 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
II
The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like
a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves
the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute, dismal, and
forgotten. There were twelve men, so it was said, in
the village of Fish, twelve sombre and inexplicable
souls who sucked a lean milk from the almost literally
bare rock upon which a mysterious populatory force
had begotten them. They had become a race apart,
these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed
by an early whim of nature, which on second thought
had abandoned them to struggle and extermination.
Out of the blue-black bruise in the distance crept a
long line of moving lights upon the desolation of the
land, and the twelve men of Fish gathered like ghosts
at the shanty depot to watch the passing of the seven
o'clock train, the Transcontinental Express from Chicago.
Six times or so a year the Transcontinental Express,
through some inconceivable jurisdiction, stopped
at the village of Fish, and when this occurred a figure
or so would disembark, mount into a buggy that always
appeared from out of the dusk, and drive off toward
the bruised sunset. The observation of this pointless
and preposterous phenomenon had become a sort of
cult among the men of Fish. To observe, that was all;
there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion
which would make them wonder or speculate,
else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious
visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond
all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even
Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock
—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only
each night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty
depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer of dim,
anæmic wonder.
On this June night, the Great Brakeman, whom, had
they deified any one, they might well have chosen as
o'clock train should leave its human (or inhuman)
deposit at Fish. At two minutes after seven Percy
Washington and John T. Unger disembarked, hurried
past the spellbound, the agape, the fearsome eyes of
the twelve men of Fish, mounted into a buggy which
had obviously appeared from nowhere, and drove away.
After half an hour, when the twilight had coagulated
into dark, the silent negro who was driving the buggy
hailed an opaque body somewhere ahead of them in the
gloom. In response to his cry, it turned upon them a
luminous disk which regarded them like a malignant eye
out of the unfathomable night. As they came closer,
John saw that it was the tail-light of an immense automobile,
larger and more magnificent than any he had
ever seen. Its body was of gleaming metal richer than
nickel and lighter than silver, and the hubs of the wheels
were studded with iridescent geometric figures of green
and yellow—John did not dare to guess whether they
were glass or jewel.
Two negroes, dressed in glittering livery such as one
sees in pictures of royal processions in London, were
standing at attention beside the car and as the two young
men dismounted from the buggy they were greeted in
some language which the guest could not understand,
but which seemed to be an extreme form of the Southern
negro's dialect.
"Get in," said Percy to his friend, as their trunks
were tossed to the ebony roof of the limousine. "Sorry
we had to bring you this far in that buggy, but of course
it wouldn't do for the people on the train or those God-forsaken
fellas in Fish to see this automobile."
"Gosh! What a car!" This ejaculation was provoked
by its interior. John saw that the upholstery
consisted of a thousand minute and exquisite tapestries
upon a background of cloth of gold. The two armchair
seats in which the boys luxuriated were covered with
stuff that resembled duvetyn, but seemed woven in numberless
colors of the ends of ostrich feathers.
"What a car!" cried John again, in amazement.
"This thing?" Percy laughed. "Why, it's just an
old junk we use for a station wagon."
By this time they were gliding along through the darkness
toward the break between the two mountains.
"We'll be there in an hour and a half," said Percy,
looking at the clock. "I may as well tell you it's not
going to be like anything you ever saw before."
If the car was any indication of what John would
see, he was prepared to be astonished indeed. The simple
piety prevalent in Hades has the earnest worship
of and respect for riches as the first article of its creed
—had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before
them, his parents would have turned away in horror
at the blashemy.
They had now reached and were entering the break
between the two mountains and almost immediately
the way became much rougher.
"If the moon shone down here, you'd see that we're
in a big gulch," said Percy, trying to peer out of the
window. He spoke a few words into the mouthpiece
and immediately the footman turned on a search-light
and swept the hillsides with an immense beam.
"Rocky, you see. An ordinary car would be knocked
to pieces in half an hour. In fact, it'd take a tank to
navigate it unless you knew the way. You notice we're
going uphill now."
They were obviously ascending, and within a few
minutes the car was crossing a high rise, where they
caught a glimpse of a pale moon newly risen in the distance.
took shape out of the dark beside it—these were negroes
also. Again the two young men were saluted in the
same dimly recognizable dialect; then the negroes set
to work and four immense cables dangling from overhead
were attached with hooks to the hubs of the great
jeweled wheels. At a resounding "Hey-yah!" John
felt the car being lifted slowly from the ground—up and
up—clear of the tallest rocks on both sides—then higher,
until he could see a wavy, moonlit valley stretched out
before him in sharp contrast to the quagmire of rocks
that they had just left. Only on one side was there
still rock—and then suddenly there was no rock beside
them or anywhere around.
It was apparent that they had surmounted some immense
knife-blade of stone, projecting perpendicularly
into the air. In a moment they were going down again,
and finally with a soft bump they were landed upon the
smooth earth.
"The worst is over," said Percy, squinting out the
window. "It's only five miles from here, and our own
road—tapestry brick—all the way. This belongs to
us. This is where the United States ends, father says."
"Are we in Canada?"
"We are not. We're in the middle of the Montana
Rockies. But you are now on the only five square miles
of land in the country that's never been surveyed."
"Why hasn't it? Did they forget it?"
"No," said Percy, grinning, "they tried to do it three
times. The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole
department of the State survey; the second time he had
the official maps of the United States tinkered with—
that held them for fifteen years. The last time was
harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were
in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up.
a slight defection that would allow for this territory not
to appear, and he substituted them for the ones that
were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he
had what looked like a village built up on its banks—so
that they'd see it, and think it was a town ten miles
farther up the valley. There's only one thing my father's
afraid of," he concluded, "only one thing in the world
that could be used to find us out."
"What's that?"
Percy sank his voice to a whisper.
"Aeroplanes," he breathed. "We've got half a dozen
anti-aircraft guns and we've arranged it so far—but
there've been a few deaths and a great many prisoners.
Not that we mind that, you know, father and I, but it
upsets mother and the girls, and there's always the
chance that some time we won't be able to arrange it."
Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the
green moon's heaven, were passing the green moon like
precious Eastern stuffs paraded for the inspection of some
Tartar Khan. It seemed to John that it was day, and
that he was looking at some lads sailing above him in the
air, showering down tracts and patent medicine circulars,
with their messages of hope for despairing, rockbound
hamlets. It seemed to him that he could see
them look down out of the clouds and stare—and stare
at whatever there was to stare at in this place whither
he was bound— What then? Were they induced
to land by some insidious device there to be immured
far from patent medicines and from tracts until the judgment
day—or, should they fail to fall into the trap,
did a quick puff of smoke and the sharp round of a splitting
shell bring them drooping to earth—and "upset"
Percy's mother and sisters. John shook his head and
the wraith of a hollow laugh issued silently from his
here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre Crœsus?
What terrible and golden mystery? . . .
The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and outside
the Montana night was bright as day. The tapestry
brick of the road was smooth to the tread of the great
tires as they rounded a still, moonlit lake; they passed
into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent and
cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn
and John's exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous
with Percy's taciturn "We're home."
Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite château
rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble
radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then
melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in translucent
feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest
of pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the
sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand
yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and
triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the
intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all
trembled on John's spirit like a chord of music. On one
of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an
arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort
of floating fairyland—and as John gazed up in warm
enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins
drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing
he had ever heard before. Then in a moment the car
stopped before wide, high marble steps around which
the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At
the top of the steps two great doors swung silently
open and amber light flooded out upon the darkness,
silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady with black,
high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.
"Mother," Percy was saying, "this is my friend, John
Unger, from Hades."
Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze
of many colors, of quick sensory impressions, of music
soft as a voice in love, and of the beauty of things, lights
and shadows, and motions and faces. There was a white-haired
man who stood drinking a many-hued cordial
from a crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There
was a girl with a flowery face, dressed like Titania with
braided sapphires in her hair. There was a room where
the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure
of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception
of the ultimate prison—ceiling, floor, and all,
it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds
of every size and shape, until, lit with tall violet
lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness
that could be compared only with itself, beyond
human wish or dream.
Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandred.
Sometimes the floor under their feet would flame
in brilliant patterns from lighting below, patterns of
barbaric clashing colors, of pastel delicacy, of sheer whiteness,
or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some
mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers
of thick crystal he would see blue or green water swirling,
inhabited by vivid fish and growths of rainbow
foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of
every texture and color or along corridors of palest
ivory, unbroken as though carved complete from the
gigantic tusks of dinosaurs extinct before the age of
man. . . .
Then a hazily remembered transition, and they were
at dinner—where each plate was of two almost imperceptible
layers of solid diamond between which was
curiously worked a filigree of emerald design, a shaving
sliced from green air. Music, plangent and unobtrusive,
drifted down through far corridors—his chair, feathered
and curved insidiously to his back, seemed to engulf
He tried drowsily to answer a question that had been
asked him, but the honeyed luxury that clasped his body
added to the illusion of sleep—jewels, fabrics, wines, and
metals blurred before his eyes into a sweet mist. . . .
"Yes," he replied with a polite effort, "it certainly is
hot enough for me down there."
He managed to add a ghostly laugh; then, without
movement, without resistance, he seemed to float off
and away, leaving an iced dessert that was pink as a
dream. . . . He fell asleep.
When he awoke he knew that several hours had
passed. He was in a great quiet room with ebony walls
and a dull illumination that was too faint, too subtle,
to be called a light. His young host was standing over
him.
"You fell asleep at dinner," Percy was saying. "I
nearly did, too—it was such a treat to be comfortable
again after this year of school. Servants undressed and
bathed you while you were sleeping."
"Is this a bed or a cloud?" sighed John. "Percy,
Percy—before you go, I want to apologize."
"For what?"
"For doubting you when you said you had a diamond
as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."
Percy smiled.
"I thought you didn't believe me. It's that mountain,
you know."
"What mountain?"
"The mountain the château rests on. It's not very
big, for a mountain. But except about fifty feet of sod
and gravel on top it's solid diamond. One diamond,
one cubic mile without a flaw. Aren't you listening?
Say—"
But John T. Unger had again fallen asleep.
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