The Mating of the Blades/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
In which it is proved that a thousand years of progressive civilization and of Christianity, meek or otherwise, have not yet succeeded in abolishing human sacrifice.
Outside, on the terrace, Mr. Preserved Higgins asked Tomps, the butler, the way to the nearest telegraph station; jumped into his roadster, hatless, coatless, and was off to the village where he flustered Miss Prudence Hutchison, the local post mistress, telegraph operator, and proprietress of a general merchandise store including everything needed from red flannels to sticky North country treacle, by sending a lengthy wire in a mad jumble of code words to an address in Upper Thames Street and, not content with having spent for it the exorbitant sum of seven and sixpence ha’penny, despatching a cablegram to a Mr. Ezra W. Warburton, 59b Pine Street, New York City, U. S. A., which read:
"Got you licked to a frazzle. What price Tamerlanistan now?
Inside, the Earl of Dealle faced his two sons. Gone was his slangy, nonchalant manner, his slangy, nonchalant diction.
“You are ruined, Hector,” he repeated, in a strangely detached voice, neither criminatory nor damnatory nor even angry, but stating it as a fact—a regrettable fact, but a fact.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” replied Hector. “I rather fancy you are making a mistake.”
He half turned toward his brother, who seemed puzzled, nonplussed, ill at ease, looking down at his remarkably well-made shoes as if trying to figure out something which he did not understand.
“Tollemache!” Hector laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder. There was entreaty in his accents; too, a terrible pity, a terrible contempt. “I say—Tollemache, old chap, won’t you …?”
The other did not reply. Slowly he looked up. Slowly he studied his brother’s face, still with that same expression of puzzled, nonplussed embarrassment, while the younger brother turned to his father with an impatient gesture.
“I don’t want to accuse”—he checked himself, and went on: “anybody. I am trying to play the game …”
“And you will play the game!” the earl cut in. “For you are my dear son, blood of my blood and bone of my bone. I am—oh—the word is so trite, so damnably inadequate—but I’m proud of you, my boy!”
"Proud—of me, sir? And a moment ago you said that I was ruined, didn’t you? What …”
Suddenly Tollemache burst into speech, hectic, slurred, rather bitter:
“I don’t understand. I don’t know what it is all about. They were my cards. I took them from my room. A brand-new pack with the seal unbroken, and …”
“Silence!” thundered his father. “You bad son! You wicked brother! You—you …” his voice peaked to a high-pitched, senile screech—“to cheat! At cards! Like a low Piccadilly cad—like some swine of a racetrack tout! God! To bring shame and disgrace on an honorable English name, for the sake of some damned, trashy, pinchbeck jewel for some damned, painted London harlot …”
“But—father! Father! Listen! I give you my word of honor that I …”
“Your word of honor? You—you cheat—you swindler—you dare speak of honor?”
“Father!”
“No, no, no! Do not deny! Do not even attempt to deny! I know. Your brother knows. That Higgins person knows. I daresay Tomps knows. But”—and frothing, corroding laughter bubbled to his lips—“don’t you be afraid. The world shall never know. For—God pity me!—you are my first-born son! You are the future Earl of Dealle!”
It had always been so with the earl, with all the Wades of Dealle: a drawling, slangy, ironic outer mask, the result of Eton and the army, beneath which slumbered a lawless, turbulent personality, an atavistic throwback to the mythical Castilian ancestor that would rise like a mighty wind in his brain, suddenly, dramatically, and scotch all sobering impulses. He did not give his son a chance to speak, to explain.
“No, no! Don’t say a word. And—don’t fear! The world will never know!”
Then, after he had pushed the stammering, protesting, almost hysterical Tollemache across the threshold and bolted the door, he repeated his last words:
“The world must never know, Hector!”
“You don’t think Higgins can be persuaded to keep mum?”
“Not his sort of cad. He hates—us, our class, because he came up from some reeking gutter while we have the infernal impudence of knowing who our grandfathers were. I’ll try. I’ll talk to him. But—”
“You think it will be useless?”
“I know it will be, Hector! You must play the game. Tollemache is my first-born son. Some day he will be the Earl of Dealle. And it must never be said that an earl of Dealle cheated at cards!”
Hector stood quite still. He stared at his father out of his black, opaque eyes. Something naked reached out and touched his soul, leaving the chill of an indescribable uneasiness.
“You mean,” he asked slowly, haltingly, “that—because I am the younger son …”
“It is our tradition. Hector! The tradition of the Wades of Dealle! In a way, the tradition of England: service, courage, sacrifice!”
“Sacrifice!” Hector picked up the word like a battle gage. “I don’t fancy I’m worse than the average coward, sir. I s’pose I’ll stand the gaff when it comes to sacrificing my blood, my life. But—my pride? My honor?”
“Yes! Even that!”
Hector stared straight ahead of him. He was young, just a little over twenty-five, with all the world’s hope and glory and golden promise opening before him like a flower. Never before had he known the crude definitiveness of personal sorrow, personal grief, despair. He realized fully what it would mean to him if he obeyed his father. He would be kicked out of his regiment, his club. Society, from Aspley House to Lambeth Palace, from the Horse Guards’ Tilt-Yard to Rotten Row, from the Oval to New market Heath, would turn its back on him. He would be a pariah.
All that he understood. But it was when he thought of his brother that the harrow drove most deeply over his soul. He had always been fond of him; had always admired him for his skill with cricket bat and polo mallet; had looked up to him with boyish hero worship.
And now …
“I’ll do it, father,” he said coldly; and left the room
Outside, he met his brother. The latter tried to stop him.
“Hector—listen …”
The younger man shook his head.
“I shall bear the blame because”—he said it half proudly, half sneeringly—“there is our old tradition. But—I do not want to see you again—ever, ever! Neither you, nor father—nor England!”
“But, Hector! You don’t for a moment believe that I would cheat at cards, do you?”
“If you didn’t, who did?” came the other’s terse counter question, and he rushed past his brother, down the terrace, toward the thatched roofs of Dealle Village that dropped to the south in gold and mauve steps. He passed the Queen Anne garden, the coursing field, and the racing paddock, and stopped in front of a weather-beaten sixteenth century building that caught the slanting rays of the western sun with deep porch and oriel windows, and that dead generations of Wades had used for a banqueting hall.
To-day it did service for a lumber room.
Hector opened the door, bolted it behind him, lit a couple of great wrought-iron lanterns that swung from brackets, and walked straight to the farther wall.
It was covered with trophies from many lands: Zulu assegais; Metabele knobkerries, long gadyami swords from Arabia with tapering blades and clumsy, wooden handles; double-barreled guns from the Persian Gulf, the sort which the Gulf Arabs call bandukyiah bi rulayin, or “two-mouthed guns”; murderous Khyberee knives; cheray daggers from Afghanistan; crooked Turkoman yataghans; throwing-knives from Tripoli and Tunis; and many other weapons—all silent, steely witnesses to the warlike prowess of many generations of the Wades of Dealle.
In the center, sheathed in moth-eaten crimson velvet studded with uncut, semi-precious stones, there was a short, broad blade with a silver hilt.
He took it down and unsheathed it.
It was about a foot long, leaflike in shape, and nine inches across half way between hilt and tapering point. Hilt as well as blade were covered with a delicate, inlaid gold pattern that the Hand of Time had wiped into an indistinct blur.
As his sensitive, groping fingers touched the naked steel, he had the sudden impression of if something in his brain was being wrenched violently loose from its fastenings. It was as if his entire soul life and soul understanding were shifting within him with utter completeness. At that moment, something quite lonely, quite ancient, and quite untamed seemed to be born within him, or, rather, reborn. A new perception of life came to him, certain new and massive sensations which he felt instinctively, without being able to classify or to describe them.
It has been so ever since he could remember, ever since, an Eton “oppidan” home on vacation, he had found the ancient blade in the lumber room.
Whenever he touched the blade. It—that was the name he had given the unknown sensation during his boyhood years—would suddenly flash down upon him with terrific force, with the strength of wind and sun and sea and the stars. He would feel himself caught in a huge, irresistible whirlpool that swept out of the womb of the past, and back into the present—the future!
Once he had spoken of it to his father—he had been about fifteen at the time—and his father had dismissed it with a hooting bellow of laughter and an unkind allusion to “growing pains—what you need, my boy, is more cricket and less thinking. It ain’t good form to think so jolly much, you know!”
But he had always felt, felt now, that the blade had a meaning in his life.
It had a message to bring to him. A half-forgotten message—and—yes!—it came out of the East, with a great whirring of wings.
He shuddered. He sheathed the blade, was about to put it back amongst the trophies on the wall.
Then he reconsidered, and slipped it into the deep inside pocket of his coat, left the lumber room, and returned to the house.
He found it in a turmoil, with Mr. Preserved Higgins in the entrance hall, well within hearing of the servants’ quarters, laying down the law to the earl:
“Harsk me to keep mum, do you, because o’ the scandal, yer lordship, wot? Well—it ain’t a go, old ’un! I was cheated. Cheated at cards—so ’elp me! By that there lousy son o’ yours with ’is bleedin’ airs and you-be-damned gryces! Gawd stroike me pink— but London’s goin’ to ’ear about these ’ere goin’s-on!”
And London did.
That night, after his return to town, Mr. Preserved Higgins told the tale to his favorite barmaid at the downstairs Criterion. She repeated it to a junior captain in the Blues. He told his mother who told the old Duchess of Clonmonnell who told all the world.
Mayfair and Belgravia and Marlborough House and Hydepark Corner cackled and jeered.
“I say, Vic dear, have you heard about young Hector Wade?”
“Rather! Disgraceful, don’t you think, darling Millicent?”
“Rather rough on his nibs, the old earl.” This from a subaltern in the Buffs. “Stony down to his last farthing, I gather. And Tollemache makin’ no end of a donkey of himself over that chorus girl with the unlikely hair—can’t think of her name—Gwen—something or other, you know. And now Hector gone to the jolly old bow-wows. Frightfully hard lines on the old Lord-bless-me, what?”
Thus the beginning; and, two days later. Hector Wade’s letter to the War Office asking permission to resign his commission crossed a letter from his colonel, Sir Samuel Greatorex, asking him to send in his resignation.
Late that afternoon he left the house of his ancestors and walked out on the Sussex Downs. Dealle Village lay before him, like a snug, gray nest in the yellow hollow, with the dying sun blazing orange high-lights and purple shadows on cottage face and limestone path and hatch. Then he turned east, to the little garden the other side of the dairy which had been his dead mother’s favorite place. It was a mass of roses, creepers as well as bushes scrambling and growing in their own strong-willed fashion, clothing stones with hearts of deep ruby, building arches of glowing pink and tea yellow against the dark blue sky, lifting shy, single, dewy heads in hushed corners.
Slightly self-conscious, slightly ashamed of the action he picked a gloire-de-Dijon bud and put it in his button hole.
Then he turned down the blue gravel path toward the railway station at Dealle-Plumpton Crossings, in his right hand a small kit bag that held the few belongings, just simple necessaries, he was taking with him.
He had seen his father at tea earlier in the afternoon.
The old earl had offered him money, letters to friends in Canada or at the Cape.
But Hector had shaken his head, stubbornly, resolutely.
“I want nothing, father,” he had said. “I am through with”—making a sweeping gesture—“all this!”
“You are through with—me?”
The earl had stretched out a withered, appealing old hand. But Hector had disregarded it.
“Yes, father,” he had replied, simply, chillily.
And so he left the home of his ancestors, carrying with him nothing except the small kit bag, the ancient blade that pressed against his heart, and—memories.
He left no address behind; when Tollemache that morning had tried to speak to him, he had turned his back on him without a word; and nobody saw him go, except Tomps, the butler.
The latter was fingering a five-pound note which Mr. Preserved Higgins had given him with the promise that there was another five pounds waiting for him if he wired Mr. Higgins on what day and by what train Hector Wade was leaving Dealle. He saw no reason why he should not earn that five pounds. He followed Hector at a safe distance, saw that he was taking the five forty-five for Waterloo Station, and wired Mr. Higgins accordingly. It was delivered to the millionaire simultaneously with a cable from his confidential agent in New York telling him that the telegram he had sent to Mr. Ezra W. Warburton, 59b Pine Street a few days earlier had been cabled back to London, as the addressee had sailed for the latter place six days earlier and was just about due at his favorite hotel there, the Savoy.
A jumble of news, which caused Mr. Preserved Higgins to do a great deal of rapid figuring and dovetailing.
When Hector Wade left the train at Waterloo and had himself driven to a small, cheap hotel in Moor Street, in the reeking heart of Soho, he was not aware that a short, stocky, sandy-haired man who worked in Upper Thames Street for a mythical party whose cable address was “Gloops,” was shadowing him in another taxicab.
Nor was he aware that, shortly afterwards, a lengthy code cablegram was sent to Babu Bansi, at Teheran, giving the latter several intricate instructions with regard to a certain Princess Aziza Nurmahal who seemed to rule a country called Tamerlanistan.
Even had he known, it would have made little difference to him. In fact, he would not have been quite sure if Tamerlanistan was the name of a rug or of the latest American cocktail.