The dinner was sumptuous; better still, it was perfect. What a magician
wealth was, Traherne mused; and Major Crespin enjoyed it immensely. The
Raja was a jolly good fellow, whatever the color of his skin, damned if
he wasn’t. Any chap who did one as well as that was a man and a brother:
the excellent food, the exquisite and welcomer wines, had lulled to fast
sleep the English soldier’s every fear. He was at peace with all the
universe, Asia and Germany included, especially Asia: to hell with silly
race-distinctions!—good fizz knew none.
The _Funeral March_ pulsed through the loggia. The sky was the color of
blood. When the record was finished, Rukh called for no other—Watkins
waiting at the gramophone had a sinecure.
Antony Crespin was drinking too much. Traherne watched him through angry
eyes; Rukh, not seeming to look, with an inscrutable smile. Lucilla was
nervous and wretched. Surely he could have spared her this—here! He
might have controlled his craving until he had reached his own room, and
have asked there for what he craved—he would only have needed to ask in
this palace of sumptuous and pressed hospitality.
_But Crespin could not wait._ He was doing his best. And, Traherne
thanked heaven for it, he was eating heartily.
Traherne ate well too—doing it in careful fore-thought of what might be
before him to do—or to attempt. And Lucilla Crespin ate as much as she
could. She too was doing her best.
The Raja ate sparingly, without seeming to do so, and drank very little.
But he chatted entertainingly all the time: the perfect host,
considerate and quietly cordial—and if the woman who sat on his right
hand received most of his attention, and all his deference, he, in that,
paid their own European custom the sincere flattery of imitation.
The meal was long—not too long. The sunset glow faded, great stars
pulsed green, white and gold in the strip of purple sky between the
o’ertopping, high, snow-covered mountains. Dessert in great cut-gold
bowls was put on the table. Watkins came and touched a switch, and when
the table sparkled with electric lights among the flowers on it, and
others above it, came and stood behind his master’s chair. The old
major-domo and his white-clad satellites with the Raja’s livery of gold,
silver and green twisted in their turbans hovered watchfully round.
A child cried somewhere—out in the mountain-pass open it sounded—and
the Raja paused suddenly in what he was saying, a look of fear in his
face, and dark as his skin was, it seemed to whiten and stiffen. Both
Lucilla Crespin and Dr. Traherne saw and wondered—but Traherne made a
quick note in his mind: he thought he had learned the tiger-man’s raw,
vulnerable point—and he would not forget: the clue might be useful to
them in their need. It all passed in an instant. The Raja laughed
lightly, and went on with his story. La-swak’s room lay far on the other
side of the palace; no sound from it could reach here. And, if aught
again had ailed La-swak, Ak-kok would have come or have sent, though a
bevy of Western kings had been dining, or even an Eastern god!
“What a heavenly night!” Mrs. Crespin murmured. The words were trite;
and because they were trite they were lame and inadequate. It was
starlight on the Himalayas. Every star hung out from the deep, velvet
sky as if chiseled and cut from precious stones, and the snow of a
hundred peaks and slopes literally reflected their jewel-colors, and the
crisp night air was warm too by the fragrance of the “evergreens” that
soaked it. The night was still, but it pulsed with its own beauty, and
here and there where some stray eddy of soft wind caught it a tree on a
lower slope was bending as if in prayer.
“Yes,” Rukh assented carelessly—careless of what was ordinary, not of
her, or her words—“our summer climate is far from bad.”
“The air is like champagne,” she said with a long, slow breath of
enjoyment. “Was she enjoying it?” Traherne asked himself. “_Could_ she
enjoy it here?”
“A little over frappé for some tastes,” the Raja suggested. “What do you
say, Madam? Shall we have coffee indoors? There is an edge to the air at
these altitudes, as soon as the sun has gone down.”
“Yes, I do feel a little chilly now,” she owned, and she shivered
slightly.
“Watkins, send for a shawl for Madam,” Rukh said in quick concern,
rising quickly. The others rose with him, of course. They had to play
the social game with this native princelet upon whose whim so much
depended for them. Traherne was playing the game very valiantly; Lucilla
Crespin was not sorry to go back to the warmer room; and the Major felt
something of actual deference to the host, no matter the shade of his
skin, who had given him such a rippin’ dinner—and such wines! At a word
from his master the major-domo touched a second switch in one of the
pillars of the loggia opening, and the chandelier and wall-lamps of the
salon burst into brilliant light. Rukh offered his arm to Mrs. Crespin,
and again the Englishwoman had to take it.
“Let me find you a comfortable seat, Madam,” he said as he led her in,
and bowed when he had guided her to a great lounge chair. “When the fire
is lighted, I think you will find this quite pleasant. Take the other
chair, Major. I must really refurnish this room,” he observed
critically. “My ancestors had no notion of comfort. To tell the truth, I
use the room only on state occasions, like the present”—again he bent
to Mrs. Crespin. “I have a much more modern snuggery upstairs, which I
hope you will see to-morrow.” It was quite courteously said, but there
was invitation in his soft black eyes, a hint of it and of caress in his
voice. Lucilla caught it, and so did Basil Traherne. She gave no sign,
but Traherne still standing at the loggia opening, looking out into the
night, clenched his strong, brown fingers until his nails cut the flesh.
But he did not dare turn. And Crespin—poor chap—heard nothing, saw
nothing. He was feeling a little sleepy, and quite full of content, and
he smiled a lazy approval at the servants bringing in coffee, liqueurs,
cigars and cigarettes.
“Star-gazing, Dr. Traherne?” the Raja asked him.
Traherne turned at that, and came to the others. “I beg your pardon,” he
said.
“Dr. Traherne is quite an astronomer,” Lucilla told the Raja.
“As much at home with the telescope as with the microscope, eh?”
“Oh, no,” Traherne told him, “I’m no astronomer. I can pick out a few of
the constellations,—that’s all.”
“For my part,” the Raja declared, “I look at the stars as little as
possible. As a spectacle they’re monotonous, and they don’t bear
thinking of. Ah, here it is!” He took the shawl the woman had brought,
and placed it delicately about Mrs. Crespin’s shoulders.
“What an exquisite shawl!” she exclaimed, drawing an end of it through
her fingers.
No self-respecting trousseau in affluent Christendom would have thought
of lacking its “Indian shawl” fifty years ago, and one winter—just
thirty-seven years ago to be exact (even at the risk of owning to
old-age well reached) every well-dressed woman in Chicago had one of the
costly things hacked up into cloaks and dolmans. And beautiful some of
those “Indian shawls” were—and (more to their advertised point)
probably most of them had been made in India. But this was a shawl not
as those. It was warmer, softer and incomparably more thin. From the
burning Indian red of its silky, sheeny center every color on the Asian
palette blended and blurred into and accentuated all the others, and so
did half a score of Oriental motifs—turquoise-blue, apple-green, orange
and emerald touched milk-white and velvet-black, crimson, rose, ruby and
scarlet, rippled like the notes of a scale masterly played, and the
half-hinted motifs that patterned it as indescribably as the fallen snow
patterns the panes it frosts in the Canadian midwinter, and the
beautiful curves of the “pineapple” and “palm-leaf” ran through them all
like its theme through a poem.
“It is the most beautiful made-thing I have ever seen,” Mrs. Crespin
said.
“And most becoming.” Rukh smiled into her eyes as he spoke, his look not
quite as light as his words. “Don’t you think so, Doctor?” he added a
shade quizzically, for Traherne was gazing fixedly at Mrs. Crespin, with
a look too in _his_ eyes. He flushed at the Raja’s words and shifted his
glance without answering; Rukh laughed softly, and let it pass.
“My Mistress of the Robes has chosen well!” He motioned his beautiful,
slim hands in noiseless applause to the ayah, who grinned, and went, as
she’d come, not making a sound.
“Why won’t the stars bear thinking of, Raja?” Lucilla asked.
“Well, dear lady, don’t you think they’re rather ostentatious? I was
guilty of a little showing off to-day, when I played that foolish trick
with my regular troops. But think of the Maharaja up yonder”—he pointed
up to the firmament outside—“who night after night whistles up his
glittering legions, and puts them through their deadly punctual drill,
as much as to say, ‘See what a devil of a fellow _I_ am!’ Do you think
it quite in good taste, Madam?”
The Punjabi mem-sahib was only veneered on the vicarage girl; Lucilla
was shocked, and tried not to show it, playing the game, and with a
forced, thin smile studied her shoe.
But Traherne laughed frankly. “I’m afraid you’re jealous, Raja! You
don’t like having to play second fiddle to a still more absolute ruler.”
“Perhaps you’re right, Doctor,” the Rajah owned; “perhaps it’s partly
that. But there’s something more to it. I can’t help resenting—”
He interrupted himself to urge Crespin to “try” the Kümmel a servant was
offering him.
Lucilla bit her lip to keep back the, “Don’t, Antony, please don’t,”
that she wanted to say.
“What is it you resent?” Traherne asked.
“Oh,” Rukh said, “the respect paid to mere size—to the immensity, as
they call it, of the universe. Are we to worship a god because he’s
big?”
“If you resent his bigness, what do you say to his littleness?” Traherne
objected. “The microscope, you know, reveals him no less than the
telescope.”
“And reveals him,” Rukh added, “in the form of death-dealing specks of
matter, which you, I understand, Doctor, are impiously proposing to
exterminate.”
“I am trying,” Traherne amended, “to marshal the life-saving against the
death-dealing powers.”
“To marshal God’s right hand against his left, eh? or _vice versa_” the
Raja demanded. “But I admit you have the better of the astronomers, in
so far as you deal in life, not in dead mechanism.” He slapped a palm
sharply down on the back of his other hand. “This mosquito that I have
just killed—I am glad to see you smoke, Madam: it helps to keep them
off—this mosquito, or any smallest thing that has life in it, is to me
far more admirable than a whole lifeless universe. What do you say,
Major?”
“I say, Raja,” Crespin replied lazily, and keeping his cigar alight,
“that if you’ll tell that fellow to give me another glass of Kümmel,
I’ll let you have your own way about the universe.”
He got his Kümmel.
“But what,” Mrs. Crespin asked, “if the mechanism, as you call it, isn’t
dead? What if the stars are swarming with life?”
“Yes—” Traherne agreed, and pushed her argument on, “suppose there are
planets, which of course we can’t see, circling round each of the great
suns we do see? And suppose they are all inhabited?”
“I’d rather not suppose it,” Rukh asserted quickly. “Isn’t one inhabited
world bad enough? Do we want it multiplied by millions?”
“But haven’t you just been telling us that a living gnat is more
wonderful than a dead universe?” Lucilla check-mated, or thought that
she had.
But the Raja slipped through. “Wonderful?” he said. “Yes, by all
means—wonderful as a device for torturing and being tortured. Oh, I’m
neither a saint nor an ascetic—I take life as I find it—I am tortured
and I torture. But there’s one thing I’m really proud of—I’m proud to
belong to the race of the Buddha, who first found out that life was a
colossal blunder. ‘His word was our arrow, his breath was our sword,’”
he quoted softly.
“Should you like the sky to be starless?” Lucilla Crespin asked him in a
low voice. (How like deep blue stars her eyes were! both he and Traherne
thought.) “That seems to me—forgive me, Raja—the last word of
impiety.”
“Possibly, Madam,” the Raja of Rukh said with a grave laugh. “How my
esteemed fellow-creatures were ever bluffed into piety is a mystery to
me. Not,” he added, “that I’m complaining. If men could not be bluffed
by the Raja above, how much less would they be bluffed by us rajas
below. And though life is a contemptible business, I don’t deny that
power is the best part of it.”
“In short,” Traherne said, “Your Highness is a Superman.”
“Ah, you read Nietzsche? Yes, if I weren’t of the kindred of the Buddha,
I should like to be of the race of that great man.”
The last servant withdrew noiselessly. Till now they had hovered about
with their trays of refreshments and tobacco.
Lucilla rose and moved to the loggia opening. “There is the moon rising
over the snowfields,” she said. “I hope you wouldn’t banish her from the
heavens?”
“Oh, no—I like her silly face”—he had followed Mrs. Crespin—“her
silly, good-natured face. And she’s useful to lovers and brigands and
other lawless vagabonds, with whom I have great sympathy. I am an
Oriental, you know. Besides, I don’t know that she’s so silly, either.
She seems to be forever raising her eyebrows in mild astonishment at
human folly.”
Crespin stirred impatiently, and said, insistently, if a little thickly,
“All this is out of my depth, Your Highness. We’ve had a rather
fatiguing day. Mightn’t we—”
“To be sure,” Rukh replied agreeably—too agreeably, Dr. Traherne
thought—“I only waited until the servants had gone. Now”—solicitously,
always the perfect host—“are you all quite comfortable?”
“Quite,” Lucilla assured him, sitting down again.
Rukh turned to Traherne. “Perfectly, thank you,” the doctor said.
The Raja glanced to the Major, and Crespin echoed, “Perfectly.”
The Raja lit a fresh cigar slowly, then stood with his back to the fire.
“Then,” he said leisurely, “we’ll go into committee upon your position
here.”
“If you please, sir,” Crespin said.
“I’m afraid,” the Raja spoke regretfully, “you may find it rather
disagreeable.”
“Communications bad, eh?” Crespin inquired more briskly than he
altogether felt. “We have a difficult journey before us?”
The Raja of Rukh smoked a moment thoughtfully before he replied very,
very slowly, a cryptic cold smile on his tawny face, “A long journey, I
fear—yet not precisely difficult.”