Prince Rajput Singh, the mythical only son of the Nazir of Hydrabad,
descended on Chicago two weeks later accompanied by J. Herbert Denby,
the distinguished authority on Far Eastern affairs. Their arrival at the
Senate Hotel just before the dinner hour was a spectacular
divertissement, to say the least, and one well calculated to make the
unsuspecting general public sit up and take notice.
His Royal Highness wore a great gray cloak when he passed through the
main entrance of the hotel flanked on his right by the impeccable Mr.
Denby and preceded by two massive and upstanding Hindus whose bearded
faces were frozen into a semblance of stoical indifference that was as
grim and forbidding as a box-office man’s impenetrable and imperturbable
mask. On his head he wore a white turban trimmed with golden braid and
his feet were encased in richly embroidered red slippers with turned-up
toes.
He paused for a moment, surveying with a condescending air the crowd of
gaping men which filled the lobby, and then clapped his hands sharply
twice. The Hindu attendants moved into position back of him. Another
pause and then, with a gesture of surpassing elegance he dropped the
cloak from his shoulders into their waiting arms. No Roman emperor had
ever done it better, Mr. Denby thought to himself. The prince stood
revealed in a gorgeous silken robe which was such a shimmering mass of
color that it almost made one blink to look at it. Purples, flaming
shades of orange and greens which seemed to suggest the rank lush
foliage of some tropical jungle were the predominating shades. The robe
was admirably designed to set off to the best advantage the dark and
finely chiseled features of His Royal Highness, who greeted the manager
of the hotel with an air of haughty reserve that was positively imperial
in its implications.
His progress through the lobby to the elevator was made amid a silence
that Mr. Denby afterwards paradoxically referred to as “audible” and
when the clanging doors closed behind him and he was shot up to his
quarters on the third floor, the feelings of all the awed onlookers
found expression in a concerted gasp.
Jimmy Martin, watching the proceedings from behind the cover of a
newspaper which he pretended to be reading while he sprawled over a
great leather chair, chuckled quietly to himself and agreed that he was
a grand little stage manager. Then he slipped out on to windswept
Michigan avenue and walked briskly away to his own hotel. He longed to
remain and watch his drama unfold, but discretion warned him that it
would be well for him to keep in seclusion for the present, inasmuch as
representatives of the fourth estate would undoubtedly descend on the
hotel shortly in a body.
Prince Rajput Singh graciously received the gentlemen of the press an
hour later and discoursed at length upon the past, present and future of
India. Hearing that his distinguished friend, the Sahib Denby, whom he
had entertained some years ago at his father’s palace while the former
was traveling in the far east, was planning a lecture tour he had
decided, he said, to visit America himself and lend his aid to the
project.
“It has been long dream of my existence,” he announced grandly, picking
his words carefully, “to assist in bringing to new world of the west the
culture and wisdom of the east. You have made wonderful discoveries in
the world of material things. We have long ago found the secret of the
soul. It is well we should make ourselves friends.”
The prince posed for flashlight photographs sitting in a great arm chair
with his Hindu attendants, arms folded, standing erect and immovable
behind him. All in all a pleasant time was had by everyone concerned and
the results in the newspapers on the following morning were all that the
most optimistic and sanguine publicity promoter could have desired. Two
and three column pictures of His Royal Highness were given prominent
positions and each interview was tagged with a paragraph announcing the
first of Mr. Denby’s lectures which was to be given a day later in the
grand ballroom of the hotel. The prince, it was announced, would
supplement the lecturer’s remarks with a little talk of his own.
Jimmy Martin, calling on him for the purpose of giving him a few more
instructions concerning his general deportment and demeanor on the
morrow, was somewhat dazzled by the splendor of his surroundings and by
the extent of the apartment assigned to him. There were five rooms in
all, overlooking the lake, and there was a canopied bed on a raised
platform in one of them as well as other evidences of extreme luxury to
which he was not accustomed. He hunted up his friend, the assistant
manager of the hotel.
“Say, Wilkins,” he said cautiously. “I’ve been up to see this prince
you’ve got stopping here. That’s some set of rooms. I wonder what
they’re going to set him back.”
“That’s the royal suite,” replied Wilkins. “We don’t get much of a
chance to get any real royalty very often, and I’m making the old boy a
special rate. Mr. Denby arranged for it. We’re only going to charge him
two hundred dollars a day.”
“My God,” stammered Jimmy, almost swallowing his cigarette and clutching
the other by the arm, “you can’t do a thing like that.”
The look of hopeless distress on the press agent’s face caused the hotel
man to laugh uproariously, for a moment, but he checked himself
suddenly.
“What’s the idea?” he inquired. “Why can’t we? You act as if we were
going to charge the bill to you.”
“Maybe you are, old man,” was Jimmy’s response as he led Wilkins over to
the latter’s little office. “I want to slip you a little side-line of
conversation that you’ve got to promise to keep Masonic.”
So it came to pass that in the quiet sanctity of the little office Jimmy
outlined certain unpublished details concerning the activities and real
mission of Prince Rajput Singh though he said nothing about that dusky
gentleman’s previous condition of servitude. He represented him as being
a genuine Indian nobleman, temporarily down on his luck, who had
consented to assist in a carefully contrived and ingenious scheme of
indirect advertising.
“Have a heart, old man,” he pleaded when he had finished. “If you scale
that two hundred down to about—well, say twenty-five and Bartlett’ll
have heart failure even at that figure—I’ll arrange to have his royal
niblets have dinner every night in your Egyptian dining room. You know
yourself you don’t do much trade in there. We’ll have those two Hindu
birds cook a lot of these curry dishes right there in full view of the
audience and wait on him. You’ll be able to hang the little old S.R.O.
sign out in a couple of days, take it from me.”
The assistant manager succumbed to Jimmy’s siren song and consented to
slash the rate for the royal suite in return for the special performance
by the prince and his entourage which the press agent promised to stage
nightly.
Mr. J. Herbert Denby and Prince Rajput Singh made their joint debut on
the lecture platform on the following afternoon before a select and
soulful audience largely composed of middle-aged females who hung
rapturously on every word uttered by both speakers.
Mr. Denby was in fine form. His discourse on “The Rig-Veda” was as vague
and misty as a treatise on the Hegelian philosophy and about as full of
real mental nourishment for that particular audience as a scientific
monograph on the bony structure of the dactylopterus volitans would have
been. He soared into the outer void and returned with bay-leaves on his
brow and with esoteric phrases dripping from his tongue. The more
hopelessly involved he became in the mystic mazes of his metaphysical
theme, the more ardent seemed to be the rapt devotion with which his
listeners received his remarks. When he finished in one grand, exultant
outburst of poetic fervor a hushed silence fell upon the gathering and
when a ripple of applause broke in upon it there were those whose brows
darkened as if something holy had been profaned.
It remained, however, for the pseudo Prince Rajput Singh to achieve the
real sensation of the afternoon. Arrayed in a purple robe and turban of
exquisite silk and carrying himself with a careless air of superb
distinction that was fascinating to watch, he delivered a brief talk in
which he pleaded for a better understanding between the East and the
West and urged a study of Indian ways and customs as the best method of
bringing such an entente cordiale about, such a study as was rendered
possible, for instance, by witnessing a performance of a play he had
recently seen in New York—was it called “The Ganges Princess?”—he was
not sure.
His dark face gleamed with animation as he spoke and his grey eyes
sparkled. When he smiled his white teeth flashed brilliantly in the rays
of the afternoon sun which poured through the mullioned windows and when
he laughed, tossing his head back like some medieval troubadour in
rollicking mood, all the impressionable women there present, young and
old, went voyaging for a moment or two into the land of romance, and
forgotten memory pictures of scenes from the Arabian Nights came
trooping back into their several and respective, not to mention
respectable, minds.
Taking it by and large Ranjit Lal, former supernumerary, devious
adventurer in a foreign clime, and now, by the grace of one James T.
Martin, Prince Rajput Singh, was, in the parlance of the boulevards, a
knockout. When the formal festivities were over he was surrounded by a
chattering swarm of females of assorted ages and subjected to that
particular form of obsequious flattery which is usually reserved by the
weaker sex for long-haired pianists and corpulent Italian tenors.
Mr. J. Herbert Denby, feeling himself somewhat out of the picture,
viewed the proceedings from a short distance away and particularly
noticed one worshiper who had edged herself into a position directly in
front of his confrere and who seemed to be trying to entirely monopolize
the swarthy-skinned lion of the occasion.
She was at least fifty. There was no doubting that, though she was
dressed, with all the gay abandon of a debutante, in a silken frock
which did not quite touch the tops of her extremely high boots. She was
also inclined to stoutness, though a straight front corset kept her
somewhat ample proportions cabined and confined permitting her to
present to the world at large at least a semblance of curvilinear grace.
There was, Mr. Denby thought, something decidedly suspicious looking
about her flaxen tresses whose symmetrically marcelled regularity was
relieved by two little curls which hung coyly in front of each ear. She
was, it was plain to see, convinced that she was the living embodiment
of Peter Pan, the young person who never grew old.
Mr. Denby could hear her high pitched voice and the gurgling laugh with
which she punctuated almost every remark.
“I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, you dear man,” she was saying. “Four
thirty tomorrow afternoon in our Indian room—I’ll have just a few
notables there and I have just one favor to ask of you. Please bring
those perfectly dear gentlemen with whiskers along to help serve.
They’ll help my background? Don’t you just love the proper background?
It’s so stimulating. Oh, yes, background is the most important thing in
life, if you grasp what I mean.”
A grunt escaped a tired looking man next to Mr. Denby. It was so
expressive that the eminent authority on the Far East turned a
questioning look on his neighbor.
“Who is she?” he inquired.
“That’s Fannie Easton,” replied the tired-looking man. “Old maid sister
of Junius P. You’ve heard of him, of course. Oodles of money, houses in
Chicago and New York, ranch in California, villa in Florence, three
private yachts and not a damned soul to decorate ’em with except that
blond nut sundae. Life’s a weird thing, sir. Too much for me.”
Mr. Denby, forgetting his own isolation for the moment, watched the
continuation of the episode with a new interest. He saw the gurgling
Miss Easton catch hold of his associate’s arm and he observed that the
latter was devoting himself to her with assiduous attention as they
walked slowly out into the corridor and disappeared, leaving behind a
collection of thoroughly disappointed admirers. As the echoes of a silly
laugh came floating on the air from some unseen corner of the hallway,
something seemed to tell Mr. Denby that all was not well.
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