IV

The festivities in honour of the Shah’s coronation took place at Bala

Bala with due solemnity. Among the black tents there was much plucking

of plaintive strings, there was more stuffing of mutton and _pilau_,

and after dark many little rockets, improvised out of gunpowder and

baked clay, traced brief arabesques of gold against the black of the

underlying gorges. The castle celebrated in the same simple way. The

stuffing, to be sure, was more prolonged and recondite, while dancers

imported from Dizful swayed and snapped their fingers, singing for

the pleasure of the Father of Swords. The eyes of that old man of the

mountain remained opaque as ever, save when he rebuked the almoner who

sat at meat with him for indecorously quoting the lines of Sadi, when

he says: “Such was this delicate crescent of the moon, and fascination

of the holy, this form of an angel, and decoration of a peacock, that

let them once behold her, and continence must cease to exist in the

constitutions of the chaste.”

This rebuke might have been called forth by the presence of another

guest of the board. Be that as it may, the eyes of the Father of Swords

glimmered perceptibly when they rested on the unannounced visitor for

whom he fished out, with his own henna’ed fingers, the fattest morsels

of mutton and the juiciest sweets. I hasten to add that the newcomer

was not the one whose earlier arrival and interview with the Father of

Swords has already been recorded. He was, nevertheless, a personage not

unknown to this record, whether as Senhor Magin of Brazil or as the

emissary of the Shah of the Shahs of _Firengistan_. For not only had he

felt impelled to bid good-bye a second time to his friend Adolf Ganz,

prince among the merchants of Shustar. He had even postponed his voyage

down the Karun long enough to make one more journey overland to Bala

Bala. And he heard there, not without interest, the story of the short

visit and the sudden flight of the young Englishman he had accidentally

met on the river.

As for Matthews, he celebrated the coronation at Dizful, in bed. And by

the time he had slept off his fag, Bala Bala and the Father of Swords

and the green chest and the ingenious Magin looked to him more than

ever like figures of myth. He was too little of the timber out of

which journalists, romancers, or diplomats are made to take them very

seriously. The world he lived in, moreover, was too solid to be shaken

by any such flimsy device as the one of which he had happened to catch

a glimpse. What had been real to him was that he, Guy Matthews, had

been suspected of playing a part in story-book intrigues, and had been

treated rudely by an old barbarian of whom he expected the proverbial

hospitality of the East. His affair had therefore been to show Mr.

Scarlet Beard that if a Lur could turn his back, an Englishman could

do likewise. He now saw, to be sure, that he himself had not been

altogether the pattern of courtesy. But the old man of the mountain

had got what was coming to him. And Matthews regretted very little,

after all, missing what he had gone to see. For Dizful, peering at

him through the arches of the bridge, reminded that there was still

something to see.

It must be said of him, however, that he showed no impatience to see

the neighbouring ruins of Susa. He was not one, this young man who was

out for a bit of a lark, to sentimentalise about antiquity or the charm

of the unspoiled. Yet even such young men are capable of finding the

rumness of strange towns a passable enough lark, to say nothing of the

general unexpectedness of life. And Dizful turned out to be quite as

unexpected, in its way, as Bala Bala. Matthews found that out before he

had been three days in the place, when a sudden roar set all the loose

little panes tinkling in Shir Ali Khan’s garden windows.

Abbas explained that this was merely a cannon shot, announcing the new

moon of Ramazan. That loud call of the faith evidently made Dizful a

rummer place than it normally was. Matthews soon got used to the daily

repetitions of the sound, rumbling off at sunset and before dawn into

the silence of the plains. But the recurrent explosion became for

him the voice of the particular rumness of that fanatical old border

town--of fierce suns, terrific smells, snapping dogs, and scowling

people. When the stranger without the gate crossed his bridge of a

morning for a stroll in the town, he felt like a discoverer of some

lost desert city. He threaded alleys of blinding light, he explored

dim thatched bazaars, he studied tiled doorways in blank mud walls, he

investigated quaint water-mills by the river, and scarce a soul did he

see, unless a stork in its nest on top of a tall _badgir_ or a naked

dervish lying in a scrap of shade asleep under a lion skin. It was as

if Dizful drowsed sullenly in that July blaze brewing something, like a

geyser, and burst out with it at the end of the unendurable day.

The brew of the night, however, was a different mixture, quite the

rummest compound of its kind Matthews had ever tasted. The bang of the

sunset gun instantly brought the deserted city back to life. Lights

began to twinkle--in tea houses, along the river, among the indigo

plantations--streets filled with ghostly costumes and jostling camels,

and everywhere voices would celebrate the happy return of dusk so

strangely and piercingly that they made Matthews think of “battles

far away.” This was most so when he listened to them, out of sight of

unfriendly eyes, from his own garden. Above the extraordinary rumour

that drifted to him through the arches of the bridge he heard the

wailing of pipes, raucous blasts of cow horns, the thumping of drums;

while dogs barked incessantly, and all night long the caravans of

Mesopotamia jingled to and fro. Then the cannon would thunder out its

climax, and the city would fall anew under the spell of the sun.

The moon of those Arabian nights was nearing its first quarter and

Matthews was waiting for it to become bright enough for him to fulfill

his true duty as a sight-seer by riding to the mounds of Susa, when

Dizful treated him to fresh discoveries as to what an unspoiled town

may contain. It contained, Abbas informed Matthews with some mystery

after one of his prolonged visits to the bazaar, another _firengi_.

This _firengi’s_ servant, moreover, had given Abbas explicit directions

as to the whereabouts of the _firengi’s_ house, in order that Abbas

might give due warning, as is the custom of the country, of a call from

Matthews. Whereat Matthews made the surprising announcement that he had

not come to Dizful to call on _firengis_. The chief charm of Dizful

for him, as a matter of fact, was that there he felt himself free of

the social obligations under which he had lain rather longer than he

liked. But if Abbas was able to resign himself to this new proof of

the eccentricity of his master, the unknown _firengi_ apparently was

not. At all events, Matthews soon made another discovery as to the

possibilities of Dizful. An evening or two later, as he loitered on the

bridge watching a string of loaded camels, a respectable-looking old

gentleman in a black _aba_ addressed him in French. French in Dizful!

And it appeared that this remarkable Elamite was a Jew, who had picked

up in Baghdad the idiom of Paris! He went on to describe himself as the

“agent” of a distinguished foreign resident, who, the linguistic old

gentleman gave Matthews to understand, languished for a sight of the

new-comer, and was unable to understand why he had not already been

favoured with a call. His pain was the deeper because the newcomer had

recently enjoyed the hospitality of this distinguished foreign resident

on a little yacht in the river.

“The unmitigated bounder!” exclaimed Matthews, unable to deliver

himself in French of that sentiment, and turning upon the stupefied old

gentleman a rude Anglo-Saxon back. “He has cheek enough for anything.”

He had enough, at any rate, to knock the next afternoon, unannounced,

on Matthews’s gate, to follow Matthews’s servant into the house without

waiting to hear whether Matthews would receive him, to present himself

at the door of the dim underground _serdab_ where Matthews lounged in

his pyjamas till it should be cool enough to go out, to make Matthews

the most ceremonious of bows, and to give that young man a half-amused,

half-annoyed, consciousness of being put at his ease. The advantage

of position, Matthews had good reason to feel, was with himself. He

knew more about the bounder than the bounder thought, and it was not

he who had knocked at the bounder’s gate. Yet the sound of that knock,

pealing muffled through the hot silence, had been distinctly welcome.

Nor could our incipient connoisseur of rum towns pretend that the

sight of Magin bowing in the doorway was wholly unwelcome, so long had

he been stewing there in the sun by himself. What annoyed him, what

amused him, what in spite of himself impressed him, was to see how the

bounder ignored advantages of position. Matthews had forgotten, too,

what an imposing individual the bounder really was. And measuring his

tall figure, listening to his deep voice, looking at his light eyes

and his two sinister scars and the big shaved dome of a head which he

this time uncovered, our cool enough young man wondered whether there

might be something more than fantastic about this navigator of strange

waters. It was rather odd, at all events, how he kept bobbing up, and

what a power he had of quickening--what? A school-boyish sense of the

romantic? Or mere vulgar curiosity? For he suddenly found himself

aware, Guy Matthews, that what he knew about his visitor was less than

what he desired to know.

The visitor made no haste, however, to volunteer any information. Nor

did he make of Matthews any but the most perfunctory inquiries.

“And Monsieur--What was his name? Your Frenchman?” he continued.

“Gaston. He’s not my Frenchman, though,” replied Matthews. “He went

back long ago.”

“Oh!” uttered Magin. He declined the refreshments which Abbas at that

point produced, even to the cigarette Matthews offered him. He merely

glanced at the make. Then he examined, with a flicker of amusement in

his eyes, the bare white-washed room. A runnel of water trickled across

it in a stone channel that widened in the centre into a shallow pool.

“A bit of a lark, eh? I remember that _mot_ of yours, Mr. Matthews. To

sit steaming, or perhaps I should say dreaming, in a sort of Turkish

bath in the bottom of Elam while over there in Europe----”

“Is there anything new?” asked Matthews, recognising his caller’s habit

of finishing a sentence with a gesture. “Archdukes and that sort of

thing don’t seem to matter much in Dizful. I have even lost track of

the date.”

“I would not have thought an Englishman so--_dolce far niente_,” said

Magin. “It is perhaps because we archæologists feed on dates! I happen

to recollect, though, that we first met on the eighteenth of July. And

to-day, if you would like to know, is Saturday, the first of August,

1914.” The flicker of amusement in his eyes became something more

inscrutable. “But there is a telegraph even in Elam,” he went on. “A

little news trickles out of it now and then. Don’t you ever catch,

perhaps, some echo of the trickle?”

“That’s not my idea of a lark,” laughed Matthews.

Magin regarded him a moment.

“Well,” he conceded, “Europe does take on a new perspective from the

point of view of Susa. I see you are a philosopher, sitting amidst the

ruins of empires and wisely preferring the trickle of your fountain to

the trickle of the telegraph. If Austria falls to pieces, if Serbia

reaches the Adriatic, what is that to us? Nothing but a story that in

Elam has been told too often to have any novelty! Eh?”

“Why,” asked Matthews, quickly, “is that on already?”

Magin looked at him again a moment before answering.

“Not yet! But why,” he added, “do you say already?”

His voice had a curious rumble in the dim stone room. Matthews wondered

whether it were because the acoustic properties of a _serdab_ in Dizful

differ from those of a galley on the Karun, or whether there really

were something new about him.

“Why, it’s bound to come sooner or later, isn’t it? If it’s true that

all the way from Nish to Ragusa those chaps speak the same language

and belong to the same race, one can hardly blame them for wanting

to do what the Italians and the Germans have already done. And, as

a philosopher sitting amidst the ruins of empires, wouldn’t you say

yourself that Austria has bitten off rather more than she can chew?”

“Very likely I should.” Magin took a cigar out of his pocket, snipped

off the end with a patent cutter, lighted it, and regarded the smoke

with a growing look of amusement. “But,” he went on, “as a philosopher

sitting amidst the ruins of empires, I would hardly confine that

observation to Austria-Hungary. For instance, I have heard”--and his

look of amusement verged on a smile--“of an island in the Atlantic

Ocean not much larger than the land of Elam, an island of rains

and fogs whose people, feeling the need of a little more sunlight

perhaps, or of pin-money and elbow-room, sailed away and conquered for

themselves two entire continents, as well as a good part of a third.

I have also heard that the inhabitants of this island, not content

with killing and enslaving so many defenceless fellow-creatures, or

with picking up any lesser island, cape, or bay that happened to suit

their fancy, took it upon themselves to govern several hundred million

unwilling individuals of all colours and religions in other parts of

the world. And, having thus procured both sunlight and elbow-room,

those enterprising islanders assumed a virtuous air and pushed the high

cries--as our friend Gaston would say--if any of their neighbours

ever showed the slightest symptom of following their very successful

example. Have you ever heard of such an island? And would you not

say--as a philosopher sitting amidst the ruins of empires!--that it had

also bitten off rather more than it could chew?”

Matthews, facing the question and the now open smile, felt that he

wanted to be cool, but that he did not altogether succeed.

“I dare say that two or three hundred years ago we did things we

wouldn’t do now. Times have changed in all sorts of ways. But we never

set out like a Cæsar or a Napoleon or a Bismarck to invent an empire.

It all came about quite naturally. Anybody else could have done the

same. But nobody else thought of it--at the time. We simply got there

first.”

“Ah?” Magin smiled more broadly. “It seems to me that I have heard

of another island, not so far from here, which is no more than a

pin-point, to be sure, but which happens to be the key of the Persian

Gulf. I have also heard that the Portuguese got there first, as you

put it. But you crushed Portugal, you crushed Spain, you crushed

Holland, you crushed France--or you meant to. And I must say it looks

to me as if you would not mind crushing Germany. Why do you go on

building ships, building ships, building ships, always two to Germany’s

one? Simply that you and your friends may go on eating up Asia and

Africa--and perhaps Germany too!”

Matthews noticed that the elder man ended, at any rate, not quite so

coolly as he began.

“Nonsense! The thing’s so simple it isn’t worth repeating. We have to

have more ships than anybody else because our empire is bigger than

anybody else’s--and more scattered. As for eating, it strikes me that

Germany has done more of that lately than any one. However, if you know

so much about islands, you must also know how we happened to go into

India--or Egypt. In the beginning it was pure accident. And you know

very well that if we left them to-morrow there would be the devil to

pay. Do we get a penny out of them?”

“Oh, no!” laughed Magin. “You administer them purely on altruistic

principles, for their own good and that of the world at large--like the

oil-wells of the Karun!”

“Well, since you put it that way,” laughed Matthews in turn, “perhaps

we do!”

Magin shrugged his shoulders.

“Extraordinary people! Do you really think the rest of the world so

stupid? Or is it that the fog of your island has got into your brains?

You always talk about truth as if it were a patented British invention,

yet no one is less willing to call a spade a spade. Look at Cairo,

where you pretend to keep nothing but a consul-general, but where the

ruler of the country can’t turn over in bed without his permission.

A consul-general! Look at your novels! Look at what you yourself are

saying to me!”

Matthews lighted a pipe over it.

“In a way, of course, you are right,” he said. “But I am not sure that

we are altogether wrong. Spades exist, but there’s no inherent virtue

in talking about them. In fact it’s often better not to mention them at

all. There’s something very funny about words, you know. They so often

turn out to mean more than you expected.”

At that Magin regarded his companion with a new interest.

“I would not have thought you knew that, at your age! But after all,

if you will allow me to say so, it is a woman’s point of view. A man

ought to say things out--and stick by them. He is less likely to get

into trouble afterward. For example, it would have been not only more

honest but more advantageous for your country if you had openly annexed

Egypt in the beginning. Now where are you? You continually have to

explain, and to watch very sharply lest some other consul-general tell

the Khedive to turn over in bed. And since you and the Russians intend

to eat up Persia, why on earth don’t you do it frankly, instead of

trying not to frighten the Persians, and talking vaguely about spheres

of influence, neutral zones, and what not? I’m afraid the truth is

that you’re getting old and fat. What?” He glanced over his cigar at

Matthews, who was regarding the trickle of the water beside them.

“Those Russians, they are younger,” he went on. “They have still to be

reckoned with. And they aren’t so squeamish, either in novels or in

life. Look at what they have done in their ‘sphere.’ They have roads,

they have Cossacks, they have the Shah under their thumb. And whenever

they choose they shut the Baghdad trail against your caravans--yours,

with whom they have an understanding! A famous understanding! You don’t

even understand how to make the most of your own sphere. You have had

the Karun in your hands for three hundred years, and what have you done

with it? Why, in heaven’s name, didn’t you blast out that rock at Ahwaz

long ago? Why haven’t you made a proper road to Isfahan? Why don’t you

build that railroad to Khorremabad that you are always talking about,

and finish it before the Germans get to Baghdad? Ah! If they had been

here in your place you would have seen!”

“It strikes me,” retorted Matthews, with less coolness than he yet had

shown, “that you are here already--from what the Father of the Swords

told me.” And he looked straight at the man who had told him that an

Englishman couldn’t call a spade a spade. But he saw anew how that man

could ignore an advantage of position.

Magin returned the look--frankly, humorously, quizzically. Then he said:

“You remind me, by the way, of a question I came to ask you. Would you

object to telling me what you are up to here?”

“What am I up to?” queried Matthews, in astonishment. The cheek of the

bounder was really beyond everything! “What do you mean?”

Magin smiled.

“I am not an Englishman. I mean what I say.”

“No you’re not!” Matthews threw back at him. “No Englishman would try

to pass himself off for a Brazilian.”

Magin smiled again.

“Nor would a German jump too hastily at conclusions. If I told you I

was from Brazil, I spoke the truth. I was born there, as were many

Englishmen I know. That makes them very little less English, though it

has perhaps made me more German. Who knows? As a philosopher sitting

with you amidst the ruins of empires I am at least inclined to believe

that we take our mother country more seriously than you do yours! But

to return to our point: what are you doing here?”

“I’m attending to my business. Which seems to me more than you are

doing, Mr. Magin.”

Matthews noticed, from the reverberation of the room, that his voice

must have been unnecessarily loud. He busied himself with the bowl of

his pipe. As for Magin, he got up and began walking to and fro, drawing

at his cigar. The red of it showed how much darker the room had been

growing. It increased, too, the curious effect of his eyes. They looked

like two empty holes in a mask.

“Eh, too bad!” sighed the visitor at last. “You disappoint me. Do

you know? You are, of course, much younger than I; but you made me

hope that you were perhaps--how shall I put it?--a spirit of the

first class. I hoped that without padding, without rancour, like true

philosophers, we might exchange our points of view. However--Since

it suits you to stand on your dignity, I must say that I am very

distinctly attending to my business. And I am obliged to add that

it does not help my business, Mr. Matthews, to have you sitting so

mysteriously in Dizful--and refusing to call on me, but occasionally

calling on nomad chiefs. I confess that you don’t look to me like a

spy. Spies are generally older men than you, more cooked, as Gaston

would say, more fluent in languages. It does not seem to me, either,

that even an English spy would go about his affairs quite as you have

done. Still, I regret to have to repeat that I dislike your idea of

a lark. And not only because you upset nomad chiefs. You upset other

people as well. You might even end by upsetting yourself.”

“Who the devil are you?” demanded Matthews, hotly. “The Emperor of

Elam?”

“Ha! I see you are acquainted with the excellent Adolf Ganz!” laughed

Magin. “No,” he went on in another tone. “His viceroy, perhaps. But as

I was saying, it does not suit me to have you stopping here. I can see,

however, that you have reason to be surprised, possibly annoyed, at my

telling you so. I am willing to be reasonable about it. How much do you

want--for the expenses of your going away?”

Matthews could hardly believe his ears. He got up in turn.

“What in hell do you mean by that?”

“I am sorry, Mr. Matthews,” answered the other slowly, “that my

knowledge of your language does not permit me to make myself clear to

you. Perhaps you will understand me better if I quote from yourself.

I got here first. Did you ever put your foot into this country until

two weeks ago? Did your countrymen ever trouble themselves about it,

even after Layard showed them the way? No! They expressly left it

outside of their famous ‘sphere,’ in that famous neutral zone. And all

these centuries it has been lying here in the sun, asleep, forgotten,

deserted, lost, given over to nomads and to lions--until I came. I

am the first European since Alexander the Great who has seen what

it might be. It is not so impossible that I might open again those

choked-up canals which once made these burnt plains a paradise. In

those mountains I have found--what I have found. What right have you

to interfere with me, who are only out for a lark? Or what right have

your countrymen? They have already, as you so gracefully express it,

bitten off so much more than they can chew! The Gulf, the Karun, the

oil-wells--they are yours. Take them. But Baghdad is ours: if not

to-day, then to-morrow. And if you will exercise that logical process

of which your British mind appears to be not altogether destitute,

you can hardly help seeing that this part of your famous neutral

zone, if not the whole of it, falls into the sphere of Baghdad. You

know, too, that we do things more thoroughly than you. Therefore I

must very respectfully but very firmly ask you, at your very earliest

convenience, to leave Dizful. I am quite willing to believe, however,

that your interference with my arrangements was accidental. And I

dislike to put you to any unnecessary trouble. So I shall be happy

to compensate you, in marks, _tomans_, or pounds sterling, for any

disappointment you may feel in bringing this particular lark to an end.

Do you now understand me? How much do you want?”

He perceived, Guy Matthews, that his lark had indeed taken an

unexpected turn. He was destined, far sooner than he dreamed, to be

asked of life, and to answer, questions even more direct than this.

But until now life had chosen to confront him with no problem more

pressing than one of cricket or hunting. He was therefore troubled

by an unwonted confusion of feelings. For he felt that his ordinary

vocabulary--made up of such substantives as lark, cheek, and bounder,

and the comprehensive adjective rum--fell short of coping with this

extraordinary speech. He even felt that he might possibly have answered

in a different way, but for that unspeakable offer of money. And the

rumble of Magin’s bass in the dark stone room somehow threw a light on

the melancholy land without, somehow gave him a dim sense that he did

not answer for himself alone--that he answered for the tradition of

Layard and Rawlinson and Morier and Sherley, of Clive and Kitchener, of

Drake and Raleigh and Nelson, of all the adventurous young men of that

beloved foggy island at which this pseudo-Brazilian jeered.

“When I first met you in the river, Mr. Magin,” he said quietly, “I

confess I did not realise how much of the spoils of Susa you were

carrying away in your chests. And I didn’t take your gold anklet as a

bribe, though I didn’t take you for too much of a gentleman in offering

it to me. But all I have to say now is that I shall stay in Dizful

as long as I please--and that you had better clear out of this house

unless you want me to kick you out.”

“Heroics, eh? You obstinate little fool! I could choke you with one

hand!”

“You’d better try!” retorted Matthews.

He started in spite of himself when a muffled boom suddenly answered

him, jarring even the sunken walls of the room. Then he remembered that

voice of the drowsing city, bursting out with the pent-up brew of the

day.

“Ah!” exclaimed Magin strangely--“The cannon speaks at last! You will

hear, beside your fountain, what it has to say. That, at any rate, you

will perhaps understand--you and the people of your island.” He stopped

a moment. “But,” he went on, “if some fasting dervish knocks you on the

head with his mace, or sticks his knife into your back, don’t say I

didn’t warn you!”

And the echo of his receding stamp in the corridor drowned for a moment

the trickle of the invisible water.

V

The destiny of some men lies coiled within them, invisible as the

blood of their hearts or the stuff of their will, working darkly, day

by day and year after year, for their glory or for their destruction.

The destiny of other men is an accident, a god from the machine or an

enemy in ambush. Such was the destiny of Guy Matthews, as it was of

how many other unsuspecting young men of his time. It would have been

inconceivable to him, as he stood in his dark stone room listening to

Magin’s receding stamp, that anything could make him do what Magin

demanded. Yet something did--the last drop of the acrid essence Dizful

had been brewing for him.

The letter that accomplished this miracle came to him by the hand of a

Bakhtiari from Meidan-i-Naft. It said very little. It said so little,

and that little so briefly, that Matthews, still preoccupied with his

own quarrel, at first saw no reason why a stupid war on the Continent,

and the consequent impossibility of telegraphing home except by way

of India, should affect the oil-works, or why his friends should put

him in the position of showing Magin the white feather. But as he

turned over the Bakhtiari’s scrap of paper the meaning of it grew,

in the light of the very circumstances that made him hesitate, so

portentously that he sent Abbas for horses. And before the Ramazan gun

boomed again he was well on his way back to Meidan-i-Naft.

There was something unreal to him about that night ride eastward across

the dusty moonlit plain. He never forgot that night. The unexpectedness

of it was only a part of the unreality. What pulled him up short was

a new quality in the general unexpectedness of life. Life had always

been, like the trip from which he was returning, more or less of a

lark. Whereas it suddenly appeared that life might, perhaps, be very

little of a lark. So far as he had ever pictured life to himself he had

seen it as an extension of his ordered English countryside, beset by

no hazard more searching than a hawthorne hedge. But the plain across

which he rode gave him a new picture of it, lighted romantically enough

by the moon, yet offering a rider magnificent chances to break his neck

in some invisible nullah, if not to be waylaid by marauding Lurs or

lions. It even began to come to this not too articulate young man that

romance and reality might be the same thing, romance being what happens

to the other fellow and reality being what happens to you. He looked up

at the moon of war that had been heralded to him by cannon and tried to

imagine what, under that same moon far away in Europe, was happening

to the other fellow. For it was entirely on the cards that it might

also happen to him, Guy Matthews, who had gone up the Ab-i-Diz for a

lark! That experience had an extraordinary air of having happened to

someone else, as he went back in his mind to his cruise on the river,

his meeting with the barge, his first glimpse of Dizful, the interlude

of Bala Bala, the return to Dizful, the cannon, Magin. Magin! He was

extraordinary enough, in all conscience, as Matthews tried to piece

together, under his romantic-realistic moon, the various unrelated

fragments his memory produced of that individual, connoisseur of Greek

kylixes and Lur nose-jewels, quoter of Scripture and secret agent.

The bounder must have known, as he sat smoking his cigar and ironising

on the ruins of empires, that the safe and settled little world to

which they both belonged was already in a blaze. Of course he had known

it--and he had said nothing about it! But not least extraordinary was

the way the bounder, whom after all Matthews had only seen twice,

seemed to colour the whole adventure. In fact, he had been the first

speck in the blue, the forerunner--if Matthews had only seen it--of the

more epic adventure into which he was so quickly to be caught.

At Shustar he broke his journey. There were still thirty miles to do,

and fresh horses were to be hired--of some fasting _charvadar_ who

would never consent in Ramazan, Matthews very well knew, to start for

Meidan-i-Naft under the terrific August sun. But he was not ungrateful

for a chance to rest. He discovered in himself, too, a sudden interest

in the trickle of the telegraph. And he was anxious to pick up what

news he could from the few Europeans in the town. Moreover, he needed

to see Ganz about the replenishing of his money-bag; for not the

lightest item of the traveller’s pack in Persia is his load of silver

_krans_.

At the telegraph office Matthews ran into Ganz himself. The Swiss was

a short fair faded man, not too neat about his white clothes, with a

pensive moustache and an ambiguous blue eye that lighted at sight of

the young Englishman. The light, however, was not one to illuminate

Matthews’s darkness in the matter of news. What news trickled out of

the local wire was very meagre indeed. The Austrians were shelling

Belgrade, the Germans, the Russians, and the French had gone in. That

was all. No, not quite all; for the bank-rate in England had suddenly

jumped sky-high--higher, at any rate, than it had ever jumped before.

And even Shustar felt the distant commotion, in that the bazaar had

already seen fit to put up the price of sugar and petroleum. Not that

Shustar showed any outward sign of commotion as the two threaded

their way toward Ganz’s house. The deserted streets reminded Matthews

strangely of Dizful. What was stranger was to find how they reminded

him of a chapter that is closed. He hardly noticed the blank walls,

the archways of brick and tile, the tall _badgirs_, even the filth and

smells. But strangest was it to listen to the hot silence, to look up

at the brilliant stripe of blue between the adobe walls, while over

there--!

The portentous uncertainty of what might be over there made his answers

to Ganz’s questions about his journey curt and abstracted. He gave

no explanation of his failure to see the celebration at Bala Bala

and the ruins of Susa, which Ganz supposed to be the chief objects

of his excursion. Yet he found himself looking with a new eye at the

anomalous exile whom the Father of Swords called the prince among the

merchants of Shustar, noting the faded untidy air as he had never noted

it before, wondering why a man should bury himself in such a hole as

this. Was one now, he speculated, to look at everybody all over again?

He was not the kind of man, Ganz, to interest the Guy Matthews who had

gone to Dizful. But it was the Guy Matthews who came back from Dizful

who didn’t like Ganz’s name or Ganz’s good enough accent. Nevertheless

he yielded to Ganz’s insistence, when they reached the office and

the money-bag had been restored to its normal portliness, that the

traveller should step into the house to rest and cool off.

“Do come!” urged the Swiss. “I so seldom see a civilised being. And I

have a new piano!” he threw in as an added inducement. “Do you play?”

He had no parlour tricks, he told Ganz, and he told himself that he

wanted to get on. But Ganz had been very decent to him, after all.

And he began to perceive that he himself was extremely tired. So he

followed Ganz through the cloister of the pool to the court where the

great basin glittered in the sun, below the pillared portico.

“Who is that?” exclaimed Ganz suddenly. “What a tone, eh? And what a

touch!”

Matthews heard from Ganz’s private quarters a welling of music so

different from the pipes and cow-horns of Dizful that it gave him a

sudden stab of homesickness.

“I say,” he said, brightening, “could it be any of the fellows from

Meidan-i-Naft?”

The ambiguous blue eye brightened too.

“Perhaps! It is the river music from _Rheingold_. But listen,” Ganz

added with a smile. “There are sharks among the Rhine maidens!”

They went on, up the steps of the portico, to the door which Ganz

opened softly, stepping aside for his visitor to pass in. The room

was so dark, after the blinding light of the court, that Matthews saw

nothing at first. He stepped forward eagerly, feeling his way among

Ganz’s tables and chairs toward the end of the room from which the

music came. They gave him, the cluttering tables and chairs, after

the empty rooms he had been living in, a sharper renewal of his stab.

And even a piano--! It made him think of Kipling and the _Song of the

Banjo_:

“I am memory and torment--I am Town!

I am all that ever went with evening dress!”

But what mute inglorious Paderewski of the restricted circle he had

moved in for the past months was capable of such parlour tricks

as this? Then, suddenly, he saw. He saw, swaying back and forth

against the dark background of the piano, a domed shaven head that

made him stop short--that head full of so many astounding things!

He saw, travelling swiftly up and down the keys, rising above them

to an extravagant height and pouncing down upon them again, those

predatory hands that had pounced on the spoils of Susa! They began,

in a moment, to flutter lightly over the upper end of the keyboard.

It was extraordinary what a ripple poured as if out of those hands.

Magin himself bent over to listen to the ripple, partly showing his

face as he turned his ear to the keys. He showed, too, in the lessening

gloom, a smile Matthews had never seen before, more extraordinary than

anything. Yet even as Matthews watched it, in his stupefaction, the

smile changed, broadened, hardened. And Magin, sitting up straight

again with his back to the room, began to execute a series of crashing

chords.

After several minutes he stopped and swung around on the piano-stool.

Ganz clapped his hands, shouting “_Bis! Bis!_” At that Magin rose,

bowed elaborately, and kissed his hands right and left. He ended by

pulling up a table-cover near him, gazing intently under the table.

“Have you lost something?” inquired Ganz.

“I seem,” answered Magin, “to have lost half my audience. What has

become of our elusive English friend? Am I so unfortunate as to have

been unable to satisfy his refined ear? Or can it be that his emotions

were too much for him?”

“He was in a hurry,” explained Ganz. “He is just back from Dizful, you

know.”

“Ah?” uttered Magin. “He is a very curious young man. He is always in a

hurry. He was in a hurry the first time I had the pleasure of meeting

him. He was in such a hurry at Bala Bala that he didn’t wait to see the

celebration which you told me he went to see. He also left Dizful in a

surprising hurry, from what I hear. I happen to know that the telegraph

had nothing to do with it. I can only conclude that some one frightened

him away. Where do you suppose he hurries to? And do you think he will

arrive in time?”

Ganz opened his mouth; but if he intended to say something, he decided

instead to draw his hand across his spare jaw. However, he did speak

after all.

“I notice that you at least do not hurry, Majesty! Do you fiddle while

Rome burns?”

“Ha!” laughed Magin. “It is not Rome that burns! And I notice, Mr.

Ganz, that you seem to be of a forgetful as well as of an inquiring

disposition. I would have been in Mohamera long ago if it had not been

for your Son of Papa, with his interest in unspoiled towns. I will

thank you to issue no more letters to the Father of Swords without

remembering me. Do you wish to enrich the already overstocked British

Museum at my expense? But I do not mind revealing to you that I am now

really on my way to Mohamera.”

“H’m,” let out Ganz slowly. “My dear fellow, haven’t you heard that

there is a war in Europe?”

“I must confess, my good Ganz, that I have. But what has Europe to do

with Mohamera?”

“God knows,” said Ganz. “I should think however, since you are so far

from the Gulf, that you would prefer the route of Baghdad--now that

French and Russian cruisers are seeking whom they may devour.”

“You forget, Mr. Ganz, that I am so fortunate as to possess a number

of valuable objects of virtue. I would think twice before attempting

to carry those objects of virtue through the country of our excellent

friends the Beni Lam Arabs!”

Ganz laughed.

“Your objects of virtue could very well be left with me. What if the

English should go into the war?”

“The English? Go into the war? Never fear! This is not their affair.

And if it were, what could they do? Sail their famous ships up the

Rhine and the Elbe? Besides, that treacherous memory of yours seems to

fail you again. This is Persia, not England.”

“Perhaps,” answered Ganz. “But the English are very funny people. There

is a rumour, you know, of pourparlers. What if you were to sail down

to the Gulf and some little midshipman were to fire a shot across your

bow?”

“Ah, bah! I am a neutral! And Britannia is a fat old woman! Also a rich

one, who doesn’t put her hand into her pocket to please her neighbours.

Besides, I have a little affair with the Sheikh of Mohamera--objects of

virtue, indigo, who knows what? As you know, I am a versatile man.” And

swinging around on his stool, Magin began to play again.

“But even fat old women sometimes know how to bite,” objected Ganz.

“Not when their teeth have dropped out,” Magin threw over his

shoulder--“or when strong young men plug their jaws!”