GLAMOURIE
There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep grass; and
over these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairy
scissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it looks
like a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangely
silver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have been
painted in Spring-wind.
"Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such a
moon as that!"
"But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer--it is not recorded
whether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it--"wouldn't
you like to?"
Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king's
palace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life things
never happen like that. Ah--do they not so? You have only to go back
to the days when young love and young life were yours to recall
distinctly that the most impossible things were every-day
occurrences. What about the time that you went down one street
instead of up another and _that_ changed the entire course of your
days and brought you two together? What about the song, the June,
the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes and
caught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it is
quite impossible to assert that any charming thing whatever would
not have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? And
is not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that common
wonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.
But if the Most Vehement--who are as thick as butterflies--still
remain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of things
fallen out thus, there is left this triumph:
"Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"
* * * * *
A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept through
the palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had an
hundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely its
own tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.
For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of the
long stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother to
Hiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, and
this cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of the
palace--dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. Here
Olivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of tea
in a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels that
resembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George and
Amory praised the admirable English muffins which some one had
taught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothingham
tip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits and
queer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amory
wondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.
Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and became
ultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully asked
for a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:
"Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besides
eggs--pineapples, very likely."
"I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectly
intuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll know
beforehand exactly how they both taste."
"A _reductio ad absurdum_, my young friend," said the lawyer
sternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for ever
unchanged."
Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the
terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the
weather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people
with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. For
St. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with some
clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche
and corner of the great pile where one--say a king--might be hidden
with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.
What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part of
the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes
that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinking
delicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, a
very temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.
George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were
become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet
be well.
To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all
octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and
amazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raised
those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can
guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace
had originally been built upon level ground and had had its
surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all events
there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked
stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the
planetary deities--Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white
bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in
the form of a rising flame--types taken from the heavens and from
the abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven
cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little
circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of
Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth,
with the lion's skin.
From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step
of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing
size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted
ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic
paws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled
with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most
luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palace
was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two
thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance
of this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of that
elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they
came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools
and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic
plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one
light, slightly fluorescent.
"It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adôn," said Jarvo. "She was
the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched
in this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago--I
have forgotten. Every one has forgotten."
They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full
storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting
the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages,
and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had
been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of
the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now
hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall
were lined with _loculi_ or niches, each as deep as the length of a
man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long
flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on
the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a
lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the
resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of
Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the
Phoenicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits of
Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings
when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the
Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were
nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall
was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where
slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of
Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of
love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably
at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the
very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to
conquer the island may one day divert the world.
Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with
winged circles.
"Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped
Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Phoenician
merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here
lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy
office."
Nothing was unbelievable--nothing had been unbelievable for so long
that these four had almost learned that everything is possible.
Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you
learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of
possibilities. It is one of our two magics.
"And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant niche
opposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle for
the present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of
God."
Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in the
ghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while,
the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But her
involuntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. George
with tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.
They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, and
crossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of the
mountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northern
slope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice where
the supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the living
rock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain,
and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a fly
on the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king of
Yaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himself
from this observatory in a rage because his court electrician had
died, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because so
little is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite the
most wonderful part of the king's palace.
Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart of
the treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably from
the wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost and
but half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made in
the days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined the
walls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of that
later day when Phoenicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic and
glyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, in
brass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which those
courtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these,
from year to year, had been added the treasure of private
chests--necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases of
glass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, now
sometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath an
altar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought from
Amathus, its ogive lid carved with _bigæ_ or two-horsed chariots,
and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary
Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with
bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
Phoenician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered--annals,
State documents, the Phoenician originals of histories preserved
elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
"Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the
cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"
"No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to
go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and
you thought Clusium was the name of it."
"I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names for
it. But it's always the same thing. _Excepting this_."
"Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned to
go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang
that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint
voices from every shelf in the room,--voices that of old had
thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.
Woke now to the eternal echo--an echo that touched delicately
through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all
that happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a little
echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of
danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time
for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because
they hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event is
a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.
The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail and
pervade and possess. In the king's palace there must have been
shrines to intangibilities--as there should be everywhere--for they
seemed to come there, and belong.
The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. George
had with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon,
in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he had
virtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.
Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face was
betrayingly eager as he told about it. It was, briefly, that
inasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain were
now on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were there
also, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque,
were in a perfectly impregnable position--counting out Fifth
Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings
as well as disappearings--and why shouldn't they stay there, and
let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? And
when the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound to
say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by
noon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvo
would get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. Otho
Holland, the king, if he were on the island. And when "Well, but
my dear fellow" occurred again, St. George replied with deference
that he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship he
fancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in the
harbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore no
one need even set foot on the island who didn't wish. And Mr.
Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw back
his head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at the
palace--that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air--and
said, "Nothing in all my experience--" and St. George left him,
deep in thought.
On the way back he chanced upon Mrs. Hastings, seated on a bench of
lapidescent wood in the portico--and a Titanic portico it looked by
day--and, having sent for the palace chef, she was attempting to
write down the recipe for the salad of that day's luncheon, although
it was composed chiefly of fowls now extinct everywhere excepting in
Yaque.
"But my poultry man will get them for me," she urged with
determination; "I have only to tell him the name of what I want, and
he can always produce it in tins, nicely labeled."
Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,
looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at the
pallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The face
was stranger by day than it had been by night--this St. George had
felt when he went that morning to release him, and the old man
leaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle good
morning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen of
the fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live to
his incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearing
the ruby ring.
"I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh
answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at
other things.
To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his
urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.
When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would
consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George
himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I
would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners
than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder
us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia
had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one
possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.
All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as
only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went
before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the _Here_ and
the _Now_ were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the
morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon
they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves
above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They
leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory
of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of
gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not
know they gave--ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told
about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young
courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of
their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For
the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and
one has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.
Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite
of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but
revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent
sword of "To-morrow, at noon."