TWO LITTLE MEN
Next morning St. George was early astir. He had slept little and his
dreams had been grotesques. He threw up his blind and looked across
buildings to the grey park. The sky was marked with rose, the still
reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its
margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine.
St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the
sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the
golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just
beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light,
and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.
His first care the evening before had been to hunt out
Chillingworth. He had found him in a theatre and had got him out to
the foyer and kept him through the third act, pouring in his ears as
much as he felt that it was well for him to know. Chillingworth had
drawn his square, brown hands through his hair and, in lieu of
copy-paper, had nibbled away his programme and paced the corner by
the cloak-room.
"It looks like a great big thing," said the city editor; "don't you
think it looks like a great big thing?"
"Extraordinarily so," assented St. George, watching him.
"Can you handle it alone, do you think?" Chillingworth demanded.
"Ah, well now, that depends," replied St. George. "I'll see it
through, if it takes me to Yaque. But I'd like you to promise, Mr.
Chillingworth, that you won't turn Crass loose at it while I'm gone,
with his feverish head-lines. Mrs. Hastings and her niece must be
spared that, at all events."
"Don't you be a sentimental idiot," snapped Chillingworth, "and
spoil the biggest city story the paper ever had. Why, this may draw
the whole United States into a row, and mean war and a new
possession and maybe consulates and governorships and one thing or
another for the whole staff. St. George, don't spoil the sport.
Remember, I'm dropsical and nobody can tell what may happen. By the
way, where did you say this prince man is?"
"Ah, I didn't say," St. George had answered quietly. "If you'll
forgive me, I don't think I shall say."
"Oh, you don't," ejaculated Chillingworth. "Well, you please be
around at eight o'clock in the morning."
St. George watched him walking sidewise down the aisle as he always
walked when he was excited. Chillingworth was a good sort at heart,
too; but given, as the bishop had once said of some one else, to
spending right royally a deal of sagacity under the obvious
impression that this is the only wisdom.
At his desk next morning Chillingworth gave to St. George a note
from Amory, who had been at Long Branch with _The Aloha_ when the
letter was posted and was coming up that noon to put ashore
Bennietod.
"May Cawthorne have his day off to-morrow and go with me?" the
letter ended. "I'll call up at noon to find out."
"Yah!" growled Chillingworth, "it's breaking up the whole staff,
that's what it's doin'. You'll all want cut-glass typewriters next."
"If I should sail to-day," observed St. George, quite as if he were
boarding a Sound steamer, "I'd like to take on at least two men. And
I'd like Amory and Cawthorne. You could hardly go yourself, could
you, Mr. Chillingworth?"
"No, I couldn't," growled Chillingworth, "I've got to keep my tastes
down. And I've got to save up to buy kid gloves for the staff. Look
here--" he added, and hesitated.
"Yes?" St. George complied in some surprise.
"Bennietod's half sick anyway," said Chillingworth, "he's thin as
water, and if you would care--"
"By all means then," St. George assented heartily, "I would care
immensely. Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy. Will you
mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to
show up without fail at my place at noon to-day? And to wait there
for me."
Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was
sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page. He was
humming a weary little tune to the effect that "Billy Enny took a
penny but now he hadn't many--Lookie They!" with which he whiled
away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the
"Lookie They!" until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet
which he never got.
"Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night
on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says
that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"
Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment,
and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.
"I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack
my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"
St. George laughed.
"Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell
any one else."
"'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect
tranquillity.
St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand
doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to
face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.
Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world
which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present
knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced
his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk
more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.
The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early
morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand
Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only
avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out
incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For
only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to
be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid
wonderment at crêpe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed
woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in
McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive
comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour
gone astray.
St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted
him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons
brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the
latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of
furniture remained.
He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find
the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and
he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could
have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls,
to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so
emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured
a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted
and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable
characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the
prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and
questioned a group of boys in the passage.
"Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation
distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement
as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de
bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk
follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no Nigger's
Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."
St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten
o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and
for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not
true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street
part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he
sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.
The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time,
and she had said "Until to-morrow."
On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to
her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion--the furniture
covered with linen, the bric-à-brac gone, and three steamer trunks
strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him
less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.
She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and
very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had
been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober
little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he
could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.
She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To
complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before
the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.
"This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and
a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."
For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.
"You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the
little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.
"Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham
sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great
comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added
naïvely, "but he must take her."
St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he
reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the
daughter of its sovereign.
"Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.
He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place
below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince,
it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them
that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no
impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt
withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.
George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a
world of uncertainty.
"I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided
between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear
lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.
Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.
"Have a muffin--do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in
America for a time--let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.
George, I want--oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate--"
"Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you
see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now
to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."
"No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was
a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through
the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds
without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned
to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.
"Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.
"Forgive me--what are you going to do all alone there in that
strange land, and such a land?"
He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he
was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired
more than ever.
"I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go.
You see that, do you not--that I must go?"
"Ah, yes," St. George assured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't
you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you
need help? And then I'll appear."
"In Yaque?"
He nodded gravely.
"Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and
though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I
shall be no end glad to have appeared."
"But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a
pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about
America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,'
by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"
"I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he assured her,
"and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your
first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will
recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."
"No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too
many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a
holiday always seems like Sunday, either."
Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant
world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque
looked like a hope.
Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly
forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and
that. What was she to bring him from Yaque--a pet ibis? No, he had
no taste for ibises--unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension
ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a
magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an
infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he
wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her
errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the
puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor
children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of
science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with
mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its
daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if
only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the
thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her
invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who
were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had
made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.
"Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will
you remember something while you are away?"
"Your kindness, always," she returned.
"But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness,
"that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success,
and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And
will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at
least be doing something to try to help you?"
"You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already
you have not only helped me--you have made the whole matter
possible."
"And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help
you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it
takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure
than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at
twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"
"By all means," Olivia assented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad,
Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine
like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"
"Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely
unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all
events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things:
that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by
minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what
perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the
chemist's.
Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was
quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did
make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her
drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows
what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so
perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon
the shore for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for
the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would
become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the
most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the
right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely
the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.
Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the
preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment
being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been
that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat
staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and
Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very
literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so
that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent
and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it
must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore
were "_les antipodes des grâces_." She was followed by a footman,
his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan
and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings
had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and
whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat
down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another
sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like
the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but
could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.
"Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite
forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions
made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell
what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked
up the Azores--that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And
camphor--I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that
I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the
camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now
it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed,
Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell--"
St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although
she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat,
hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the
next that he would send them a copy of whatever the _Sentinel_ might
publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the
post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of
the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the
prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting
sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or
a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island,
she was affected in the same way.
As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling
her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he
were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the
submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator
bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor
below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American
lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained
to a passing chamber-maid.
St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who
was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's
return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the
Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out
of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of
milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had
tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this
submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it
suddenly assumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though
it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card
was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs.
Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an
hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and
presently produced it--a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling
him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour
earlier than he had planned.
Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity
with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St.
George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of
chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had
bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod
would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of
anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer
hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon
smilingly back to support him.
In the vestibule of the Boris, deaf to the hovering attention of a
door-boy more curious than dutiful, stood two men of the stature and
complexion of Prince Tabnit of Yaque. They were dressed like the
youth who had answered the door of the prince's apartment, and they
were speaking softly with many gestures and evidently in some
perplexity. The drooping spirits of St. George soared to Heaven as
he hastened to them.
"You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of
Yaque," he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the
democracy with hereditary titles.
The men stared and spoke almost together.
"We are," they said promptly.
"She is not here," explained St. George, "but I have attended to
some affairs for her. Will you come with me to my apartment where we
may be alone?"
The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured
greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the
suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.
"Pardon," said one, "if we may be quite assured that this is Miss
Holland's friend to whom we speak--"
St. George hesitated. The hall-boy listened with an air of polite
concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the
passers-by. Suddenly St. George's face lighted and he went swiftly
through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper--the fragment that
had lain that morning on the floor of the prince's deserted
apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque. It was the
strangers' turn to regard him with amazement. Immediately, to St.
George's utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and
pronounced together:
"Pardon, adôn!"
"My name is St. George," he assured them, "and let's get into a
cab."
They followed him without demur.
St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them--lean
lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great
repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had
felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley
Reformatory--as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way
rhymed with a word which he did not know.
"What is it," St. George asked as they rolled away, "what is it that
you have come to tell Miss Holland?"
Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two
rows of exceptionally white teeth.
"May we not know, adôn," asked the man respectfully, "whether the
prince has given her his news? And if the prince is still in your
land?"
"The prince's servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and
has got herself locked up," St. George imparted without hesitation.
An exclamation of horror broke from both men.
"To stab--to _kill_!" they cried.
"Quite so," said St. George, "and the prince, upon being discovered,
disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her
friends started an hour ago for Yaque."
"That is well, that is well!" cried the little man, nodding, and
momentarily hesitated; "but yet his news--what news, adôn, has he
told her?"
For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.
"Ah, well now, what news had he?" he asked briefly.
The men answered readily.
"Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the
princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father,
the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the
hereditary throne of Yaque."
"Jupiter!" said St. George under breath.
In a flash the whole matter was clear to him. Prince Tabnit had
delivered no such message from the people of Yaque, but had
contented himself with the mere intimation that in some vanishing
future she would be expected to ascend the throne. And he had done
this only when Olivia herself had sought him out after an attempt
had been made upon her life by his servant. It seemed to St. George
far from improbable that the woman had been acting under the
prince's instructions and, that failing, he himself had appeared and
obligingly placed the daughter of King Otho precisely within the
prince's power. Now she was gone with him, in the hope of aiding her
father, to meet Heaven knew what peril in this pagan island; and he,
St. George, was wholly to blame from first to last.
"Good Heavens," he groaned, "are you sure--but are you sure?"
"It is simple, adôn," said the man, "we came with this message from
the people of Yaque. A day before we were to land, Akko and I--I am
Jarvo--overheard the prince plan with the others to tell her
nothing--nothing that the people desire. When they knew that we had
heard they locked us up and we have only this morning escaped from
the submarine. If the prince has told her this message everything is
well. But as for us, I do not know. The prince has gone."
"He told her nothing--nothing," said St. George, "but that her
father and the Hereditary Treasure have disappeared. And he has
taken her with him. She has gone with him."
Deaf alike to their exclamations and their questions St. George sat
staring unseeingly through the window, his mind an abyss of fear.
Then the cab drew up at the door of his hotel and he turned upon the
two men precipitantly.
"See," he cried, "in a boat on the open sea, would you two be at all
able to direct a course to Yaque?"
Both men smiled suddenly and brilliantly.
"But we have stolen a chart," announced Jarvo with great simplicity,
"not knowing what thing might befall."
St. George wrenched at the handle of the cab door. He had a glimpse
of Amory within, just ringing the elevator bell, and he bundled the
two little men into the lobby and dashed up to him.
"Come on, old Amory," he told him exultingly. "Heaven on earth, put
out that pipe and pack. We leave for Yaque to-night!"