HIGH WORDS
Once outside in the open air, the Jinnee "towered" like a pheasant shot
through the breast, and Horace closed his eyes with a combined
swing-switchback-and-Channel-passage sensation during a flight which
apparently continued for hours, although in reality it probably did not
occupy more than a very few seconds. His uneasiness was still further
increased by his inability to guess where he was being taken to--for he
felt instinctively that they were not travelling in the direction of
home.
At last he felt himself set down on some hard, firm surface, and
ventured to open his eyes once more. When he realised where he actually
was, his knees gave way under him, and he was seized with a sudden
giddiness that very nearly made him lose his balance. For he found
himself standing on a sort of narrow ledge or cornice immediately under
the ball at the top of St. Paul's.
Many feet beneath him spread the dull, leaden summit of the dome, its
raised ridges stretching, like huge serpents over the curve, beyond
which was a glimpse of the green roof of the nave and the two west
towers, with their grey columns and urn-topped buttresses and gilded
pineapples, which shone ruddily in the sun.
He had an impression of Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street as a deep, winding
ravine, steeped in partial shadow; of long sierras of roofs and
chimney-pots, showing their sharp outlines above mouse-coloured
smoke-wreaths; of the broad, pearl-tinted river, with oily ripples and a
golden glitter where the sunlight touched it; of the gleaming slope of
mud under the wharves and warehouses on the Surrey side; of barges and
steamers moored in black clusters; of a small tug fussing noisily down
the river, leaving a broadening arrow-head in its wake.
Cautiously he moved round towards the east, where the houses formed a
blurred mosaic of cream, slate, indigo, and dull reds and browns, above
which slender rose-flushed spires and towers pierced the haze, stained
in countless places by pillars of black, grey, and amber smoke, and
lightened by plumes and jets of silvery steam, till all blended by
imperceptible gradations into a sky of tenderest gold slashed with
translucent blue.
It was a magnificent view, and none the less so because the
indistinctness of all beyond a limited radius made the huge City seem
not only mystical, but absolutely boundless in extent. But although
Ventimore was distinctly conscious of all this, he was scarcely in a
state to appreciate its grandeur just then. He was much too concerned
with wondering why Fakrash had chosen to plant him up there in so
insecure a position, and how he was ever to be rescued from it, since
the Jinnee had apparently disappeared.
He was not far off, however, for presently Horace saw him stalk round
the narrow cornice with an air of being perfectly at home on it.
"So there you are!" said Ventimore; "I thought you'd deserted me again.
What have you brought me up here for?"
"Because I desired to have speech with thee in private," replied the
Jinnee.
"We're not likely to be intruded on here, certainly," said Horace. "But
isn't it rather exposed, rather public? If we're seen up here, you know,
it will cause a decided sensation."
"I have laid a spell on all below that they should not raise their
eyes. Be seated, therefore, and hear my words."
Horace lowered himself carefully to a sitting position, so that his legs
dangled in space, and Fakrash took a seat by his side. "O, most
indiscreet of mankind!" he began, in an aggrieved tone; "thou hast been
near the committal of a great blunder, and doing ill to thyself and to
me!"
"Well, I _do_ like that!" retorted Horace; "when you let me in for all
that freedom of the City business, and then sneaked off, leaving me to
get out of it the best way I could, and only came back just as I was
about to explain matters, and carried me up through the roof like a sack
of flour. Do you consider that tactful on your part?"
"Thou hadst drunk wine and permitted it to creep as far as the place of
secrets."
"Only one glass," said Horace; "and I wanted it, I can assure you. I was
obliged to make a speech to them, and, thanks to you, I was in such a
hole that I saw nothing for it but to tell the truth."
"Veracity, as thou wilt learn," answered the Jinnee, "is not invariably
the Ship of Safety. Thou wert about to betray the benefactor who
procured for thee such glory and honour as might well cause the
gall-bladder of lions to burst with envy!"
"If any lion with the least sense of humour could have witnessed the
proceedings," said Ventimore, "he might have burst with
laughter--certainly not envy. Good Lord! Fakrash," he cried, in his
indignation, "I've never felt such an absolute ass in my whole life! If
nothing would satisfy you but my receiving the freedom of the City, you
might at least have contrived some decent excuse for it! But you left
out the only point there was in the whole thing--and all for what?"
"What doth it signify why the whole populace should come forth to
acclaim thee and do thee honour, so long as they did so?" said Fakrash,
sullenly. "For the report of thy fame would reach Bedeea-el-Jemal."
"That's just where you're mistaken," said Horace. "If you had not been
in too desperate a hurry to make a few inquiries, you would have found
out that you were taking all this trouble for nothing."
"How sayest thou?"
"Well, you would have discovered that the Princess is spared all
temptation to marry beneath her by the fact that she became the bride of
somebody else about thirty centuries ago. She married a mortal, one
Seyf-el-Mulook, a King's son, and they've both been dead a considerable
time--another obstacle to your plans."
"It is a lie," declared Fakrash.
"If you will take me back to Vincent Square, I shall be happy to show
you the evidence in your national records," said Horace. "And you may be
glad to know that your old enemy, Mr. Jarjarees, came to a violent end,
after a very sporting encounter with a King's daughter, who, though
proficient in advanced magic, unfortunately perished herself, poor lady,
in the final round."
"I had intended _thee_ to accomplish his downfall," said Fakrash.
"I know," said Horace. "It was most thoughtful of you. But I doubt if I
should have done it half as well--and it would have probably cost me an
eye, at the very least. It's better as it is."
"And how long hast thou known of these things?"
"Only since last night."
"Since last night? And thou didst not unfold them unto me till this
instant?"
"I've had such a busy morning, you see," explained Horace. "There's been
no time."
"Silly-bearded fool that I was to bring this misbegotten dog into the
august presence of the great Lord Mayor himself (on whom be peace!),"
cried the Jinnee.
"I object to being referred to as a misbegotten dog," said Horace, "but
with the rest of your remark I entirely concur. I'm afraid the Lord
Mayor is very far from being at peace just now." He pointed to the steep
roof of the Guildhall, with its dormers and fretted pinnacles, and the
slender lantern through which he had so lately made his inglorious exit.
"There's the devil of a row going on under that lantern just now, Mr.
Fakrash, you may depend upon that. They've locked the doors till they
can decide what to do next--which will take them some time. And it's all
your fault!"
"It was thy doing. Why didst thou dare to inform the Lord Mayor that he
was deceived?"
"Why? Because I thought he ought to know. Because I was bound,
particularly after my oath of allegiance, to warn him of any conspiracy
against him. Because I was in such a hat. He'll understand all that--he
won't blame _me_ for this business."
"It is fortunate," observed the Jinnee, "that I flew away with thee
before thou couldst pronounce my name."
"You gave yourself away," said Horace. "They all saw you, you know. You
weren't flying so particularly fast. They'll recognise you again. If you
_will_ carry off a man from under the Lord Mayor's very nose, and shoot
up through the roof like a rocket with him, you can't expect to escape
some notice. You see, you happen to be the only unbottled Jinnee in this
City."
Fakrash shifted his seat on the cornice. "I have committed no act of
disrespect unto the Lord Mayor," he said, "therefore he can have no just
cause of anger against me."
Horace perceived that the Jinnee was not altogether at ease, and pushed
his advantage accordingly.
"My dear good old friend," he said, "you don't seem to realise yet what
an awful thing you've done. For your own mistaken purposes, you have
compelled the Chief Magistrate and the Corporation of the greatest City
in the world to make themselves hopelessly ridiculous. They'll never
hear the last of this affair. Just look at the crowds waiting patiently
below there. Look at the flags. Think of that gorgeous conveyance of
yours standing outside the Guildhall. Think of the assembly inside--all
the most aristocratic, noble, and distinguished personages in the land,"
continued Horace, piling it on as he proceeded; "all collected for what?
To be made fools of by a Jinnee out of a brass bottle!"
"For their own sakes they will preserve silence," said Fakrash, with a
gleam of unwonted shrewdness.
"Probably they would hush it up, if they only could," conceded Horace.
"But how _can_ they? What are they to say? What plausible explanation
can they give? Besides, there's the Press: you don't know what the Press
is; but I assure you its power is tremendous--it's simply impossible to
keep anything secret from it nowadays. It has eyes and ears everywhere,
and a thousand tongues. Five minutes after the doors in that hall are
unlocked (and they can't keep them locked _much_ longer) the reporters
will be handing in their special descriptions of you and your latest
vagaries to their respective journals. Within half an hour bills will be
carried through every quarter of London--bills with enormous letters:
'Extraordinary Scene at the Guildhall.' 'Strange End to a Civic
Function.' 'Startling Appearance of an Oriental Genie in the City.'
'Abduction of a Guest of the Lord Mayor.' 'Intense Excitement.' 'Full
Particulars!' And by that time the story will have flashed round the
whole world. 'Keep silence,' indeed! Do you imagine for a moment that
the Lord Mayor, or anybody else concerned, however remotely, will ever
forget, or be allowed to forget, such an outrageous incident as this? If
you do, believe me, you're mistaken."
"Truly, it would be a terrible thing to incur the wrath of the Lord
Mayor," said the Jinnee, in troubled accents.
"Awful!" said Horace. "But you seem to have managed it."
"He weareth round his neck a magic jewel, which giveth him dominion
over devils--is it not so?"
"You know best," said Horace.
"It was the splendour of that jewel and the majesty of his countenance
that rendered me afraid to enter his presence, lest he should recognise
me for what I am and command me to obey him, for verily his might is
greater even than Suleyman's, and his hand heavier upon such of the Jinn
as fall into his power!"
"If that's so," said Horace, "I should strongly advise you to find some
way of putting things straight before it's too late--you've no time to
lose."
"Thou sayest well," said Fakrash, springing to his feet, and turning his
face towards Cheapside. Horace shuffled himself along the ledge in a
seated position after the Jinnee, and, looking down between his feet,
could just see the tops of the thin and rusty trees in the churchyard,
the black and serried swarms of foreshortened people in the street, and
the scarlet-rimmed mouths of chimney-pots on the tiled roofs below.
"There is but one remedy I know," said the Jinnee, "and it may be that I
have lost power to perform it. Yet will I make the endeavour." And,
stretching forth his right hand towards the east, he muttered some kind
of command or invocation.
Horace almost fell off the cornice with apprehension of what might
follow. Would it be a thunderbolt, a plague, some frightful convulsion
of Nature? He felt sure that Fakrash would hesitate at no means, however
violent, of burying all traces of his blunder in oblivion, and very
little hope that, whatever he did, it would prove anything but some
worse indiscretion than his previous performances.
Happily none of these extreme measures seemed to have occurred to the
Jinnee, though what followed was strange and striking enough.
For presently, as if in obedience to the Jinnee's weird gesticulations,
a lurid belt of fog came rolling up from the direction of the Royal
Exchange, swallowing up building after building in its rapid course; one
by one the Guildhall, Bow Church, Cheapside itself, and the churchyard
disappeared, and Horace, turning his head to the left, saw the murky
tide sweeping on westward, blotting out Ludgate Hill, the Strand,
Charing Cross, and Westminster--till at last he and Fakrash were alone
above a limitless plain of bituminous cloud, the only living beings
left, as it seemed, in a blank and silent universe.
"Look again!" said Fakrash, and Horace, looking eastward, saw the spire
of Bow Church, rosy once more, the Guildhall standing clear and intact,
and the streets and house-tops gradually reappearing. Only the flags,
with their unrestful shiver and ripple of colour, had disappeared, and,
with them, the waiting crowds and the mounted constables. The ordinary
traffic of vans, omnibuses, and cabs was proceeding as though it had
never been interrupted--the clank and jingle of harness chains, the
cries and whip-crackings of drivers, rose with curious distinctness
above the incessant trampling roar which is the ground-swell of the
human ocean.
"That cloud which thou sawest," said Fakrash, "hath swept away with it
all memory of this affair from the minds of every mortal assembled to do
thee honour. See, they go about their several businesses, and all the
past incidents are to them as though they had never been."
It was not often that Horace could honestly commend any performance of
the Jinnee's, but at this he could not restrain his admiration. "By
Jove!" he said, "that certainly gets the Lord Mayor and everybody else
out of the mess as neatly as possible. I must say, Mr. Fakrash, it's
much the best thing I've seen you do yet."
"Wait," said the Jinnee, "for presently thou shalt see me perform a yet
more excellent thing."
There was a most unpleasant green glow in his eyes and a bristle in his
thin beard as he spoke, which suddenly made Horace feel uncomfortable.
He did not like the look of the Jinnee at all.
"I really think you've done enough for to-day," he said. "And this wind
up here is rather searching. I shan't be sorry to find myself on the
ground again."
"That," replied the Jinnee, "thou shalt assuredly do before long, O
impudent and deceitful wretch!" And he laid a long, lean hand on
Horace's shoulder.
"He _is_ put out about something!" thought Ventimore. "But what?" "My
dear sir," he said aloud, "I don't understand this tone of yours. What
have I done to offend you?"
"Divinely gifted was he who said: 'Beware of losing hearts in
consequence of injury, for the bringing them back after flight is
difficult.'"
"Excellent!" said Horace. "But I don't quite see the application."
"The application," explained the Jinnee, "is that I am determined to
cast thee down from here with my own hand!"
Horace turned faint and dizzy for a moment. Then, by a strong effort of
will, he pulled himself together. "Oh, come now," he said, "you don't
really mean that, you know. After all your kindness! You're much too
good-natured to be capable of anything so atrocious."
"All pity hath been eradicated from my heart," returned Fakrash.
"Therefore prepare to die, for thou art presently about to perish in the
most unfortunate manner."
Ventimore could not repress a shudder. Hitherto he had never been able
to take Fakrash quite seriously, in spite of all his supernatural
powers; he had treated him with a half-kindly, half-contemptuous
tolerance, as a well-meaning, but hopelessly incompetent, old foozle.
That the Jinnee should ever become malevolent towards him had never
entered his head till now--and yet he undoubtedly had. How was he to
cajole and disarm this formidable being? He must keep cool and act
promptly, or he would never see Sylvia again.
As he sat there on the narrow ledge, with a faint and not unpleasant
smell of hops saluting his nostrils from some distant brewery, he tried
hard to collect his thoughts, but could not. He found himself, instead,
idly watching the busy, jostling crowd below, who were all unconscious
of the impending drama so high above them. Just over the rim of the dome
he could see the opaque white top of a lamp on a shelter, where a pigmy
constable stood, directing the traffic.
Would he look up if Horace called for help? Even if he could, what help
could he render? All he could do would be to keep the crowd back and
send for a covered stretcher. No, he would _not_ dwell on these horrors;
he _must_ fix his mind on some way of circumventing Fakrash.
How did the people in "The Arabian Nights" manage? The fisherman, for
instance? He persuaded _his_ Jinnee to return to the bottle by
pretending to doubt whether he had ever really been inside it.
But Fakrash, though simple enough in some respects, was not quite such a
fool as that. Sometimes the Jinn could be mollified and induced to grant
a reprieve by being told stories, one inside the other, like a nest of
Oriental boxes. Unfortunately Fakrash did not seem in the humour for
listening to apologues, and, even if he were, Horace could not think of
or improvise any just then. "Besides," he thought, "I can't sit up here
telling him anecdotes for ever. I'd almost sooner die!" Still, he
remembered that it was generally possible to draw an Arabian Efreet into
discussion: they all loved argument, and had a rough conception of
justice.
"I think, Mr. Fakrash," he said, "that, in common fairness, I have a
right to know what offence I have committed."
"To recite thy misdeeds," replied the Jinnee, "would occupy much time."
"I don't mind that," said Horace, affably. "I can give you as long as
you like. I'm in no sort of a hurry."
"With me it is otherwise," retorted Fakrash, making a stride towards
him. "Therefore court not life, for thy death hath become unavoidable.'
"Before we part," said Horace, "you won't refuse to answer one or two
questions?"
"Didst thou not undertake never to ask any further favour of me?
Moreover, it will avail thee nought. For I am positively determined to
slay thee."
"I demand it," said Horace, "in the most great name of the Lord Mayor
(on whom be peace!)"
It was a desperate shot--but it took effect. The Jinnee quailed visibly.
"Ask, then," he said; "but briefly, for the time groweth short."
Horace determined to make one last appeal to Fakrash's sense of
gratitude, since it had always seemed the dominant trait in his
character.
"Well," he said, "but for me, wouldn't you be still in that brass
bottle?"
"That," replied the Jinnee, "is the very reason why I purpose to destroy
thee!"
"Oh!" was all Horace could find to say at this most unlooked-for answer.
His sheet anchor, in which he had trusted implicitly, had suddenly
dragged--and he was drifting fast to destruction.
"Are there any other questions which thou wouldst ask?" inquired the
Jinnee, with grim indulgence; "or wilt thou encounter thy doom without
further procrastination?"
Horace was determined not to give in just yet; he had a very bad hand,
but he might as well play the game out and trust to luck to gain a stray
trick.
"I haven't nearly done yet," he said. "And, remember, you've promised to
answer me--in the name of the Lord Mayor!"
"I will answer one other question, and no more," said the Jinnee, in an
inflexible tone; and Ventimore realised that his fate would depend upon
what he said next.