The Surakarta/Chapter 2
II
MAX SCHIMIMEL
Not many men knew enough, as did Hereford, to visit Max Schimmel when confronted by something that perplexed and bewildered them. Those who did found that to Max nothing was strange, very little was perplexing. If somewhere, sometime, he had not encountered the precise situation that disturbed his questioner he had seen some one else encounter and had helped some one else to overcome it.
Max occupied the second floor, which otherwise could not have been rented at all, of a two-story frame building belonging to the Regan estate. This frame building, falling into decay, was almost in the heart of the business district on property left unimproved by Hereford for business reasons. Besides the second floor, Max had the use of half the yard.
He was in this yard, which with carefully nurtured shrubs and vines he had converted into a garden, when Hereford found him. Beside him a stump-tailed Gila lizard in a little glass cage basked comfortably in the warm October sun, and at his feet a strange crimson-striped fish, which Hereford had not seen before, with long, featherlike fins streaked purple and crimson, flopped in a glass trough; but Max's attention was entirely absorbed by a tiny clay pot boasting one white sweet pea. He was measuring this sweet pea across and across with a fine wire scale so earnestly that he did not notice the entrance of his friend.
There was mystery about Max. Clerks, stenographers and business men often stopped their work to look down in perplexed curiosity from their high windows at him and his dwelling. They wondered who he was and what he did; but the bushy-haired little man, with a scarred, perpetually tanned face, ignored these looks. In his life nothing was definite since his birth in Schleswig-Holstein except his presence at Gravelotte, where he was lamed in his right knee. Exactly as in India and China Max had dwelt in the farthest inland and most inaccessible villages, as in Africa and Borneo he had disappeared in the most impenetrable jungles, so here in civilization he had elected to dwell where civilization was fully represented and men were found twelve thousand to the acre. Yet he seemed as unaware of the presence of these men as he was of Hereford, now that he stood beside him.
"Put it down, Max," Hereford directed. "I have something important to ask you."
Max only adjusted his scale more intently, recognizing the voice, but not turning his head.
"Ach! Imbortant!" he exclaimed. "It must be that some one is about to lose or to make money then; for that iss what beople here think iss imbortant. But what iss imbortant iss—this." He pointed to the sweet pea.
"Dangerous variety, Max?"
"Why not? Would it be imbossible to give to this sweet pea the poison of the Borgias? But then this pea would become an exception—therefore unimbortant. Wait but a minute now and I will tell you whether—if you had an ancestor with too long a shankbone, let us say, back in the time of Rameses—your children may be gawky with that same long shank; or whether—so far as now iss proved—our forevaters only so far back as Cleopatra can so determine our shanks. See, this which I measure we may call the shank of this flower; it iss one hundred and fifty generations of this flower back or three thousand human years—that only a single pea had this petal long. And look!"
"Well?"
"Opserve, my friend, from this sweet pea, if you are thinking of getting marriet, that your child may resemble any forevater for three thousand years."
"I am not thinking of getting married!" Hereford returned irritatedly.
Max turned with a bland smile. "Then what?"
"I came to ask you about emeralds, to get from you a list of the most precious emeralds in the world."
"The most brecious emerald in the world, my friend"—Max put the pot carefully down—"iss, beyont argument or doubt, the last little speck of green put by a man who loves ubon the finger of the lovet one."
"Then the next precious?"
"The next brecious would mean the largest, no doubt; and that—of course—iss the great Java emerald, the Surakarta. The next"
"You need go no farther, Max."
"Ach!" Max said, with interest. "So it iss not about a list of emeralds you have come; but only about the great Surakarta?"
Hereford, looking carefully on both sides and under the bench where Max was sitting, sat down.
"That is true, Max. Where is it?"
"It iss in the tower of the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, my friend, where it has stayed six hundred years and will, perhaps, stay six hundred more in the steel box that was made that long ago to protect it. You will make no money out of the Surakarta, my friend. It iss not on the market to be sold; it iss not to be seen on exhibition even. Opserve a pretty story: Six hundred years ago there wass in that vertile island of Java a most cunning worker of metals. The Dutch had not yet come to the island, which was vertile then in brown men of intelligence as it iss vertile now in sugar and rice. This man could make statues of metal which, when one blew upon them, spoke words, as before that did the great stone statues of Egypt. He made faces out of steel which, when one pressed upon a lever, would change their exbression. So this man wass sent for by the Soesoehoenan that he might make a box which could be opened by no one who had not its secret; and in this box wass to be put the great Surakarta, which iss the sign of the sovereignty of Surakarta. While the Soesoehoenan holds that emerald no one can depose him; so it iss guarded as the heart of his power, and no one was to know the secret of the box but the Soesoehoenan and his favorite, so that in case the Soesoehoenan died the favorite still could open it. Then the man—this maker of metals—knowing what this meant, gafe a dinner to all his friends; and after the dinner he distributed to one and to another and gafe away all that he owned; and then he went and made the box; and after it wass finished, coming out, he was seized and strangled by order of the Soesoehoenan, as he had expected. Iss it not a bretty story?"
"And the emerald is all that they say of it, Max?"
"That, my friendt, I do not know; for I haf nefer seen it. But in Sumatra I met once a man who had seen it, and he said it iss not, but that there iss a small flaw in it. Whether that iss so or not iss something which I would like to know."
"I did not mean that, Max; I meant, the Javanese still—at least so I have been told—hold that strange superstition that the throne of Surakarta goes with the emerald?"
"To be sure. But in what iss that strange? What iss strange iss that the German William should be submitted to by all Germans as their ruler, when in broof he can show not efen an emerald!" Max lifted his chin in an argumentative manner. "An emerald iss at least an emerald; and when it iss the Surakarta it iss something more than an emerald. The man that hass that indeed hass something that is worth while."
The striped fish flopped with a loud splash in its glass trough, and Hereford frowned at the interruption to his thoughts. He felt now, with his irritation against his ward increased by his increased certainty, that it was imperative to see Lorine at once.
He got up and took leave of the little German.