[1] Written in collaboration with John Taylor.
“O you cynical man!” cried the lady from Pittsburgh. She had wattles,
and a jewelled lorgnette through which she made me aware of the
disadvantage under which we suffered in that day and generation who
went about the world without shoulder-straps. She leaned forward a
little in order to obtain a better view of those worn by Mrs. Maturin’s
General.
“Heavens!” I protested. “Do you think me as young as that? A cynic is a
doggish person, who snarls. Now I may be a dog, but at bottom I am as
sentimental as a school-girl. At the same time I can’t help noticing
that people are very seldom of one piece. And I understand them better
if I put together, or take apart, the different pieces. Besides, what
people do is not often important. What may be important are their
reasons for doing it. Don’t you think?”
She didn’t. A waiter, bearing away her oyster shells, widened the
breach between us. Across it the lady from Pittsburgh confided to
me that her husband, also without shoulder-straps, who sat at the
left of our hostess, was in his quiet way working for Uncle Sam. I
asked myself if her phrase did not perhaps contain an unnecessary
preposition. For although half an hour before I had never heard of
her, I had heard of him. He was one of those gentlemen so plentiful in
Washington just then, full of good advice for the Government, and a
little uneasy lest their particular good thing be looked into by some
inquisitive commission. What his particular thing was I am too discreet
to mention; but it was good enough to keep his wife’s wattles in the
pink, not to say the purple, of condition, and to set them off by a
quite rococo display of diamonds. They confirmed me anew in an old
persuasion of mine that a diamond is a stone for a chambermaid--and not
for those rare members of that oppressed profession who are as good as
gold.
I should say for the lady from Pittsburgh that this reflection probably
came to me because fate, generally readier with a surprise than with
a piece of good fortune, had put at my other side the famous Miss
Sanderson--or the famous Mrs. Maturin, as she is now. She had in her
hair some of those perfect emeralds which are the only jewels she ever
wears. She explains that she has to, because she was born in May and
because a romantic parent took it into his head to name her Esmeralda.
Her explanation would be less convincing if the same individual had not
bequeathed her a _dot_ as melodramatic as her name. Who bequeathed her
that aureole of smouldering bronze hair--of the kind you read about in
the short-story magazines, but never see--it is not for me to say. In
such cases one usually suspects the beauty doctor. But no beauty doctor
could achieve that ivory skin, or those grey-green eyes which--Well,
they were so much more lyric than I remembered that I myself could
almost break out in the most approved magazine manner about moonlit
pools in mountain forests, etc. So if the lady from Pittsburgh
considered me an ill-natured dog, I counted myself a lucky one, after
all. Not that Mrs. Maturin is witty, or rich in recondite stores of
gossip. But then, she needs no such adventitious attractions. She has
only to enter a room to have all eyes rest upon her with the tranquil
pleasure that is given, say, by an orchid in an old silver-gilt vase.
In furtively giving myself that pleasure, amid the chatter about food
conservation which went on above a delicious terrapin soup, it amused
me to recall the last time I had seen Mrs. Maturin, there on the other
side of the world--Miss Sanderson as she was then. Whereupon she
suddenly paid me the compliment of turning away from her General long
enough to say in a low voice:
“I got it, you know. I’ll tell you about it when I get a chance. I
haven’t forgotten that I really owe it to you. And it gave me Peter.”
At the moment I was dull enough to wonder what she meant. For I had
imagined that her fortune had given her Peter. But as she turned back
to the General she bent forward a little toward Peter, across the
table, and I saw his eyes light up as they looked for hers. It was
pretty to see, at that table where diamonds lit up double chins and
pouched eyes from which all fire had long since faded. And no fortune
could have bought that. It simply is not in the market.
Even as I told myself so, however, Peter’s expression changed so
abruptly, as he caught me looking at him, with so little of pride
and triumph in his eye, that I could not help asking myself if I
had misread his radio message. Was it conceivable that any dramatic
complication of the human comedy could lie in wait among the lights and
flowers of so polite a dinner-party? At any rate, nothing but an S. O.
S. could have the passion of Peter’s look, if it were not such a look
as I first fancied. Yet why on earth should Peter be going down with
all on board--now, at our comfortable Shoreham, in our safe Washington,
before the lovely eyes of his well-dowered Esmeralda? And if by any
chance he was, what could she do to save him?
I paid for these untimely and fantastic ruminations by finding that
the lorgnette of the lady from Pittsburgh was no longer turned in my
direction. It now glittered upon young Rodman of the Intelligence
Service, at her right, who had been the means of her making that ever
delightful discovery with regard to the smallness of the world. At my
left Beauty and Valour were already deep in the war. As for myself,
whom fate has seen fit to withhold from the paths of glory, and upon
whom two great ladies now turned a sufficiently unflattering pair of
backs, I was not too piqued to be grateful for a moment in which to
turn over the case of Peter and Mrs. Peter.
Yes, Mrs. Maturin was right. I suppose I had, after all, given her
Peter. At any rate, I had accidentally set in motion the series of
events that ended in so eugenic a marriage. I have lived long enough,
however, to learn that it is never safe to say where a series of events
has ended. And knowing Peter far far better than I knew his wife, I
could not help wondering whether the condition of equilibrium which
had been arrived at were a stable one. Still, there had been that look
across the table. And larger fortunes than Mrs. Maturin’s have been
spent on objects less worthy than Peter. He was young: I fancy a little
younger than his Esmeralda. He was tall and well made. He was very
nearly as good-looking in his way as she was in hers. He was no fool,
either. He could ride, he could shoot, he could play every imaginable
game--though somehow he could never carry off the stakes. And he was
enough of an engineer, or a mineralogist, or whatever an oil-man needs
to be, for an English company to send him out to Persia, of all places,
to tap rocks and drill holes for their dark operations. The only thing
was--Well, I wondered whether he would prove completely satisfactory as
a husband. But then, perhaps it is not the truly good young man who is
most adored.
Peter, when I met him in Tehran, seemed by no means one of the truly
good. I do not say it in disparagement; for I have noticed, in this
ironic world, that the truly good seem as capable of making a botch
of their own and other people’s lives as the rest of us, while the
prodigal son appears to enjoy an undue share of immortality. Be that
as it may, the sight of Peter across the table, chatting with the
Honourable Miss Windham, brought it incongruously back to me that the
first time I ever saw him was much later in the evening than this,
between the shafts of a pre-historic victoria which he, together with
a young Russian attaché and a couple of youths whom I took to be
Telegraph, was trundling down the Lalazar, as it were the Pennsylvania
Avenue of Tehran, with every sign of enjoyment. Who was in the victoria
I don’t know. Certainly not Mrs. Maturin, then.
I afterward heard--in those places, you know, one hears everything
about everybody--that although theoretically prospecting for oil among
the mountains of Kurdistan, he was for the moment _persona non grata_
in that temperamental land, where his investigations had included the
wearers of veils. However, he was distinctly _persona grata_ with M.
Godet, the French hotel-keeper, who does so much for the local colour
of Tehran. While there are a good many young men there, what with the
Legations, the Bank, the Telegraph, and what not, and while between one
estate and another are there great gulfs fixed, in the most approved
metropolitan manner, the young men vastly outnumber the young women of
their own sort or of any other sort, for that matter. And there are
fewer things for them to do than in larger and less exotic capitals.
They therefore give themselves with the more zest to such simple
distractions as may be found in any mining-camp. And one of their
favourite distractions is to sack M. Godet’s hotel. M. Godet takes
these periodical devastations very philosophically. I suspect, in fact,
that he rather counts on them--in a country where travellers are rare
and of the less pecunious, if of the more adventurous, sort, such as
military men, rug-buyers, missionaries, and music-hall artists. As for
the young men, certain among them are mortgaged to M. Godet for life.
It is quite a recognised institution of Tehran. The Legation, or the
Bank, or the Telegraph, goes bond for its particular young man, and he
goes without everything but pilau enough to keep him at his desk until
he is square with M. Godet. Peter, being an outsider, might have fared
more hardly if I had not been foolish enough, as a fellow-countryman,
to sign my name to a certain scrap of paper drawn up between him and M.
Godet. True, the wisdom of my folly had very soon been proved by the
tearing up of that scrap of paper, not long after Peter’s departure, by
M. Godet himself. But the transaction enlightened me not a little on
such topics as the budget of the Hôtel de Paris, the price of glass in
Persia, etc. For Peter, they said, when he became a little exalted,
cried out for air, and he never could wait to open the windows. He
preferred to pitch the furniture at them. He never killed any body who
happened to be passing below.
So you see there were reasons for my liking Peter. There was something
honest and human about him. We all have impulses to throw furniture,
but not many of us have the courage of our convictions. Still, I
had never dreamed that Peter would turn out so much the hero of a
fairy-tale as to marry the miraculous Miss Sanderson. She turned up in
Tehran, too, a year or two after the war broke out, with a French maid
and a mongrel Caucasian courier. The war had caught her in Vladikavkaz,
Kisliavodsk, one of those watering-places in the Caucasus. She had
stayed on in Russia, waiting for the war to stop, till she made up
her mind that the longest way around was the shortest way home. And
she sailed into the Legation one day, with a letter from the Embassy
at Petrograd, desiring to be presented at court and to be shown the
Peacock Throne.
It is hard to deny the requests of beautiful ladies. The requests of
Miss Sanderson were peculiarly impossible, because, in the first place,
ladies are not presented at court in Persia, as they are in more modern
monarchies, and because, in the second place, there happens to be no
Peacock Throne. There was one once, with a history as wonderful as
its canopy of jewelled peacocks, of which there remains nothing but a
doubtful modern fragment. And there is now another, whose name refers
not to its decoration, but to a certain Madam Peacock who adorned the
harem of Fat’h Ali Shah. These facts were set forth at considerable
length, many years ago, in his important work on Persia, by Lord
Curzon of Kedleston. But if every other traveller always demanded a
sight of the Peacock Throne, and always went away doubting our account
of the matter, how could eyes so romantic as those of Miss Sanderson
be expected to waste themselves on the closely printed and none too
thrilling pages of an ex-Viceroy of India? So I contented myself by
pointing out to Miss Sanderson that the Peacock Throne had not been
visible since the coronation of young Ahmed Shah, and that Tehran was
full of dark rumours as to its having been sold, together with many
other magnificent things belonging to the Persian crown. In the third
place, however, the requests of the lovely Esmeralda were in particular
impossible because of the moment which she chose for making them. It
was the moment when the rivers of German gold poured out in Persia had
begun to produce their effect. The Holy War had been preached, the
banks in the south had been looted, the gendarmes had gone over to the
enemy after their Swedish officers, the battle of Kengaver had been
fought, and Kermanshah and Hamadan had been taken by the Turks. Even in
Tehran things were beginning to look very funny. I therefore urged Miss
Sanderson to return to Russia while she could and get home via Sweden
or Siberia. As for going to India by way of the Gulf, it was out of the
question.
All the same, she did it! Impossible, I suppose, is a word not to be
found in the dictionaries of lovely ladies who all their lives have
seen the most obdurate doors fly open before them. And this lovely lady
evidently had her share of the resolution, or of a certain indifference
to the realities of life, for which her sex is noted. Not that she took
anybody into her confidence--except Peter. Him she also took with her,
to the vast amusement of Tehran, for whom the fantasies of the American
virgin upon her travels are still more or less a novelty. The gossip
was that she had discharged her courier and taken Peter on instead.
Everybody knew that poor Peter was hard up. At any rate, I happened to
know that he and Miss Sanderson had never heard of each other until I
introduced them, shortly before they disappeared. And that introduction
was merely an accident. On such careless threads do hang the destinies
of men!
As I considered it, eyeing the correct and opulent Peter, who now
looked secure against the accidents of life, I had to scratch my head
to recall just how we had turned so successful a trick, Providence and
I. Oh, yes: an emerald, of course. Miss Sanderson had not taken me very
seriously at first, and had gone over my head to the Chief and then to
the Russians. She had letters to them, too. But a few days later, when
I ran across her at the French Legation, she said she had about made up
her mind to take my advice. Persia was too disappointing, what with the
dirt and the ugliness and the discomfort and the obstacles everybody
put in the way of her seeing the sights, if there really were any. She
had even been unable to find anything in the Bazaar.
I explained to her that in Persia nobody goes shopping in bazaars, if
antiques were what she was after. The only thing was to get hold of
a go-between, a sort of broker who has ways of getting into Persian
houses and of getting out the treasures some of them contain.
“Then find me one,” she promptly recommended.
It appeared that she didn’t want rugs or tiles or miniatures or any
of the other things that most people take from Persia. She wanted an
emerald, and a much better one than she had seen in the shops. It
was then that I first heard of her fancy for emeralds. She had one
that belonged to Marie Antoinette. She had another that came from the
magnificent collection of Abd-ül-Hamid. Why shouldn’t she have a third
out of the treasury in Tehran--if the Shah’s jewels were really being
sold? If I wouldn’t show her the Peacock Throne, I might at least get
her a go-between. The notion seemed to tickle her enormously, and she
refused to be frightened by my warnings that she would have to keep her
eyes very wide open and pay any number of commissions without knowing
it, including a good fat one for me.
So it was that I handed her over to Peter. Not that Peter was the
go-between. The go-between was a picturesque character known in Tehran
as the Adorner of the Monarchy. The Adorner of the Monarchy, otherwise
one Yeprem Khan, is really an Armenian, I believe. Just how he came to
merit his flowery Persian title I cannot say--unless by virtue of his
decorative beard, which he dyes purple with henna. Or perhaps it is
because out of his back shop in Tiflis, which is his true headquarters,
come most of the Rhages jars which adorn the collections of Europe
and America. At any rate, the Adorner of the Monarchy is one of the
greatest artists and most unmitigated rascals in Asia. There is very
little in the way of Saracenic antiquities which the old scarecrow
cannot turn out of that mysterious back shop of his in Tiflis, though
he specialises in pre-Sefevian pottery. The only trouble with it is
that some of it is genuine. For in that sort of thing the Adorner
of the Monarchy has the scent of a bloodhound. And he sticks that
sanguine beard of his into every corner of western Asia where there may
be battle, revolution, or sudden death, seeking what he may devour.
Wherefore, I suppose, did he happen to be there in Tehran when we
wanted him.
Of course if it had been something really nice Miss Sanderson was
after, like an eleventh-century bowl or a miniature by Behzad, she
would have been a lost woman. As it was, she knew a good deal more
about emeralds than the Adorner of the Monarchy. I could as easily
have conceived him taking an interest in Mission furniture. The point
was that those clairvoyant eyes of his, as black and deep as Avernus,
yet humourously three-cornered, could find anything for anybody. They
even say he was the one who found that French countess for Prince
Salar-es-Somebody. However, for extra precaution I called in Peter.
There were half a dozen obvious enough reasons why he was a better man
for Miss Sanderson’s affair than I, the most important being that I had
something else to think about just then than trinkets for beautiful
ladies. Things had already been looking rather funny behind the scenes
in Tehran. They got funnier until that day when the fat little Shah
was stopped in the nick of time from running away to Isfahan and the
Germans. His valuables had gone, his bodyguard had gone, he himself
was on the point of going, when the British and Russian ministers
demanded even more insistently than Miss Sanderson an audience with
him. Precisely what they said to him has yet to be published, though we
got a fairly reliable version of it before night. But the Shah did not
go to Isfahan.
Peter and Miss Sanderson did, however. The first definite news we had
of them was from there, in a note of Peter’s that came through as soon
as the Russians had cleared the road. Not that the note brought any
real news. It merely contained an inclosure for M. Godet and laconic
thanks for my own part in that affair. Nor did we hear anything more
about our enterprising pair before I had to leave Tehran myself. And
here I had run into them again, alive and married, in Washington! It
was a common enough whirligig of life, but I was simple enough to
be amused by it. I wished that blessed General would hurry up with
his National Army. In the meantime I speculated as to which of Mrs.
Maturin’s emeralds was the Persian one. That, of course, must have been
what she meant she owed me. What interested me more, though, was how
they had managed to get through the Turkish lines, and how long it had
taken them to get married. They must have had adventures, those two.
If life were like stories, Esmeralda would at this point have turned
back to me and have taken up her part in these reminiscences, or I
would have prepared for it by shouting across the table at Peter.
But both these young people were otherwise occupied, while the lady
from Pittsburgh continued to be engrossed in Rodman and his aunts. I
therefore plied my fork in undistinguished silence, outwardly trying
to look intelligent and inwardly comparing the Shoreham with the Hôtel
de Paris. If one was rather better appointed and the other a little
livelier, it would be hard to say which of the two could collect
queerer fish out of the seven seas. Washington and Tehran, for that
matter, are a good deal alike. Neither quite looks its part, and in
both there is a great deal more news than ever comes out in any paper.
I would not swear, either, that it is more reliable or less fantastic
in one capital than in the other. What I found most fantastic, though,
was that I, whose own affairs are far from glittering, should turn out
to be a sort of Harun-ar-Rashid, carelessly presenting a capricious
lady with the jewel of her heart’s desire and an unfortunate gentleman
with a fortune and a wife. As I considered it I began to feel the pride
of the creator in his handiwork. After all, Providence needs a poke
now and then. Even Mr. Belasco: would he do as well for us in that new
play to which we were going after dinner? Which for some obscure reason
reminded me of my newly married cousin Millicent, who didn’t want her
cook to make friends with the cook next door because the people in that
house were Presbyterians. And so on, and so on.
Dessert was in sight before the General finished what he had to say
about the improvisation of the Air Service, whose deficiencies I hope
he overstated. He then pronounced highly enlightening and worthy
of being brought to the attention of the M. I. D. Mrs. Maturin’s
report of the military preparations of India and Japan--as observed
from the port-holes of ocean greyhounds, the windows of first-class
compartments, and the lobbies of the best hotels. And at last Mrs.
Maturin turned to me.
“But where is it?” I demanded, beginning with what interested me least.
“Which one is it?”
It was her turn to be mystified, having been occupied with affairs of
state while I was mooning about her and Peter. But, noticing that my
eyes were on the points of green light in her bronze hair, she came
around quickly enough.
“Oh, it isn’t there. It’s--it’s quite a story,” she broke off. I was
ready to believe her. But dessert was already on, and I hadn’t waited
all that time to hear the threadbare old yarn of bargaining in Asia.
“The funny part of it,” Mrs. Maturin went on, “is that I saw the
Peacock Throne after all--thanks to you.” She leaned toward me as if to
confide the most delightful of secrets. “That’s where I got my emerald.”
If jaws could drop, mine would have crashed into my plate. My
partnership with Providence had gone rather farther than I foresaw if
it had been the means of providing the lovely Esmeralda not only with a
historic precious stone, but with one from a piece of furniture which
does not exist. I began to feel vaguely uneasy. I remembered what in my
pride of a Harun-ar-Rashid I had almost forgotten, that look of Peter’s
across the table. And so many questions suddenly surged up into the
back of my head that I again asked the one which interested me least.
“How soon did you young people make up your minds to get married? In
Tehran?”
“Oh dear no! It wasn’t till we got to India. And then we were driven
into it. People kept making the most stupid mistakes--insisting on
giving us the same room, and all that sort of thing. Of course it was a
mad thing to do, to trail off like that with a man I had never seen or
heard of the week before. But I was just wild to get that emerald. And
Peter was such a sport--not like the rest of you old fogies in Tehran.
And then out there in Persia, in sight of the war, things didn’t look
just as they would here. We had no end of a time, you know. I wondered
afterward that I ever had the courage to go through with it. But,” she
added irrelevantly, “if it hadn’t been for that, I would have gone
straight to Paris and cut Pierre Loti’s throat!”
“O! la! la!” I let out, marvelling that a Mrs. Maturin should hold an
unorthodox literary opinion. “Why his?” There are so many other throats
that need cutting first.
“Well, he is such an awful liar. I don’t know why it is that people who
write books give you such false impressions. They always lead you to
expect so much colour and magnificence in the East, when it is mostly
dirt and fleas--or worse.”
It was curious that a lady capable of discovering Kisliavodsk, and of
running away with a strange man into the jaws of the Germans, should be
incapable of seeing Persia through her own eyes. I might have pointed
out to her that if the readers of books have made up their minds what a
country ought to be like, the most candid writers of books have small
chance against them, and that a Pierre Loti will make admirable prose
out of the most unpromising material. But what I wanted to point out to
her was that books at least get on with their stories faster than she
was doing. Instead of which I remarked:
“The Adorner of the Monarchy is quite a character, isn’t he? He must
have worked the oracle very quickly, for you to have scuttled off from
Tehran as soon as you did.”
She smiled.
“He didn’t work it in Tehran. He worked it in Kum. That, really, was
how Peter happened to go with us. My courier refused to when he heard
about that little rumpus the Turks were stirring up.”
“Kum!” I cried. “Why Kum, of all earthly places? I never heard of
anybody going to Kum except on a pilgrimage to that shrine.”
“Well, that’s what we did.”
I stared at her, for that shrine is one of the most sacred spots
in Persia. It is the last resting-place of Fatima the Immaculate,
granddaughter I don’t remember how many times great of the Prophet, and
sister of the Imam Riza--who flies over once a week from his own more
famous tomb in Meshed to visit her. And few there are, of Christian
birth, that is, who have seen it.
“You look as if you didn’t believe me,” said Mrs. Maturin. “But it
was simple enough. Don’t you remember how the Shah tried to run away
to Isfahan, and how he sent his things on ahead of him? Well, when he
didn’t turn up, they put the things into the shrine at Kum for safe
keeping. The Adorner of the Monarchy happened to know about it. And you
were quite right about the Shah’s being willing to sell some of his
jewels. That was how we happened to go to Kum. Have you been there?”
I had to tell her that having spent three years within walking
distance, so to speak, of it, I had never visited it.
“I had never even heard of it,” she was frank enough to confess. “But
it was more like Persia than anything else I saw. We had to go in
disguise, you know. I was supposed to be the wife of the Adorner of the
Monarchy, and Peter and Claudine were our servants! It was immense fun.
But that costume is horribly stuffy, I assure you. And I couldn’t half
see anything through that little strip of openwork in front of my eyes.”
She almost left me speechless.
“Perhaps,” I allowed myself to suggest, “that was why you liked it so
much.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” she was again human enough to admit. “But there’s
really a lot of colour there, besides those usual horrid mud houses
and flat roofs. Miles before we got there we could see the dome of
Fatima’s tomb glittering like a great gold bubble above the plain, with
iridescent mountains behind it. And as we got nearer we made out the
big turquoise minarets around it, and smaller domes of peacock tiles,
and little blue-and-green tiled pinnacles, above cream-coloured walls.
You have no idea how attractive it was.”
That, I must confess, would ordinarily have been enough to quench my
interest. When beautiful ladies call a place attractive, the game, so
far as I am concerned, is up. But this was a different game.
“Did you really go into the shrine itself?” I asked.
“Of course we did. We had to, to carry out the comedy. And I didn’t
know what it didn’t cost us. They were dreadfully afraid we would
betray ourselves and get them into trouble. They whisked us out in no
time. I got only the vaguest impression, through my strip of open-work,
of a dim-lighted octagon, and a catafalque covered with cloth of gold
behind a tall silver grille. But it was worth it.”
I was grateful to them, whoever they were, for delaying me no longer
than necessary. It came to me a little enviously, though, that beauty
and gold are indeed magic keys. Also that dessert was disappearing all
too rapidly. Likewise that the lady from Pittsburgh was eyeing Mrs.
Maturin through her lorgnette.
“Then they took us,” the latter went on, “through a porcelain gateway
into the loveliest little cloister I ever saw--all blue and green
tiles, with a toy river running through it, in a channel of mossy
marble that widened in the centre into a big oblong pool. Some enormous
cypress-trees were reflected in it.”
I thought it must have been very becoming to her. But I was too afraid
of wasting time to tell her so.
“I hoped they would empty the pool and let us into a secret passage
at the bottom of it, or something like that. But they took us through
a high tiled porch at one end of the court, into a sort of apartment
where the Shah stays when he makes pilgrimages to the shrine--all
plaster arabesques, stuck over in the quaintest way with bits of mirror
glass.”
“Was it there?” I asked desperately, perceiving signs of coffee.
“Not in the room where we sat down. There was nothing but rugs and
couches. They served us tea and candies and ices, and they talked
about the weather, and asked how many children Peter and I had. They
were frightfully embarrassing. And at last, one at a time, they began
showing us things that the Shah had sent there and wanted to sell.”
“Fancy!” I heard from my right.
“Some of them were quite nice,” said Mrs. Maturin. “There were one
or two big carpets, and a few of those funny old books full of gaudy
little pictures that look like nothing on earth, touched up with gold.
Pottery, too. The usual bazaar kind of thing, only better of its kind
than usual. Then they showed us jewels--bowls of them! They were
nothing very extraordinary, though: mostly rubies and pearls. I didn’t
have my veil down, either,” she added. “They let me put it off, in
there. But I wouldn’t let them put me off, even when they brought out
two or three good enough emeralds. The Adorner of the Monarchy--isn’t
he killing!--had got us permission to see the Peacock Throne, and I
insisted that they must let us see it. So at last, very unwillingly,
they took us into an inner room. It was full of boxes and bundles,
piled helter-skelter on top of one another. They cleared off some of
them till they came to an enormous case, which they opened with the
most ridiculous little adzes you ever saw. And out of it they pulled a
mountain of paper and old silks. But under them all was the throne.”
“Her voice had gradually been lifting, and by this time the rest of the
table was silent. What came to me that time was that a story is never
quite the same for the different people who listen to it, and that no
one there could possibly be listening quite so intensely as I--unless
it were Peter. But if he was going down with all on board, he had
evidently made up his mind to it. I caught that out of the corner of my
eye.”
“Did you sit on it?” asked the General, jovially.
“Of course I did!” answered Mrs. Maturin. “And it was as uncomfortable
as thrones are said to be. It wasn’t a chair at all, but a kind of
longish platform, set on seven curved legs, with two or three steps
at one end. There was a balustrade around the platform, with enameled
inscriptions in cartouches outside of it, and a high back. It ended in
a jewelled peacock with an outspread tail of turquoises, sapphires, and
emeralds. But the most prodigious emerald of all was set in his breast.”
“No diamonds?” demanded Pittsburgh.
“None that I remember,” answered Esmeralda, “except in the peacock’s
crest. He was a wonderful peacock, but somehow he didn’t look to me
quite in keeping with the rest of the throne. And sure enough, the
Adorner of the Monarchy said I was right. So many things have happened
to that throne in all the centuries it has gone knocking around Asia;
and the peacock is a modern restoration. But there isn’t a particle of
doubt about the rest of it. Whatever happens, I can say I have sat on
the throne of Tamerlane! He began it, you know. And Jehan Shah, that
Indian Mogul who built the Taj Mahal, finished it. And afterward it was
looted from Agra by--Who was it?” she asked, turning to me.
“Nadir Shah, from Delhi, in 1739,” I replied with more particularity
than perhaps was necessary. What could I do? I couldn’t, before all
those people, point out that her history and her throne didn’t go
together. Yet each was well enough in its way--except for the peacock.
That I had never seen or heard of. But she had not been taken in by it.
After all, I breathed more freely. Besides, the liqueurs were being
passed.
“Oh, yes; Nadir Shah.” Mrs. Maturin took green chartreuse. “And after
his death the Kurds got hold of it. But I never dreamed of anything
so magnificent. The gold and enamel of the throne were crusted with
precious stones, as if a swarm of gorgeous tropical beetles had
descended on it. Never in my life have I seen so many emeralds. There
was one splendid one on the right arm, uncut and very deep in colour,
where the hands of the Shahs and the Moguls and Tamerlane and who knows
how many other kings before him must have rested, when they were
granting life and death to the slaves at their feet.”
“How interesting!” burst out the lady from Pittsburgh. “But what a pity
you didn’t see it in the palace, in its own setting, the way we saw
the throne of the Sultans in Constantinople! The ambassador happened
to be a friend of my husband’s, and as a very special favour he got us
permission to see the old Seraglio.”
The infamous woman had the floor, and she didn’t propose to relinquish
it until she had told every last detail of that routine experience
which was shared by hundreds of tourists every year before the war. I
could have cut her throat much more easily than Mrs. Maturin could have
cut Pierre Loti’s. She had spoiled Mrs. Maturin’s story--how utterly
nobody knew better than I. And Peter’s impassive countenance told me
nothing. I shamelessly edged over to Mrs. Peter.
“Which one was it?” I whispered. “The one in the peacock’s breast?”
She shook her head. “Too incredible!” She looked around the table,
where everyone but the lady from Pittsburgh, was aware that it was time
to go to the theatre. The General, drumming a little on the cloth,
favoured me with a wink. Mrs. Maturin decided to whisper back. “The
one on the arm. We had a terrific time about it. They nearly ruined me
for life. Your commission must have been pretty plump! And they made
us swear the most awful oaths that we would never breathe a word as
long we lived. Then they sent us packing that night, out of a little
side door, where our carriage was waiting, straight to Isfahan. I
carried it in my hand all the way.”
“But where is it?” I demanded. “Why on earth didn’t you wear it
to-night for me to see? Is it too precious?”
She hesitated so queerly that my dormant uneasiness stirred anew.
“Of course, if we had only been buying an emerald, we could have found
one quite as good, and for far less in New York; though Peter insists
we could not. But then, this was not an ordinary stone. After all, what
jewel is, if you know its history? Peter had it beautifully mounted for
me--in Agra, in sight of the Taj Mahal. As a matter of fact, though, it
doesn’t look worth the fortune we paid for it.”
“Nothing does,” I said as much to myself as to her. “Life is like that.
It is the pursuit we value, not the acquisition.”
“What I mean,” she explained, “is that it doesn’t show for what it
really is. Those uncut stones never do, you know. And they don’t go
with modern clothes. So I want to have it cut. It’s the only thing on
which we differ, Peter and I. You would never guess how sentimental he
is.”
I somewhat perfunctorily began to assure her that sentiment is coming
into fashion again when our hostess at last gave her signal, and we all
stood up.
In the moment of confusion that followed I saw Peter join his wife. I
also saw, as I pulled away the chair of the lady from Pittsburgh, that
she, she of the wattles and the diamonds, and not the lovely Esmeralda,
had been the one to save Peter this time. In fact, I saw that you never
can tell when life will turn dramatic in your hands, even at so polite
a dinner-party as ours. I saw it the more distinctly because it was
so invisible. The thing was “a drama of small, smothered, intensely
private things,” as Henry James says. Nevertheless it made me impatient
of the play for which we were already late. Mr. Belasco, of course,
would arrange everything very much better, with tears and smiles in
their proper order. Here everything had been too long drawn out in the
beginning and too much jammed at the end. The end, indeed, was just
what was lacking, now that Mrs. Maturin had given it so disquieting
a twist--and what I stood small chance of getting hold of in that
confounded box at the Belasco.
So I followed the others out of the dining-room, much less concerned
about my hat than about the whimsicalities of playing Harun-ar-Rashid.
Not that I minded my own fix, now that I took in what it might mean to
have a beautiful lady beholden to one for an emerald of Tamerlane. The
worst was that they might think I really had taken a commission from
that old terror in Tehran. Nor could I feel too sorry for Mrs. Maturin.
I had done my best for her, and I had given her due warning. If she
had been taken in, if she had paid a Shah’s ransom for a bit of green
paste out of the back shop of the Adorner of the Monarchy, it was her
own fault. What a magnificent hoax, though, pulled off in how artistic
a manner! Mr. Belasco himself couldn’t have staged it better, or have
left her so unaware of having been taken in. And, after all, she could
afford her little caprices. Besides which, she had Peter to show for
it. He was more of a jewel than perhaps she knew. If she didn’t, she
still had her famous eyes and her famous hair. Those were genuine
enough and rare enough, in all conscience, and nothing could rob her of
them--except time.
But Peter, poor old Peter, who could always play a game, but who could
never carry off the stakes: what would time do for him? Peter disturbed
me more than anything. Had he been taken in, too? Or--I must confess I
was black enough to put that question to myself--had he helped to take
Esmeralda in? He would almost have been justified in doing it, hard up
as he was at the time. In any case, he must have come in for a very
tidy little commission. Otherwise how could he possibly have squared M.
Godet so soon? And I wondered if he was capable of the sentiment with
which his wife credited him when she confided to me that he didn’t want
the emerald cut. But if it was cut--there could be no doubt it would be
if Mrs. Maturin had so made up her mind--and if the historic jewel did
turn out to be a sham, what then? Of course I did not know for sure;
I generally do jump at wrong conclusions. Still, it was a very pretty
little predicament even if the stone was genuine. For--
At the cloak-room door I suddenly felt a hand in my arm. It was
Peter’s. He showed no trace of my self-consciousness.
“Let’s walk around to the theatre,” he proposed. “A breath of air will
be nice after all that cackle. I have told Esmeralda. She’s going to
take the General in our car. Do you mind?”
I didn’t. As for Peter, he at once began to talk quite naturally
about Tehran. It amused me, on H Street, to go back to the Lalazar.
My news was a little later than Peter’s, and I was able to tell him
details of the Turco-German invasion, the recapture of Hamadan, the
adventures of several of our friends. Half a dozen of the young men he
had known in the Hôtel de Paris had already met their fates in France,
in Macedonia, in Mesopotamia, in Poland. They had, at any rate--one or
two of them--been released in the most unexpected of ways from their
obligations to M. Godet. M. Godet himself, for that matter, had not let
his collection of I. O. U.’s stand in the way of going home and taking
his own part in Armageddon.
These matters kept us from turning down to the Belasco when we reached
the corner of Lafayette Square. We compromised by striking into it. And
presently Peter announced:
“I have enlisted, too--in the Aviation. They took me this afternoon.
I’m on the ragged edge of being too old for it; but I’m as fit as a
fiddle, and I passed all those whirligig things they put you through
better than any of the youngsters.”
No one, of course, is any longer surprised by anything. I heard myself
make the usual remarks, with a wave of my hand toward Lafayette and
Rochambeau, standing on their pedestals among the Washington trees.
Peter smiled a little.
“I don’t know very much about right and wrong, and our debt to France,
and all the rest of it; but I’m not used to being a quiet family man,
you know, and you feel like a fool rolling around here in a limousine
while over there----”
He broke off abruptly, drawing me in the direction of our theatre. He
might be fit as a fiddle, but it struck me as I glanced at him under
an electric light that he looked worn--as if, perhaps, he had been
required to produce itemised accounts, and had found it difficult.
He had nothing of his own, not even the oil company now, and with
the best possible intentions there seemed no likelihood of his
obtaining anything commensurate with his position as the husband of
Mrs. Maturin. Charming as his wife was, I should expect to find her a
rather precise pay-master. That was an element of the situation which
I had not taken in at first in considering what we had brought about,
Providence and I. At any rate, Peter would never be able to slide the
bill for an extremely large and perfectly cut emerald into his postage
account--the less so as I don’t suppose he wrote three letters a year.
But long before our winding path brought us back to the street I had
absolved him. If he had sowed his wild oat or two, he had never been a
cad. He could not have known, poor wretch, what he was letting himself
in for. He had never been one to go smelling around antiquity shops.
He had not known until he took the emerald to be mounted. And after
the commission, the emerald must have become a thing too terrific to
explain. Had the marriage been, perhaps, an attempt at reparation which
might not succeed? At any rate, Peter had always needed air in moments
of exaltation. Well, he would get it. He would no doubt get medals,
too. They made me, as we sauntered toward our belated theatre-party,
a sufficiently telling picture. I seemed to see, against a background
of sanguine mist, with perhaps a white wooden cross visible in it,
the image of a Mrs. Maturin no longer young, fingering an emerald
now never to be cut, which was all that was left to her of the most
romantic episode of her life. But what I saw most clearly was that life
is an egregiously jumbled-up mess, and that many nameless things, not
to be mentioned in official histories, must lie behind the momentous
decisions of life. And then at last we reached the lighted doorway
of the theatre. For some reason or other we both hesitated to go in
and admire the well-arranged passions and admirable upholstery of Mr.
Belasco.
“That was a rum affair you started us off on, wasn’t it?” Peter
suddenly exclaimed. “But, after all, it was only fair that you should
hear the rest of the story. Did my wife tell you the end?”