distance — never truly opaque for such as he — and to display to that acute inner vision a reeking battlefield. Before his shuddering soul defiled men maimed, blind, bleeding from ghastly hurts; men long dead. Women he saw in lowly hovels, weeping over cots fashioned from rough boxes; women, dry-eyed, mutely tragic, surrounded by softness, luxury and servitude, wearing love gifts of a hand for ever stilled, dreaming of lover-words whispered in a voice for ever mute. He seemed to float spiritually over the whole world upon that wave of sound and to find the whole world stricken, desolate, its fairness mockery and its music a sob.
“At the moment, no doubt,” said Don, “you feel as though you had been knocked out of the ring in the first round. But this phase will pass. The point is, that you never had any business in the ring at all. No quarrel ever actually begins with a blow, and no quarrel was ever terminated by one. Genius — perverted, I’ll grant you, but nevertheless genius — started this war; and we are English enough to think that we can end it by brute force. Pass the matches.”
“You are really of opinion,” asked Paul dreamily, “that I should be doing my utmost if I stuck to my last?”
“Unquestionably. There are a thousand and one things of vital interest to all humanity which have not been said yet, which only you can say, a thousand and one aspects of the Deluge not yet presented to the world. Above all, Paul, there are millions of poor bereaved souls who suffer dumbly and vaguely wonder for what crime they are being punished.”
“Would you have me tell them that their faith, their churches, are to blame?”
“Not necessarily. The churches will receive many a hard knock without you adding your quota. Merry England has always nourished the ‘Down-wither’; we breed the ‘Down-withers’; and they will raise their slogan of ‘Down with everything’ soon enough. I see your part, Paul, as that of a reconstructor rather than a ‘Down-wither.’ Any fool can smash a Ming pot but no man living to-day can make one. You think that the churches have failed?”
“On the whole, yes. If we here in England are firm in our spiritual faith, why are the churches empty at such an hour as this and the salons of the crystal-gazers full?”
“Because we are not firm in our spiritual faith. But many of us know and admit that. The point is, can you tell us why, and indicate a remedy?”
Paul Mario’s expression grew wrapt, and he stared out over the valley into a land which it is given to few ever to explore. “I believe I can,” he answered softly; “but I dare not attempt such a task without the unshakable conviction that mine is the chosen hand.”
“I am glad to hear you say it; those doubts prove to me that you recognise the power of your pen. They are fools who hold that a ton of high-explosive is worth all the rhetoric of Cicero. It was not Krupps who plunged the Central Empires into the pit, Paul, but Bernhardi, Nietzsche and What’s-his-name. Wagner’s music has done more to form the German character than Bismarck’s diplomacy. Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth means more to England than Magna Charta.”
“I agree.”
“When the last of our marshals has stuck the last of his pins in the last war map, all the belligerents will still be of the same opinion as before the war began. The statesman of to-day is perhaps past praying for, but your book will help to form the statesman of to-morrow.”
“You dazzle me. You would make me the spiritual father of a new Europe.”
“And a new America. Why not? You have heard the call and you are not the man to shirk it. Lesser men than you have tried — all honour to them if they were sincere — to voice the yearnings, the questions, the doubts, of a generation that has outgrown its spiritual garments. All the world feels, knows, that a new voice must come soon. The world is waiting for you, Paul.”
III
Flamby Duveen lay flat amid the bluebells, one hand outstretched before her and resting lightly upon a little mound of moss. It was a small brown hand and she held it in such a manner, knuckles upward, and imparted to it so cunning and peculiar a movement that it assumed quite an uncanny resemblance to a tiny and shrinking hare.
Some four feet in front of her, at the edge of a small clearing in the bluebell forest, from a clump of ferns two long silky ears upstood, motionless, like twin sentries, and from between the thick stalks of the flowers which intermingled with the ferns one round bright eye regarded the moving hand fascinatedly.
Flamby’s lips were pursed up and a soft low whistle quite peculiar in tone caused the silky ears of the watching hare to twitch sharply. But the little animal remained otherwise motionless and continued to study the odd billowy motions of the brown hand with that eager wonder-bright eye. The whistling continued, and the hare ventured forth from cover, comin
g fully twelve inches nearer to Flamby. Flamby constrained her breathing as much as was consistent with maintaining the magical whistle. Her hand wriggled insinuatingly forward, revealing a round bare arm, brown as a nut upon its outer curves and creamy on the inner.
The hypnotised subject ventured a foot nearer. Flamby’s siren song grew almost inaudible above the bird-calls of the surrounding wood, but it held its sway over the fascinated hare, for the animal suddenly sprang across the space intervening between himself and the mysterious hand and sat studying that phenomenon at close quarters.
A little finger softly caressed one furry forepaw. Up went the hare’s ears again and his whole body grew rigid. The caress was continued, however, and the animal grew to like it. Two gentle fingers passed lightly along his back and he was thrilled ecstatically. Now, his silky ears were grasped, firmly, confidently; and unresisting, he allowed himself to be couched in the crook of a soft arm. His heart was beating rapidly, but with a kind of joyous fear hitherto unknown and to which he resigned himself without a struggle.
Flamby wriggled up on to her knees and holding the hare in her lap petted the wild thing as though it had been some docile kitten. “Sweet little Silk Ears,” she whispered endearingly. “What a funny tiny tail!”
Quite contentedly now, the hare crouched, rubbing its blunt nose against her hands and peering furtively up into her face and quickly down again. Flamby studied the little creature with an oddly critical eye.
“Your funny ears go this way and that way,” she murmured, raising one hand and drawing imaginary lines in the air to illustrate her words; “so and so. I never noticed before those little specks in your fur, Silk Ears. They only show in some lights but they are there right enough. Now I am going to study your tiny toes, Silky, and you don’t have to be afraid....”
Raising one of the hare’s feet, Flamby peered at it closely, at the same time continuing to caress the perfectly happy animal. She was so engaged when suddenly up went the long ears, and uttering a faint cry resembling an infant’s whimper the hare sprang from her lap into the sea of bluebells and instantly disappeared. A harsh grip fastened upon Flamby’s shoulder.
