GREY MAGIC
To Victor Cleves came the following telegram in code:
“_Washington_
“April 14th, 1919.”
“_Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of
frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the
Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are
actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central
Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A
strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this
Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to
the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic
in battle._
“_From information so far gathered by the several branches of the
United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears
possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe
and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security,
of all established civilisation on earth, may have had a common origin.
This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch;
the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have
had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose
existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder._
“_Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees,
are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a
tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common
predilection for crimes of violence._
“_On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government
will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret
Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in
the United States and other countries. You personally are formally
instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303
(James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly
with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible,
enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid
and comrade._
“_It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called
Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and
whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he
is not to be taken into custody. M. H. 2479._
“_(Signed)_
“(John Recklow.)”
The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves’s duty plain enough.
For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And
they had learned practically nothing about her.
And now the girl had come within Cleves’s sphere of operation. She had
been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and
from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.
He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth
Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the
theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her _entr’ acte_ was staged. He
knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the
man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New
York, although warned that he had arrived.
So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his
evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons’
Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was
in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he
strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of
the popular show without being too late to see the curious little
_entr’ acte_ in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.
He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the
main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered
the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the
descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.
Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne
stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an
expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.
The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere
child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her
winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world’s wisdom.
Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes
darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons.
She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold
pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat,
slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at
the toes.
All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no
firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity;
her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so
that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her
chest to a few inches above the ankles.
She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the
performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve
herself with any magician’s patter. She did her work close to the
footlights.
Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare
even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.
But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was
suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently
fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed
little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She
merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something
weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was
visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it,
she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing
to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air
appeared a tripod to support it.
Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience
which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an _entr’
acte_ is an audience responsive only to the obvious.
Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People
scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of
innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of
innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made
up by somebody else.
So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but
every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who continued
to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble “putting something
over” on them; a thing which no uneducated American conglomeration ever
quite forgives.
The girl’s silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to
gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant
metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city
whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social
existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure,
repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city’s symbol; its
chiefest crime, silence.
The girl having finished with the big glass bubble full of tiny fish,
picked it up and tossed it aside. For a moment it apparently floated
there in space like a soap-bubble. Changing rainbow tints waxed and
waned on the surface, growing deeper and more gorgeous until the
floating globe glowed scarlet, then suddenly burst into flame and
vanished. And only a strange, sweet perfume lingered in the air.
But she gave her perplexed audience no time to wonder; she had seated
herself on the stage and was already swiftly busy unfolding a white
veil with which she presently covered herself, draping it over her like
a tent.
The veil seemed to be translucent; she was apparently visible seated
beneath it. But the veil turned into smoke, rising into the air in a
thin white cloud; and there, where she had been seated, was a statue of
white stone the image of herself!—in all the frail springtide of early
adolescence—a white statue, cold, opaque, exquisite in its sculptured
immobility.
There came, the next moment, a sound of distant thunder; flashes
lighted the blank curtain; and suddenly a vein of lightning and a
sharper peal shattered the statue to fragments.
There they lay, broken bits of her own sculptured body, glistening in a
heap behind the footlights. Then each fragment began to shimmer with a
rosy internal light of its own, until the pile of broken marble glowed
like living coals under thickening and reddening vapours. And,
presently, dimly perceptible, there she was in the flesh again, seated
in the fiery centre of the conflagration, stretching her arms
luxuriously, yawning, seemingly awakening from refreshing slumber, her
eyes unclosing to rest with a sort of confused apology upon her
astounded audience.
As she rose to her feet nothing except herself remained on the stage—no
débris, not a shred of smoke, not a spark.
She came down, then, across an inclined plank into the orchestra among
the audience.
In the aisle seat nearest her sat Victor Cleves. His business was to be
there that evening. But she didn’t know that, knew nothing about
him—had never before set eyes on him.
At her gesture of invitation he made a cup of both his hands. Into
these she poured a double handful of unset diamonds—or what appeared to
be diamonds—pressed her own hands above his for a second—and the
diamonds in his palms had become pearls.
These were passed around to people in the vicinity, and finally
returned to Mr. Cleves, who, at her request, covered the heap of pearls
with both his hands, hiding them entirely from view.
At her nod he uncovered them. The pearls had become emeralds. Again,
while he held them, and without even touching him, she changed them
into rubies. Then she turned away from him, apparently forgetting that
he still held the gems, and he sat very still, one cupped hand over the
other, while she poured silver coins into a woman’s gloved hands,
turned them into gold coins, then flung each coin into the air, where
it changed to a living, fragrant rose and fell among the audience.
Presently she seemed to remember Cleve, came back down the aisle, and
under his close and intent gaze drew from his cupped hands, one by one,
a score of brilliant little living birds, which continually flew about
her and finally perched, twittering, on her golden headdress—a
rainbow-crest of living jewels.
As she drew the last warm, breathing little feathered miracle from
Cleves’s hands and released it, he said rapidly under his breath: “I
want a word with you later. Where?”
She let her clear eyes rest on him for a moment, then with a shrug so
slight that it was perceptible, perhaps, only to him, she moved on
along the inclined way, stepped daintily over the footlights, caught
fire, apparently, nodded to a badly rattled audience, and sauntered
off, burning from head to foot.
What applause there was became merged in a dissonant instrumental
outburst from the orchestra; the great god Jazz resumed direction, the
mindless audience breathed freely again as the curtain rose upon a
familiar, yelling turbulence, including all that Gotham really
understands and cares for—legs and noise.
Victor Cleves glanced up at the stage, then continued to study the name
of the girl on the programme. It was featured in rather pathetic
solitude under “_Entr’ acte_.” And he read further: “During the _entr’
acte_ Miss Tressa Norne will entertain you with several phases of Black
Magic. This strange knowledge was acquired by Miss Norne from the
Yezidees, among which almost unknown people still remain descendants of
that notorious and formidable historic personage known in the twelfth
century as The Old Man of the Mountain—or The Old Man of Mount Alamout.
“The pleasant profession of this historic individual was assassination;
and some historians now believe that genuine occult power played a part
in his dreadful record—a record which terminated only when the infantry
of Genghis Khan took Mount Alamout by storm and hanged the Old Man of
the Mountain and burned his body under a boulder of You-Stone.
“For Miss Norne’s performance there appears to be no plausible,
practical or scientific explanation.
“During her performance the curtain will remain lowered for fifteen
minutes and will then rise on the last act of ‘You Betcha Life.’”
The noisy show continued while Cleves, paying it scant attention,
brooded over the programme. And ever his keen, grey eyes reverted to
her name, Tressa Norne.
Then, for a little while, he settled back and let his absent gaze
wander over the galloping battalions of painted girls and the slapstick
principals whose perpetual motion evoked screams of approbation from
the audience amid the din of the great god Jazz.
He had an aisle seat; he disturbed nobody when he went out and around
to the stage door.
The aged man on duty took his card, called a boy and sent it off. The
boy returned with the card, saying that Miss Norne had already dressed
and departed.
Cleves tipped him and then tipped the doorman heavily.
“Where does she live?” he asked.
“Say,” said the old man, “I dunno, and that’s straight. But them ladies
mostly goes up to the roof for a look in at the ‘Moonlight Masque’ and
a dance afterward. Was you ever up there?”
“Yes.”
“Seen the new show?”
“No.”
“Well, g’wan up while you can get a table. And I bet the little girl
will be somewheres around.”
“The little girl” _was_ “somewheres around.” He secured a table, turned
and looked about at the vast cabaret into which only a few people had
yet filtered, and saw her at a distance in the carpeted corridor buying
violets from one of the flower-girls.
A waiter placed a reserve card on his table; he continued on around the
outer edge of the auditorium.
Miss Norne had already seated herself at a small table in the rear, and
a waiter was serving her with iced orange juice and little French
cakes.
When the waiter returned Cleves went up and took off his hat.
“May I talk with you for a moment, Miss Norne?” he said.
The girl looked up, the wheat-straw still between her scarlet lips.
Then, apparently recognising in him the young man in the audience who
had spoken to her, she resumed her business of imbibing orange juice.
The girl seemed even frailer and younger in her hat and street gown. A
silver-fox stole hung from her shoulders; a gold bag lay on the table
under the bunch of violets.
She paid no attention whatever to him. Presently her wheat-straw
buckled, and she selected a better one.
He said: “There’s something rather serious I’d like to speak to you
about if you’ll let me. I’m not the sort you evidently suppose. I’m not
trying to annoy you.”
At that she looked around and upward once more.
Very, very young, but already spoiled, he thought, for the dark-blue
eyes were coolly appraising him, and the droop of the mouth had become
almost sullen. Besides, traces of paint still remained to incarnadine
lip and cheek and there was a hint of hardness in the youthful
plumpness of the features.
“Are you a professional?” she asked without curiosity.
“A theatrical man? No.”
“Then if you haven’t anything to offer me, what is it you wish?”
“I have a job to offer if you care for it and if you are up to it,” he
said.
Her eyes became slightly hostile:
“What kind of job do you mean?”
“I want to learn something about you first. Will you come over to my
table and talk it over?”
“No.”
“What sort do you suppose me to be?” he inquired, amused.
“The usual sort, I suppose.”
“You mean a Johnny?”
“Yes—of sorts.”
She let her insolent eyes sweep him once more, from head to foot.
He was a well-built young man and in his evening dress he had that
something about him which placed him very definitely where he really
belonged.
“Would you mind looking at my card?” he asked.
He drew it out and laid it beside her, and without stirring she scanned
it sideways.
“That’s my name and address,” he continued. “I’m not contemplating
mischief. I’ve enough excitement in life without seeking adventure.
Besides, I’m not the sort who goes about annoying women.”
She glanced up at him again:
“You are annoying me!”
“I’m sorry. I was quite honest. Good-night.”
He took his _congé_ with unhurried amiability; had already turned away
when she said:
“Please ... what do you desire to say to me?” He came back to her
table:
“I couldn’t tell you until I know a little more about you.”
“What—do you wish to know?”
“Several things. I could scarcely ask you—go over such matters with
you—standing here.”
There was a pause; the girl juggled with the straw on the table for a
few moments, then, partly turning, she summoned a waiter, paid him,
adjusted her stole, picked up her gold bag and her violets and stood
up. Then she turned to Cleves and gave him a direct look, which had in
it the impersonal and searching gaze of a child.
When they were seated at the table reserved for him the place already
was filling rapidly—backwash from the theatres slopped through every
aisle—people not yet surfeited with noise, not yet sufficiently sodden
by their worship of the great god Jazz.
“Jazz,” said Cleves, glancing across his dinner-card at Tressa
Norne—“what’s the meaning of the word? Do you happen to know?”
“Doesn’t it come from the French ‘_jaser_’?”
He smiled. “Possibly. I’m rather hungry. Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you indicate your preferences?”
She studied her card, and presently he gave the order.
“I’d like some champagne,” she said, “unless you think it’s too
expensive.”
He smiled at that, too, and gave the order.
“I didn’t suggest any wine because you seem so young,” he said.
“How old do I seem?”
“Sixteen perhaps.”
“I am twenty-one.”
“Then you’ve had no troubles.”
“I don’t know what you call trouble,” she remarked, indifferently,
watching the arriving throngs.
The orchestra, too, had taken its place.
“Well,” she said, “now that you’ve picked me up, what do you really
want of me?” There was no mitigating smile to soften what she said. She
dropped her elbows on the table, rested her chin between her palms and
looked at him with the same searching, undisturbed expression that is
so disconcerting in children. As he made no reply: “May I have a
cocktail?” she inquired.
He gave the order. And his mind registered pessimism. “There is nothing
doing with this girl,” he thought. “She’s already on the toboggan.” But
he said aloud: “That was beautiful work you did down in the theatre,
Miss Norne.”
“Did you think so?”
“Of course. It was astounding work.”
“Thank you. But managers and audiences differ with you.”
“Then they are very stupid,” he said.
“Possibly. But that does not help me pay my board.”
“Do you mean you have trouble in securing theatrical engagements?”
“Yes, I am through here to-night, and there’s nothing else in view, so
far.”
“That’s incredible!” he exclaimed.
She lifted her glass, slowly drained it.
For a few moments she caressed the stem of the empty glass, her gaze
remote.
“Yes, it’s that way,” she said. “From the beginning I felt that my
audiences were not in sympathy with me. Sometimes it even amounts to
hostility. Americans do not like what I do, even if it holds their
attention. I don’t quite understand why they don’t like it, but I’m
always conscious they don’t. And of course that settles it—to-night has
settled the whole thing, once and for all.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What others do, I presume.”
“What do others do?” he inquired, watching the lovely sullen eyes.
“Oh, they do what I’m doing now, don’t they?—let some man pick them up
and feed them.” She lifted her indifferent eyes. “I’m not criticising
you. I meant to do it some day—when I had courage. That’s why I just
asked you if I might have some champagne—finding myself a little scared
at my first step.... But you _did_ say you might have a job for me.
Didn’t you?”
“Suppose I haven’t. What are you going to do?”
The curtain was rising. She nodded toward the bespangled chorus.
“Probably that sort of thing. They’ve asked me.”
Supper was served. They both were hungry and thirsty; the music made
conversation difficult, so they supped in silence and watched the
imbecile show conceived by vulgarians, produced by vulgarians and
served up to mental degenerates of the same species—the average
metropolitan audience.
For ten minutes a pair of comedians fell up and down a flight of steps,
and the audience shrieked approval.
“Miss Norne?”
The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked
back at him.
“Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of.
Even in India such things are not done.”
“No, not in India,” she said, indifferently.
“Where then?”
“In China.”
“You learned to do such things there?”
“Yes.”
“Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?”
“In Yian.”
“I never heard of it. Is it a province?”
“A city.”
“And you lived there?”
“Fourteen years.”
“When?”
“From 1904 to 1918.”
“During the great war,” he remarked, “you were in China?”
“Yes.”
“Then you arrived here very recently.”
“In November, from the Coast.”
“I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.”
“And went to pieces in New York,” she added calmly, finishing her glass
of champagne.
“Have you any family?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you care to say anything further?” he inquired, pleasantly.
“About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in
Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own
compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen
years old.... The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years,
and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January
of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six
months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded
the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my
mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian.... I was not told for four
years.”
“Why did they spare you?” he asked, astonished at her story so quietly
told, so utterly destitute of emotion.
“I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls
in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol
temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol.
I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna.
But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the
Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.”
She lifted her sombre eyes. “So I learned how to do the things you saw.
But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.”
An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally,
suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon
at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her
pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous
exhibitions.
But her eyes became more sombre still, and, “I don’t care to talk about
it,” she said. “I have already said too much.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry into professional secrets——”
“I can’t talk about it,” she repeated. “... Please—my glass is quite
empty.”
When he had refilled it:
“How did you get away from Yian?” he asked.
“The Japanese.”
“What luck!”
“Yes. One battle was fought at Buldak. The Hassanis and Blue Flags were
terribly cut up. Then, outside the walls of Yian, Prince Sanang’s
Tchortcha infantry made a stand. He was there with his Yezidee
horsemen, all in leather and silk armour with casques and corselets of
black Indian steel.
“I could see them from the temple—saw the Japanese gunners open fire.
The Tchortchas were blown to shreds in the blast of the Japanese
guns.... Sanang got away with some of his Yezidee horsemen.”
“Where was that battle?”
“I told you, outside the walls of Yian.”
“The newspapers never mentioned any such trouble in China,” he said,
suspiciously.
“Nobody knows about it except the Germans and the Japanese.”
“Who is this Sanang?” he demanded.
“A Yezidee-Mongol. He is one of the Sheiks-el-Djebel—a servant of The
Old Man of Mount Alamout.”
“What is _he_?”
“A sorcerer—assassin.”
“What!” exclaimed Cleves incredulously.
“Why, yes,” she said, calmly. “Have you never heard of The Old Man of
Mount Alamout?”
“Well, yes——”
“The succession has been unbroken since 1090 B.C.A Hassan Sabbah is
still the present Old Man of the Mountain. His Yezidees worship Erlik.
They are sorcerers. But you would not believe that.”
Cleves said with a smile, “Who is Erlik?”
“The Mongols’ Satan.”
“Oh! So these Yezidees are devil-worshipers!”
“They are more. They _are_ actually devils.”
“You don’t really believe that even in unexplored China there exists
such a creature as a real sorcerer, do you?” he inquired, smilingly.
“I don’t wish to talk of it.”
To his surprise her face had flushed, and he thought her sensitive
mouth quivered a little.
He watched her in silence for a moment; then, leaning a little way
across the table:
“Where are you going when the show here closes?”
“To my boarding-house.”
“And then?”
“To bed,” she said, sullenly.
“And to-morrow what do you mean to do?”
“Go out to the agencies and ask for work.”
“And if there is none?”
“The chorus,” she said, indifferently.
“What salary have you been getting?”
She told him.
“Will you take three times that amount and work with me?”