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THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ
I
John T. Unger came from a family that had been well
known in Hades—a small town on the Mississippi River
—for several generations. John's father had held the
amateur golf championship through many a heated contest;
Mrs. Unger was known "from hot-box to hot-bed,"
as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and
young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had
danced all the latest dances from New York before he
put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he
was to be away from home. That respect for a New
England education which is the bane of all provincial
places, which drains them yearly of their most promising
young men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing
would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas'
School near Boston—Hades was too small to hold their
darling and gifted son.
Now in Hades—as you know if you ever have been
there—the names of the more fashionable preparatory
schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants
have been so long out of the world that, though they
make a show of keeping up to date in dress and manners
and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay,
and a function that in Hades would be considered
elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago beef-princess
as "perhaps a little tacky."
John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs.
Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of
linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented
his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money.
"Remember, you are always welcome here," he said.
"You can be sure, boy, that we'll keep the home fires
burning."
"I know," answered John huskily.
"Don't forget who you are and where you come from,"
continued his father proudly, "and you can do nothing
to harm you. You are an Unger—from Hades."
So the old man and the young shook hands and John
walked away with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten
minutes later he had passed outside the city limits, and
he stopped to glance back for the last time. Over the
gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely
attractive to him. His father had tried time and time
again to have it changed to something with a little more
push and verve about it, such as "Hades—Your Opportunity,"
or else a plain "Welcome" sign set over a
hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The
old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought
—but now. . . .
So John took his look and then set his face resolutely
toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the
lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm
and passionate beauty.
St. Midas' School is half an hour from Boston in a
Rolls-Pierce motor-car. The actual distance will never
be known, for no one, except John T. Unger, had ever
arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce and probably no
one ever will again. St. Midas' is the most expensive
and the most exclusive boys' preparatory school in the
world.
John's first two years there passed pleasantly. The
fathers of all the boys were money-kings and John spent
his summers visiting at fashionable resorts. While he
was very fond of all the boys he visited, their fathers
way he often wondered at their exceeding sameness.
When he told them where his home was they would
ask jovially, "Pretty hot down there?" and John would
muster a faint smile and answer, "It certainly is." His
response would have been heartier had they not all made
this joke—at best varying it with, "Is it hot enough
for you down there?" which he hated just as much.
In the middle of his second year at school, a quiet,
handsome boy named Percy Washington had been put
in John's form. The newcomer was pleasant in his manner
and exceedingly well dressed even for St. Midas',
but for some reason he kept aloof from the other boys.
The only person with whom he was intimate was John
T. Unger, but even to John he was entirely uncommunicative
concerning his home or his family. That he was
wealthy went without saying, but beyond a few such
deductions John knew little of his friend, so it promised
rich confectionery for his curiosity when Percy invited
him to spend the summer at his home "in the West."
He accepted, without hesitation.
It was only when they were in the train that Percy
became, for the first time, rather communicative. One
day while they were eating lunch in the dining-car and
discussing the imperfect characters of several of the
boys at school, Percy suddenly changed his tone and
made an abrupt remark.
"My father," he said, "is by far the richest man in
the world."
"Oh," said John, politely. He could think of no answer
to make to this confidence. He considered "That's
very nice," but it sounded hollow and was on the point
of saying, "Really?" but refrained since it would seem
to question Percy's statement. And such an astounding
statement could scarcely be questioned.
"By far the richest," repeated Percy.
"I was reading in the World Almanac," began John,
"that there was one man in America with an income of
over five million a year and four men with incomes of
over three million a year, and—"
"Oh, they're nothing." Percy's mouth was a half-moon
of scorn. "Catch-penny capitalists, financial
small-fry, petty merchants and money-lenders. My
father could buy them out and not know he'd done it."
"But how does he—"
"Why haven't they put down his income tax? Because
he doesn't pay any. At least he pays a little one
—but he doesn't pay any on his real income."
"He must be very rich," said John simply. "I'm
glad. I like very rich people.
"The richer a fella is, the better I like him." There
was a look of passionate frankness upon his dark face.
"I visited the Schnlitzer-Murphys last Easter. Vivian
Schnlitzer-Murphy had rubies as big as hen's eggs,
and sapphires that were like globes with lights inside
them—"
"I love jewels," agreed Percy enthusiastically. "Of
course I wouldn't want any one at school to know about
it, but I've got quite a collection myself. I used to
collect them instead of stamps."
"And diamonds," continued John eagerly. "The
Schnlitzer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts—"
"That's nothing." Percy had leaned forward and
dropped his voice to a low whisper. "That's nothing
at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton
Hotel."
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.
III
Morning. As he awoke he perceived drowsily that
the room had at the same moment become dense with
sunlight. The ebony panels of one wall had slid aside
on a sort of track, leaving his chamber half open to the
day. A large negro in a white uniform stood beside his
bed.
"Good-evening," muttered John, summoning his
brains from the wild places.
"Good-morning, sir. Are you ready for your bath,
sir? Oh, don't get up—I'll put you in, if you'll just
unbutton your pajamas—there. Thank you, sir."
John lay quietly as his pajamas were removed—he
was amused and delighted; he expected to be lifted like
a child by this black Gargantua who was tending him,
but nothing of the sort happened; instead he felt the
bed tilt up slowly on its side—he began to roll, startled
at first, in the direction of the wall, but when he reached
the wall its drapery gave way, and sliding two yards
farther down a fleecy incline he plumped gently into
water the same temperature as his body.
He looked about him. The runway or rollway on
which he had arrived had folded gently back into place.
He had been projected into another chamber and was
sitting in a sunken bath with his head just above the
level of the floor. All about him, lining the walls of the
room and the sides and bottom of the bath itself, was a
blue aquarium, and gazing through the crystal surface
on which he sat, he could see fish swimming among
amber lights and even gliding without curiosity past
his outstretched toes, which were separated from them
only by the thickness of the crystal. From overhead,
sunlight came down through sea-green glass.
"I suppose, sir, that you'd like hot rosewater and
soapsuds this morning, sir—and perhaps cold salt water
to finish."
The negro was standing beside him.
"Yes," agreed John, smiling inanely, "as you please."
Any idea of ordering this bath according to his own
meagre standards of living would have been priggish
and not a little wicked.
The negro pressed a button and a warm rain began to
fall, apparently from overhead, but really, so John discovered
after a moment, from a fountain arrangement
near by. The water turned to a pale rose color and jets
of liquid soap spurted into it from four miniature walrus
heads at the corners of the bath. In a moment a
dozen little paddle-wheels, fixed to the sides, had churned
the mixture into a radiant rainbow of pink foam which
enveloped him softly with its delicious lightness, and
burst in shining, rosy bubbles here and there about him.
"Shall I turn on the moving-picture machine, sir?"
suggested the negro deferentially. "There's a good one-reel
comedy in this machine to-day, or I can put in a
serious piece in a moment, if you prefer it."
"No, thanks," answered John, politely but firmly.
He was enjoying his bath too much to desire any distraction.
But distraction came. In a moment he was
listening intently to the sound of flutes from just outside,
flutes dripping a melody that was like a waterfall,
cool and green as the room itself, accompanying a frothy
piccolo, in play more fragile than the lace of suds that
covered and charmed him.
After a cold salt-water bracer and a cold fresh finish,
he stepped out and into a fleecy robe, and upon a couch
covered with the same material he was rubbed with oil,
alcohol, and spice. Later he sat in a voluptuous chair
while he was shaved and his hair was trimmed.
"Mr. Percy is waiting in your sitting-room," said the
negro, when these operations were finished. "My name
is Gygsum, Mr. Unger, sir. I am to see to Mr. Unger
every morning."
John walked out into the brisk sunshine of his living-room,
where he found breakfast waiting for him and
Percy, gorgeous in white kid knickerbockers, smoking
in an easy chair.
IV
This is a story of the Washington family as Percy
sketched it for John during breakfast.
The father of the present Mr. Washington had been
a Virginian, a direct descendant of George Washington,
and Lord Baltimore. At the close of the Civil War he
was a twenty-five-year-old Colonel with a played-out
plantation and about a thousand dollars in gold.
Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, for that was the
young Colonel's name, decided to present the Virginia
estate to his younger brother and go West. He selected
two dozen of the most faithful blacks, who, of course,
worshipped him, and bought twenty-five tickets to the
West, where he intended to take out land in their names
and start a sheep and cattle ranch.
When he had been in Montana for less than a month
and things were going very poorly indeed, he stumbled
on his great discovery. He had lost his way when riding
in the hills, and after a day without food he began to
grow hungry. As he was without his rifle, he was forced
to pursue a squirrel, and in the course of the pursuit he
noticed that it was carrying something shiny in its
mouth. Just before it vanished into its hole—for Providence
did not intend that this squirrel should alleviate
his hunger—it dropped its burden. Sitting down to
consider the situation Fitz-Norman's eye was caught
had completely lost his appetite and gained one hundred
thousand dollars. The squirrel, which had refused
with annoying persistence to become food, had
made him a present of a large and perfect diamond.
Late that night he found his way to camp and twelve
hours later all the males among his darkies were back
by the squirrel hole digging furiously at the side of the
mountain. He told them he had discovered a rhinestone
mine, and, as only one or two of them had ever
seen even a small diamond before, they believed him,
without question. When the magnitude of his discovery
became apparent to him, he found himself in a quandary.
The mountain was a diamond—it was literally nothing
else but solid diamond. He filled four saddle bags full
of glittering samples and started on horseback for St.
Paul. There he managed to dispose of half a dozen
small stones—when he tried a larger one a storekeeper
fainted and Fitz-Norman was arrested as a public disturber.
He escaped from jail and caught the train for
New York, where he sold a few medium-sized diamonds
and received in exchange about two hundred thousand
dollars in gold. But he did not dare to produce any
exceptional gems—in fact, he left New York just in
time. Tremendous excitement had been created in
jewelry circles, not so much by the size of his diamonds
as by their appearance in the city from mysterious
sources. Wild rumors became current that a diamond
mine had been discovered in the Catskills, on the Jersey
coast, on Long Island, beneath Washington Square.
Excursion trains, packed with men carrying picks and
shovels, began to leave New York hourly, bound for
various neighboring El Dorados. But by that time
young Fitz-Norman was on his way back to Montana.
By the end of a fortnight he had estimated that the
quantity to all the rest of the diamonds known to exist
in the world. There was no valuing it by any regular
computation, however, for it was one solid diamond—
and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom
fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary
with its size in the usual arithmetical progression, there
would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth
part of it. And what could any one do with a diamond
that size?
It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one
sense, the richest man that ever lived—and yet was he
worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire
there was no telling to what measures the Government
might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well
as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately
and institute a monopoly.
There was no alternative—he must market his mountain
in secret. He sent South for his younger brother
and put him in charge of his colored following—darkies
who had never realized that slavery was abolished. To
make sure of this, he read them a proclamation that he
had composed, which announced that General Forrest
had reorganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated
the North in one pitched battle. The negroes
believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring
it a good thing and held revival services immediately.
Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with
one hundred thousand dollars and two trunks filled with
rough diamonds of all sizes. He sailed for Russia in a
Chinese junk and six months after his departure from
Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure
lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller,
announcing that he had a diamond for the Czar. He
remained in St. Petersburg for two weeks, in constant
and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or
four times during the whole fortnight.
On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer
stones, he was allowed to leave for India. Before he
left, however, the Court Treasurers had deposited to
his credit, in American banks, the sum of fifteen million
dollars—under four different aliases.
He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a
little over two years. He had visited the capitals of
twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors,
eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan.
At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own
wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently
against the disclosure of his secret. No one of
his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a
week before being invested with a history of enough
fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied
it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire.
From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman
Washington was a long epic in gold. There
were side issues, of course—he evaded the surveys, he
married a Virginia lady, by whom he had a single son,
and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate
complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate
habit of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had
several times endangered their safety. But very few
other murders stained these happy years of progress
and expansion.
Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all
but a few million dollars of his outside wealth bought
up rare minerals in bulk, which he deposited in the safety
vaults of banks all over the world, marked as bric-à-brac.
His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed this
policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals
—so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could
be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box.
When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his
son, Braddock, decided that the business had gone far
enough. The amount of wealth that he and his father
had taken out of the mountain was beyond all exact
computation. He kept a note-book in cipher in which
he set down the approximate quantity of radium in
each of the thousand banks he patronized, and recorded
the alias under which it was held. Then he did a very
simple thing—he sealed up the mine.
He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of
it would support all the Washingtons yet to be born in
unparalleled luxury for generations. His one care must
be the protection of his secret, lest in the possible panic
attendant on its discovery he should be reduced with
all the property-holders in the world to utter poverty.
This was the family among whom John T. Unger was
staying. This was the story he heard in his silver-walled
living-room the morning after his arrival.
V
After breakfast, John found his way out the great
marble entrance, and looked curiously at the scene before
him. The whole valley, from the diamond mountain
to the steep granite cliff five miles away, still gave
off a breath of golden haze which hovered idly above
the fine sweep of lawns and lakes and gardens. Here
and there clusters of elms made delicate groves of shade,
contrasting strangely with the tough masses of pine
forest that held the hills in a grip of dark-blue green.
Even as John looked he saw three fawns in single file
patter out from one clump about a half mile away and
half-light of another. John would not have been surprised
to see a goat-foot piping his way among the trees
or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph-skin and flying
yellow hair between the greenest of the green leaves.
In some such cool hope he descended the marble
steps, disturbing faintly the sleep of two silky Russian
wolfhounds at the bottom, and set off along a walk of
white and blue brick that seemed to lead in no particular
direction.
He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It
is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can
never live in the present, but must always be measuring
up the day against its own radiantly imagined future—
flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations
and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable
young dream.
John rounded a soft corner where the massed rosebushes
filled the air with heavy scent, and struck off
across a park toward a patch of moss under some trees.
He had never lain upon moss, and he wanted to see
whether it was really soft enough to justify the use of
its name as an adjective. Then he saw a girl coming
toward him over the grass. She was the most beautiful
person he had ever seen.
She was dressed in a white little gown that came just
below her knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped
with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink
bare feet scattered the dew before them as she came.
She was younger than John—not more than sixteen.
"Hello," she cried softly, "I'm Kismine."
She was much more than that to John already. He
advanced toward her, scarcely moving as he drew near
lest he should tread on her bare toes.
"You haven't met me," said her soft voice. Her blue
"You met my sister, Jasmine, last night. I was sick
with lettuce poisoning," went on her soft voice, and her
eyes continued, "and when I'm sick I'm sweet—and
when I'm well."
"You have made an enormous impression on me,"
said John's eyes, "and I'm not so slow myself"—"How
do you do?" said his voice. "I hope you're better this
morning."—"You darling," added his eyes tremulously.
John observed that they had been walking along
the path. On her suggestion they sat down together
upon the moss, the softness of which he failed to determine.
He was critical about women. A single defect—a
thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye—was enough to
make him utterly indifferent. And here for the first
time in his life he was beside a girl who seemed to him
the incarnation of physical perfection.
"Are you from the East?" asked Kismine with
charming interest.
"No," answered John simply. "I'm from Hades."
Either she had never heard of Hades, or she could
think of no pleasant comment to make upon it, for she
did not discuss it further.
"I'm going East to school this fall," she said. "D'you
think I'll like it? I'm going to New York to Miss
Bulge's. It's very strict, but you see over the weekends
I'm going to live at home with the family in our
New York house, because father heard that the girls
had to go walking two by two."
"Your father wants you to be proud," observed
John.
"We are," she answered, her eyes shining with dignity.
"None of us has ever been punished. Father
said we never should be. Once when my sister Jasmine
got up and limped away.
"Mother was—well, a little startled," continued Kismine,
"when she heard that you were from—from where
you are from, you know. She said that when she was
a young girl—but then, you see, she's a Spaniard and
old-fashioned."
"Do you spend much time out here?" asked John,
to conceal the fact that he was somewhat hurt by this
remark. It seemed an unkind allusion to his provincialism.
"Percy and Jasmine and I are here every summer,
but next summer Jasmine is going to Newport. She's
coming out in London a year from this fall. She'll be
presented at court."
"Do you know," began John hesitantly, "you're
much more sophisticated than I thought you were when
I first saw you?"
"Oh, no, I'm not," she exclaimed hurriedly. "Oh,
I wouldn't think of being. I think that sophisticated
young people are terribly common, don't you? I'm not
at all, really. If you say I am, I'm going to cry."
She was so distressed that her lip was trembling.
John was impelled to protest:
"I didn't mean that; I only said it to tease you."
"Because I wouldn't mind if I were," she persisted,
"but I'm not. I'm very innocent and girlish. I never
smoke, or drink, or read anything except poetry. I
know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry. I dress
very simply—in fact, I scarcely dress at all. I think
sophisticated is the last thing you can say about me. I
believe that girls ought to enjoy their youths in a
wholesome way."
"I do, too," said John heartily.
Kismine was cheerful again. She smiled at him, and
eye.
"I like you," she whispered, intimately. "Are you
going to spend all your time with Percy while you're
here, or will you be nice to me? Just think—I'm absolutely
fresh ground. I've never had a boy in love with
me in all my life. I've never been allowed even to see
boys alone—except Percy. I came all the way out here
into this grove hoping to run into you, where the family
wouldn't be around."
Deeply flattered, John bowed from the hips as he had
been taught at dancing school in Hades.
"We'd better go now," said Kismine sweetly. "I
have to be with mother at eleven. You haven't asked
me to kiss you once. I thought boys always did that
nowadays."
John drew himself up proudly.
"Some of them do," he answered, "but not me.
Girls don't do that sort of thing—in Hades."
Side by side they walked back toward the house.
VI
John stood facing Mr. Braddock Washington in the
full sunlight. The elder man was about forty with a
proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure.
In the mornings he smelt of horses—the best horses. He
carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single
large opal for a grip. He and Percy were showing John
around.
"The slaves' quarters are there." His walking-stick
indicated a cloister of marble on their left that ran in
graceful Gothic along the side of the mountain. "In
my youth I was distracted for a while from the business
of life by a period of absurd idealism. During that
every one of their rooms with a tile bath."
"I suppose," ventured John, with an ingratiating
laugh, "that they used the bathtubs to keep coal in.
Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy told me that once he—"
"The opinions of Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy are of little
importance, I should imagine," interrupted Braddock
Washington, coldly. "My slaves did not keep coal in
their bathtubs. They had orders to bathe every day,
and they did. If they hadn't I might have ordered a
sulphuric acid shampoo. I discontinued the baths for
quite another reason. Several of them caught cold and
died. Water is not good for certain races—except as a
beverage."
John laughed, and then decided to nod his head in
sober agreement. Braddock Washington made him
uncomfortable.
"All these negroes are descendants of the ones my
father brought North with him. There are about two
hundred and fifty now. You notice that they've lived
so long apart from the world that their original dialect
has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We
bring a few of them up to speak English—my secretary
and two or three of the house servants.
"This is the golf course," he continued, as they strolled
along the velvet winter grass. "It's all a green, you see
—no fairway, no rough, no hazards."
He smiled pleasantly at John.
"Many men in the cage, father?" asked Percy suddenly.
Braddock Washington stumbled, and let forth an involuntary
curse.
"One less than there should be," he ejaculated darkly
—and then added after a moment, "We've had difficulties."
"Mother was telling me," exclaimed Percy, "that
Italian teacher—"
"A ghastly error," said Braddock Washington angrily.
"But of course there's a good chance that we may have
got him. Perhaps he fell somewhere in the woods or
stumbled over a cliff. And then there's always the probability
that if he did get away his story wouldn't be
believed. Nevertheless, I've had two dozen men looking
for him in different towns around here."
"And no luck?"
"Some. Fourteen of them reported to my agent
that they'd each killed a man answering to that description,
but of course it was probably only the reward
they were after—"
He broke off. They had come to a large cavity in
the earth about the circumference of a merry-go-round
and covered by a strong iron grating. Braddock Washington
beckoned to John, and pointed his cane down
through the grating. John stepped to the edge and
gazed. Immediately his ears were assailed by a wild
clamor from below.
"Come on down to Hell!"
"Hello, kiddo, how's the air up there?"
"Hey! Throw us a rope!"
"Got an old doughnut, Buddy, or a couple of secondhand
sandwiches?"
"Say, fella, if you'll push down that guy you're
with, we'll show you a quick disappearance scene."
"Paste him one for me, will you?"
It was too dark to see clearly into the pit below, but
John could tell from the coarse optimism and rugged
vitality of the remarks and voices that they proceeded
from middle-class Americans of the more spirited type.
Then Mr. Washington put out his cane and touched a
button in the grass, and the scene below sprang into light.
"These are some adventurous mariners who had the
misfortune to discover El Dorado," he remarked.
Below them there had appeared a large hollow in the
earth shaped like the interior of a bowl. The sides were
steep and apparently of polished glass, and on its slightly
concave surface stood about two dozen men clad in
the half costume, half uniform, of aviators. Their upturned
faces, lit with wrath, with malice, with despair,
with cynical humor, were covered by long growths of
beard, but with the exception of a few who had pined
perceptibly away, they seemed to be a well-fed, healthy
lot.
Braddock Washington drew a garden chair to the
edge of the pit and sat down.
"Well, how are you, boys?" he inquired genially.
A chorus of execration in which all joined except a
few too dispirited to cry out, rose up into the sunny
air, but Braddock Washington heard it with unruffled
composure. When its last echo had died away he spoke
again.
"Have you thought up a way out of your difficulty?"
From here and there among them a remark floated up.
"We decided to stay here for love!"
"Bring us up there and we'll find us a way!"
Braddock Washington waited until they were again
quiet. Then he said:
"I've told you the situation. I don't want you here.
I wish to heaven I'd never seen you. Your own curiosity
got you here, and any time that you can think
of a way out which protects me and my interests I'll
be glad to consider it. But so long as you confine your
efforts to digging tunnels—yes, I know about the new
one you've started—you won't get very far. This
isn't as hard on you as you make it out, with all your
howling for the loved ones at home. If you were the
you'd never have taken up aviation."
A tall man moved apart from the others, and held up
his hand to call his captor's attention to what he was
about to say.
"Let me ask you a few questions!" he cried. "You
pretend to be a fair-minded man."
"How absurd. How could a man of my position be
fair-minded toward you? You might as well speak of a
Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak."
At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen
steaks fell, but the tall man continued:
"All right!" he cried. "We've argued this out before.
You're not a humanitarian and you're not fair-minded,
but you're human—at least you say you are—
and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place
for long enough to think how—how—how—
"How what?" demanded Washington, coldly.
"—how unnecessary—"
"Not to me."
"Well,—how cruel—"
"We've covered that. Cruelty doesn't exist where
self-preservation is involved. You've been soldiers; you
know that. Try another."
"Well, then, how stupid."
"There," admitted Washington, "I grant you that.
But try to think of an alternative. I've offered to have
all or any of you painlessly executed if you wish. I've
offered to have your wives, sweethearts, children, and
mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I'll enlarge
your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest
of your lives. If there was some method of producing
permanent amnesia I'd have all of you operated on and
released immediately, somewhere outside of my preserves.
But that's as far as my ideas go."
"How about trusting us not to peach on you?" cried
some one.
"You don't proffer that suggestion seriously," said
Washington, with an expression of scorn. "I did take
out one man to teach my daughter Italian. Last week
he got away."
A wild yell of jubilation went up suddenly from two
dozen throats and a pandemonium of joy ensued. The
prisoners clog-danced and cheered and yodled and
wrestled with one another in a sudden uprush of animal
spirits. They even ran up the glass sides of the bowl as
far as they could, and slid back to the bottom upon the
natural cushions of their bodies. The tall man started
a song in which they all joined—
On a sour apple tree—"
Braddock Washington sat in inscrutable silence until
the song was over.
"You see," he remarked, when he could gain a modicum
of attention. "I bear you no ill-will. I like to
see you enjoying yourselves. That's why I didn't
tell you the whole story at once. The man—what was
his name? Critchtichiello?—was shot by some of my
agents in fourteen different places."
Not guessing that the places referred to were cities,
the tumult of rejoicing subsided immediately.
"Nevertheless," cried Washington with a touch of
anger, "he tried to run away. Do you expect me to
take chances with any of you after an experience like
that?"
Again a series of ejaculations went up.
"Sure!"
"Would your daughter like to learn Chinese?"
"Hey, I can speak Italian! My mother was a wop."
"Maybe she'd like t'learna speak N'Yawk!"
"If she's the little one with the big blue eyes I can
teach her a lot of things better than Italian."
"I know some Irish songs—and I could hammer
brass once't."
Mr. Washington reached forward suddenly with his
cane and pushed the button in the grass so that the picture
below went out instantly, and there remained only
that great dark mouth covered dismally with the black
teeth of the grating.
"Hey!" called a single voice from below, "you ain't
goin' away without givin' us your blessing?"
But Mr. Washington, followed by the two boys, was
already strolling on toward the ninth hole of the golf
course, as though the pit and its contents were no more
than a hazard over which his facile iron had triumphed
with ease.
VII
July under the lee of the diamond mountain was a
month of blanket nights and of warm, glowing days.
John and Kismine were in love. He did not know that
the little gold football (inscribed with the legend Pro
deo et patria et St. Mida) which he had given her
rested on a platinum chain next to her bosom. But it
did. And she for her part was not aware that a large
sapphire which had dropped one day from her simple
coiffure was stowed away tenderly in John's jewel box.
Late one afternoon when the ruby and ermine music
room was quiet, they spent an hour there together. He
held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered
her name aloud. She bent toward him—then
hesitated.
"Did you say `Kismine'?" she asked softly, "or—"
She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might
have misunderstood.
Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the
course of an hour it seemed to make little difference.
The afternoon drifted away. That night when a last
breath of music drifted down from the highest tower,
they each lay awake, happily dreaming over the separate
minutes of the day. They had decided to be married
as soon as possible.
VIII
Every day Mr. Washington and the two young men
went hunting or fishing in the deep forests or played
golf around the somnolent course—games which John
diplomatically allowed his host to win—or swam in the
mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Washington
a somewhat exacting personality—utterly uninterested
in any ideas or opinions except his own. Mrs.
Washington was aloof and reserved at all times. She
was apparently indifferent to her two daughters, and
entirely absorbed in her son Percy, with whom she held
interminable conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner.
Jasmine, the elder daughter, resembled Kismine in
appearance—except that she was somewhat bow-legged,
and terminated in large hands and feet—but was utterly
unlike her in temperament. Her favorite books had to
do with poor girls who kept house for widowed fathers.
John learned from Kismine that Jasmine had never
recovered from the shock and disappointment caused
her by the termination of the World War, just as she
was about to start for Europe as a canteen expert. She
had even pined away for a time, and Braddock Washington
had taken steps to promote a new war in the
Balkans—but she had seen a photograph of some
proceedings. But Percy and Kismine seemed to have
inherited the arrogant attitude in all its harsh magnificence
from their father. A chaste and consistent
selfishness ran like a pattern through their every idea.
John was enchanted by the wonders of the château
and the valley. Braddock Washington, so Percy told
him, had caused to be kidnapped a landscape gardener,
an architect, a designer of state settings, and a French
decadent poet left over from the last century. He had
put his entire force of negroes at their disposal, guaranteed
to supply them with any materials that the world
could offer, and left them to work out some ideas of
their own. But one by one they had shown their uselessness.
The decadent poet had at once begun bewailing
his separation from the boulevards in spring—
he made some vague remarks about spices, apes, and
ivories, but said nothing that was of any practical value.
The stage designer on his part wanted to make the whole
valley a series of tricks and sensational effects—a state
of things that the Washingtons would soon have grown
tired of. And as for the architect and the landscape
gardener, they thought only in terms of convention.
They must make this like this and that like that.
But they had, at least, solved the problem of what
was to be done with them—they all went mad early
one morning after spending the night in a single room
trying to agree upon the location of a fountain, and were
now confined comfortably in an insane asylum at Westport,
Connecticut.
"But," inquired John curiously, "who did plan all
your wonderful reception rooms and halls, and approaches
and bathrooms—?"
"Well," answered Percy, "I blush to tell you, but it
was a moving-picture fella. He was the only man we
amount of money, though he did tuck his napkin in his
collar and couldn't read or write."
As August drew to a close John began to regret that he
must soon go back to school. He and Kismine had decided
to elope the following June.
"It would be nicer to be married here," Kismine confessed,
"but of course I could never get father's permission
to marry you at all. Next to that I'd rather elope.
It's terrible for wealthy people to be married in America
at present—they always have to send out bulletins to
the press saying that they're going to be married in
remnants, when what they mean is just a peck of old
second-hand pearls and some used lace worn once by
the Empress Eugènie."
"I know," agreed John fervently. "When I was
visiting the Schnlitzer-Murphys, the eldest daughter,
Gwendolyn, married a man whose father owns half of
West Virginia. She wrote home saying what a tough
struggle she was carrying on on his salary as a bank
clerk—and then she ended up by saying that `Thank
God, I have four good maids anyhow, and that helps
a little.' "
"It's absurd," commented Kismine. "Think of the
millions and millions of people in the world, laborers
and all, who get along with only two maids."
One afternoon late in August a chance remark of
Kismine's changed the face of the entire situation, and
threw John into a state of terror.
They were in their favorite grove, and between kisses
John was indulging in some romantic forebodings which
he fancied added poignancy to their relations.
"Sometimes I think we'll never marry," he said sadly.
"You're too wealthy, too magnificent. No one as rich
as you are can be like other girls. I should marry the
from Omaha or Sioux City, and be content with her half-million."
"I knew the daughter of a wholesale hardware man
once," remarked Kismine. "I don't think you'd have
been contented with her. She was a friend of my sister's.
She visited here."
"Oh, then you've had other guests?" exclaimed John
in surprise.
Kismine seemed to regret her words.
"Oh, yes," she said hurriedly, "we've had a few."
"But aren't you—wasn't your father afraid they'd
talk outside?"
"Oh, to some extent, to some extent," she answered.
"Let's talk about something pleasanter."
But John's curiosity was aroused.
"Something pleasanter!" he demanded. "What's
unpleasant about that? Weren't they nice girls?"
To his great surprise Kismine began to weep.
"Yes—th—that's the—the whole t-trouble. I grew
qu-quite attached to some of them. So did Jasmine,
but she kept inv-viting them anyway. I couldn't
understand it."
A dark suspicion was born in John's heart.
"Do you mean that they told, and your father had
them—removed?"
"Worse than that," she muttered brokenly. "Father
took no chances—and Jasmine kept writing them to
come, and they had such a good time!"
She was overcome by a paroxysm of grief.
Stunned with the horror of this revelation, John sat
there open-mouthed, feeling the nerves of his body twitter
like so many sparrows perched upon his spinal column.
"Now, I've told you, and I shouldn't have," she said,
calming suddenly and drying her dark blue eyes.
"Do you mean to say that your father had them
murdered before they left?"
She nodded.
"In August usually—or early in September. It's
only natural for us to get all the pleasure out of them
that we can first."
"How abominable! How—why, I must be going
crazy! Did you really admit that—"
"I did," interrupted Kismine, shrugging her shoulders.
"We can't very well imprison them like those
aviators, where they'd be a continual reproach to us
every day. And it's always been made easier for Jasmine
and me, because father had it done sooner than
we expected. In that way we avoided any farewell
scene—"
"So you murdered them! Uh!" cried John.
"It was done very nicely. They were drugged while
they were asleep—and their families were always told
that they died of scarlet fever in Butte."
"But—I fail to understand why you kept on inviting
them!"
"I didn't," burst out Kismine. "I never invited one.
Jasmine did. And they always had a very good time.
She'd give them the nicest presents toward the last.
I shall probably have visitors too—I'll harden up to it.
We can't let such an inevitable thing as death stand in
the way of enjoying life while we have it. Think how
lonesome it'd be out here if we never had any one. Why,
father and mother have sacrificed some of their best
friends just as we have."
"And so," cried John accusingly, "and so you were
letting me make love to you and pretending to return
it, and talking about marriage, all the time knowing
perfectly well that I'd never get out of here alive—"
"No," she protested passionately. "Not any more.
I thought your last days might as well be pleasant for
both of us. But then I fell in love with you, and—and
I'm honestly sorry you're going to—going to be put
away—though I'd rather you'd be put away than ever
kiss another girl."
"Oh, you would, would you?" cried John ferociously.
"Much rather. Besides, I've always heard that a
girl can have more fun with a man whom she knows
she can never marry. Oh, why did I tell you? I've
probably spoiled your whole good time now, and we
were really enjoying things when you didn't know it. I
knew it would make things sort of depressing for you."
"Oh, you did, did you?" John's voice trembled with
anger. "I've heard about enough of this. If you
haven't any more pride and decency than to have an
affair with a fellow that you know isn't much better
than a corpse, I don't want to have any more to do with
you!"
"You're not a corpse!" she protested in horror.
"You're not a corpse! I won't have you saying that
I kissed a corpse!"
"I said nothing of the sort!"
"You did! You said I kissed a corpse!"
"I didn't!"
Their voices had risen, but upon a sudden interruption
they both subsided into immediate silence. Footsteps
were coming along the path in their direction,
and a moment later the rose bushes were parted displaying
Braddock Washington, whose intelligent eyes set
in his good-looking vacuous face were peering in at them.
"Who kissed a corpse?" he demanded in obvious
disapproval.
"Nobody," answered Kismine quickly. "We were
just joking."
"What are you two doing here, anyhow?" he demanded
gruffly. "Kismine, you ought to be—to be
reading or playing golf with your sister. Go read! Go
play golf! Don't let me find you here when I come
back!"
Then he bowed at John and went up the path.
"See?" said Kismine crossly, when he was out of
hearing. "You've spoiled it all. We can never meet
any more. He won't let me meet you. He'd have you
poisoned if he thought we were in love."
"We're not, any more!" cried John fiercely, "so he
can set his mind at rest upon that. Moreover, don't
fool yourself that I'm going to stay around here. Inside
of six hours I'll be over those mountains, if I have to
gnaw a passage through them, and on my way East."
They had both got to their feet, and at this remark
Kismine came close and put her arm through his.
"I'm going, too."
"You must be crazy—"
"Of course I'm going," she interrupted impatiently.
"You most certainly are not. You—"
"Very well," she said quietly, "we'll catch up with
father now and talk it over with him."
Defeated, John mustered a sickly smile.
"Very well, dearest," he agreed, with pale and unconvincing
affection, "we'll go together."
His love for her returned and settled placidly on his
heart. She was his—she would go with him to share
his dangers. He put his arms about her and kissed her
fervently. After all she loved him; she had saved him,
in fact.
Discussing the matter, they walked slowly back toward
the château. They decided that since Braddock Washington
had seen them together they had best depart
the next night. Nevertheless, John's lips were unusually
spoonful of peacock soup into his left lung. He had to
be carried into the turquoise and sable card-room and
pounded on the back by one of the under-butlers, which
Percy considered a great joke.
IX
Long after midnight John's body gave a nervous jerk,
and he sat suddenly upright, staring into the veils of
somnolence that draped the room. Through the squares
of blue darkness that were his open windows, he had
heard a faint far-away sound that died upon a bed of
wind before identifying itself on his memory, clouded
with uneasy dreams. But the sharp noise that had succeeded
it was nearer, was just outside the room—the
click of a turned knob, a footstep, a whisper, he could
not tell; a hard lump gathered in the pit of his stomach,
and his whole body ached in the moment that he strained
agonizingly to hear. Then one of the veils seemed to
dissolve, and he saw a vague figure standing by the door,
a figure only faintly limned and blocked in upon the
darkness, mingled so with the folds of the drapery as
to seem distorted, like a reflection seen in a dirty pane
of glass.
With a sudden movement of fright or resolution John
pressed the button by his bedside, and the next moment
he was sitting in the green sunken bath of the adjoining
room, waked into alertness by the shock of the cold
water which half filled it.
He sprang out, and, his wet pajamas scattering a
heavy trickle of water behind him, ran for the aquamarine
door which he knew led out onto the ivory
landing of the second floor. The door opened noiselessly.
A single crimson lamp burning in a great dome
with a poignant beauty. For a moment John
hesitated, appalled by the silent splendor massed about
him, seeming to envelop in its gigantic folds and contours
the solitary drenched little figure shivering upon the
ivory landing. Then simultaneously two things happened.
The door of his own sitting-room swung open,
precipitating three naked negroes into the hall—and,
as John swayed in wild terror toward the stairway, another
door slid back in the wall on the other side of the
corridor, and John saw Braddock Washington standing
in the lighted lift, wearing a fur coat and a pair of riding
boots which reached to his knees and displayed, above,
the glow of his rose-colored pajamas.
On the instant the three negroes—John had never
seen any of them before, and it flashed through his mind
that they must be the professional executioners—paused
in their movement toward John, and turned expectantly
to the man in the lift, who burst out with an imperious
command:
"Get in here! All three of you! Quick as hell!"
Then, within the instant, the three negroes darted
into the cage, the oblong of light was blotted out as the
lift door slid shut, and John was again alone in the hall.
He slumped weakly down against an ivory stair.
It was apparent that something portentous had occurred,
something which, for the moment at least, had
postponed his own petty disaster. What was it? Had
the negroes risen in revolt? Had the aviators forced
aside the iron bars of the grating? Or had the men of
Fish stumbled blindly through the hills and gazed with
bleak, joyless eyes upon the gaudy valley? John did
not know. He heard a faint whir of air as the lift
whizzed up again, and then, a moment later, as it descended.
It was probable that Percy was hurrying to
was his opportunity to join Kismine and plan an immediate
escape. He waited until the lift had been silent
for several minutes; shivering a little with the night
cool that whipped in through his wet pajamas, he returned
to his room and dressed himself quickly. Then
he mounted a long flight of stairs and turned down the
corridor carpeted with Russian sable which led to Kismine's
suite.
The door of her sitting-room was open and the lamps
were lighted. Kismine, in an angora kimono, stood
near the window of the room in a listening attitude, and
as John entered noiselessly she turned toward him.
"Oh, it's you!" she whispered, crossing the room to
him. "Did you hear them?"
"I heard your father's slaves in my—"
"No," she interrupted excitedly. "Aeroplanes!"
"Aeroplanes? Perhaps that was the sound that woke
me."
"There're at least a dozen. I saw one a few moments
ago dead against the moon. The guard back by the
cliff fired his rifle and that's what roused father. We're
going to open on them right away."
"Are they here on purpose?"
"Yes—it's that Italian who got away—"
Simultaneously with her last word, a succession of
sharp cracks tumbled in through the open window.
Kismine uttered a little cry, took a penny with fumbling
fingers from a box on her dresser, and ran to one of the
electric lights. In an instant the entire château was in
darkness—she had blown out the fuse.
"Come on!" she cried to him. "We'll go up to the roof
garden, and watch it from there!"
Drawing a cape about her, she took his hand, and they
found their way out the door. It was only a step to
them upward he put his arms around her in the darkness
and kissed her mouth. Romance had come to John
Unger at last. A minute later they had stepped out
upon the star-white platform. Above, under the misty
moon, sliding in and out of the patches of cloud that
eddied below it, floated a dozen dark-winged bodies in
a constant circling course. From here and there in the
valley flashes of fire leaped toward them, followed by
sharp detonations. Kismine clapped her hands with
pleasure, which, a moment later, turned to dismay as
the aeroplanes at some prearranged signal, began to
release their bombs and the whole of the valley became
a panorama of deep reverberate sound and lurid light.
Before long the aim of the attackers became concentrated
upon the points where the anti-aircraft guns
were situated, and one of them was almost immediately
reduced to a giant cinder to lie smouldering in a park
of rose bushes.
"Kismine," begged John, "you'll be glad when I tell
you that this attack came on the eve of my murder.
If I hadn't heard that guard shoot off his gun back by
the pass I should now be stone dead—"
"I can't hear you!" cried Kismine, intent on the scene
before her. "You'll have to talk louder!"
"I simply said," shouted John, "that we'd better get
out before they begin to shell the château!"
Suddenly the whole portico of the negro quarters
cracked asunder, a geyser of flame shot up from under
the colonnades, and great fragments of jagged marble
were hurled as far as the borders of the lake.
"There go fifty thousand dollars' worth of slaves,"
cried Kismine, "at prewar prices. So few Americans
have any respect for property."
John renewed his efforts to compel her to leave. The
by minute, and only two of the anti-aircraft guns were
still retaliating. It was obvious that the garrison, encircled
with fire, could not hold out much longer.
"Come on!" cried John, pulling Kismine's arm,
"we've got to go. Do you realize that those aviators
will kill you without question if they find you?"
She consented reluctantly.
"We'll have to wake Jasmine!" she said, as they hurried
toward the lift. Then she added in a sort of childish
delight: "We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in
books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free
and poor! What fun!" She stopped and raised her
lips to him in a delighted kiss.
"It's impossible to be both together," said John
grimly. "People have found that out. And I should
choose to be free as preferable of the two. As an extra
caution you'd better dump the contents of your jewel
box into your pockets."
Ten minutes later the two girls met John in the dark
corridor and they descended to the main floor of the
château. Passing for the last time through the magnificence
of the splendid halls, they stood for a moment
out on the terrace, watching the burning negro quarters
and the flaming embers of two planes which had fallen
on the other side of the lake. A solitary gun was still
keeping up a sturdy popping, and the attackers seemed
timorous about descending lower, but sent their thunderous
fireworks in a circle around it, until any chance
shot might annihilate its Ethiopian crew.
John and the two sisters passed down the marble
steps, turned sharply to the left, and began to ascend
a narrow path that wound like a garter about the diamond
mountain. Kismine knew a heavily wooded spot
half-way up where they could lie concealed and yet be
make an escape, when it should be necessary, along a
secret path laid in a rocky gully.
X
It was three o'clock when they attained their destination.
The obliging and phlegmatic Jasmine fell off to
sleep immediately, leaning against the trunk of a large
tree, while John and Kismine sat, his arm around her,
and watched the desperate ebb and flow of the dying
battle among the ruins of a vista that had been a garden
spot that morning. Shortly after four o'clock the last
remaining gun gave out a clanging sound and went out
of action in a swift tongue of red smoke. Though the
moon was down, they saw that the flying bodies were
circling closer to the earth. When the planes had made
certain that the beleaguered possessed no further resources,
they would land and the dark and glittering
reign of the Washingtons would be over.
With the cessation of the firing the valley grew quiet.
The embers of the two aeroplanes glowed like the eyes
of some monster crouching in the grass. The château
stood dark and silent, beautiful without light as it had
been beautiful in the sun, while the woody rattles of
Nemesis filled the air above with a growing and receding
complaint. Then John perceived that Kismine,
like her sister, had fallen sound asleep.
It was long after four when he became aware of footsteps
along the path they had lately followed, and he
waited in breathless silence until the persons to whom
they belonged had passed the vantage-point he occupied.
There was a faint stir in the air now that was not of
human origin, and the dew was cold; he knew that the
dawn would break soon. John waited until the steps
Then he followed. About half-way to the
steep summit the trees fell away and a hard saddle of
rock spread itself over the diamond beneath. Just before
he reached this point he slowed down his pace,
warned by an animal sense that there was life just ahead
of him. Coming to a high boulder, he lifted his head
gradually above its edge. His curiosity was rewarded;
this is what he saw:
Braddock Washington was standing there motionless,
silhouetted against the gray sky without sound or sign
of life. As the dawn came up out of the east, lending a
cold green color to the earth, it brought the solitary
figure into insignificant contrast with the new day.
While John watched, his host remained for a few moments
absorbed in some inscrutable contemplation;
then he signalled to the two negroes who crouched at his
feet to lift the burden which lay between them. As
they struggled upright, the first yellow beam of the sun
struck through the innumerable prisms of an immense
and exquisitely chiselled diamond—and a white radiance
was kindled that glowed upon the air like a fragment of
the morning star. The bearers staggered beneath its
weight for a moment—then their rippling muscles caught
and hardened under the wet shine of the skins and the
three figures were again motionless in their defiant
impotency before the heavens.
After a while the white man lifted his head and slowly
raised his arms in a gesture of attention, as one who would
call a great crowd to hear—but there was no crowd, only
the vast silence of the mountain and the sky, broken by
faint bird voices down among the trees. The figure on
the saddle of rock began to speak ponderously and with
an inextinguishable pride.
"You out there—" he cried in a trembling voice.
his head held attentively as though he were expecting
an answer. John strained his eyes to see whether
there might be men coming down the mountain, but the
mountain was bare of human life. There was only sky
and a mocking flute of wind along the tree-tops. Could
Washington be praying? For a moment John wondered.
Then the illusion passed—there was something in the
man's whole attitude antithetical to prayer.
"Oh, you above there!"
The voice was become strong and confident. This
was no forlorn supplication. If anything, there was in
it a quality of monstrous condescension.
"You there—"
Words, too quickly uttered to be understood, flowing
one into the other. . . . John listened breathlessly,
catching a phrase here and there, while the voice broke
off, resumed, broke off again—now strong and argumentative,
now colored with a slow, puzzled impatience.
Then a conviction commenced to dawn on the single
listener, and as realization crept over him a spray of
quick blood rushed through his arteries. Braddock
Washington was offering a bribe to God!
That was it—there was no doubt. The diamond in
the arms of his slaves was some advance sample, a promise
of more to follow.
That, John perceived after a time, was the thread
running through his sentences. Prometheus Enriched
was calling to witness forgotten sacrifices, forgotten
rituals, prayers obsolete before the birth of Christ.
For a while his discourse took the form of reminding God
of this gift or that which Divinity had deigned to accept
from men—great churches if he would rescue cities from
the plague, gifts of myrrh and gold, of human lives and
beautiful women and captive armies, of children and
harvests and cities, whole conquered lands that had been
offered up in lust or blood for His appeasal, buying a
meed's worth of alleviation from the Divine wrath—
and now he, Braddock Washington, Emperor of Diamonds,
king and priest of the age of gold, arbiter of
splendor and luxury, would offer up a treasure such as
princes before him had never dreamed of, offer it up
not in suppliance, but in pride.
He would give to God, he continued, getting down to
specifications, the greatest diamond in the world. This
diamond would be cut with many more thousand facets
than there were leaves on a tree, and yet the whole diamond
would be shaped with the perfection of a stone no
bigger than a fly. Many men would work upon it for
many years. It would be set in a great dome of beaten
gold, wonderfully carved and equipped with gates of
opal and crusted sapphire. In the middle would be hollowed
out a chapel presided over by an altar of iridescent,
decomposing, ever-changing radium which would
burn out the eyes of any worshipper who lifted up his
head from prayer—and on this altar there would be
slain for the amusement of the Divine Benefactor any
victim He should choose, even though it should be the
greatest and most powerful man alive.
In return he asked only a simple thing, a thing that for
God would be absurdly easy—only that matters should
be as they were yesterday at this hour and that they
should so remain. So very simple! Let but the heavens
open, swallowing these men and their aeroplanes—
and then close again. Let him have his slaves once
more, restored to life and well.
There was no one else with whom he had ever needed
to treat or bargain.
He doubted only whether he had made his bribe big
in man's image, so it had been said: He must have His
price. And the price would be rare—no cathedral whose
building consumed many years, no pyramid constructed
by ten thousand workmen, would be like this cathedral,
this pyramid.
He paused here. That was his proposition. Everything
would be up to specifications and there was nothing
vulgar in his assertion that it would be cheap at the
price. He implied that Providence could take it or
leave it.
As he approached the end his sentences became
broken, became short and uncertain, and his body
seemed tense, seemed strained to catch the slightest
pressure or whisper of life in the spaces around him.
His hair had turned gradually white as he talked, and
now he lifted his head high to the heavens like a prophet
of old—magnificently mad.
Then, as John stared in giddy fascination, it seemed
to him that a curious phenomenon took place somewhere
around him. It was as though the sky had darkened
for an instant, as though there had been a sudden murmur
in a gust of wind, a sound of far-away trumpets,
a sighing like the rustle of a great silken robe—for a
time the whole of nature round about partook of this
darkness; the birds' song ceased; the trees were still,
and far over the mountain there was a mutter of dull,
menacing thunder.
That was all. The wind died along the tall grasses of
the valley. The dawn and the day resumed their place
in a time, and the risen sun sent hot waves of yellow
mist that made its path bright before it. The leaves
laughed in the sun, and their laughter shook the trees
until each bough was like a girl's school in fairyland.
God had refused to accept the bribe.
For another moment John watched the triumph of
the day. Then, turning, he saw a flutter of brown down
by the lake, then another flutter, then another, like
the dance of golden angels alighting from the clouds.
The aeroplanes had come to earth.
John slid off the boulder and ran down the side of
the mountain to the clump of trees, where the two girls
were awake and waiting for him. Kismine sprang to
her feet, the jewels in her pockets jingling, a question on
her parted lips, but instinct told John that there was no
time for words. They must get off the mountain without
losing a moment. He seized a hand of each, and
in silence they threaded the tree-trunks, washed with
light now and with the rising mist. Behind them from
the valley came no sound at all, except the complaint
of the peacocks far away and the pleasant undertone of
morning.
When they had gone about half a mile, they avoided
the park land and entered a narrow path that led over
the next rise of ground. At the highest point of this
they paused and turned around. Their eyes rested
upon the mountainside they had just left—oppressed
by some dark sense of tragic impendency.
Clear against the sky a broken, white-haired man was
slowly descending the steep slope, followed by two gigantic
and emotionless negroes, who carried a burden
between them which still flashed and glittered in the
sun. Half-way down two other figures joined them—
John could see that they were Mrs. Washington and
her son, upon whose arm she leaned. The aviators had
clambered from their machines to the sweeping lawn in
front of the château, and with rifles in hand were starting
up the diamond mountain in skirmishing formation.
But the little group of five which had formed farther
up and was engrossing all the watchers' attention had
and pulled up what appeared to be a trap-door in the
side of the mountain. Into this they all disappeared,
the white-haired man first, then his wife and son, finally
the two negroes, the glittering tips of whose jeweled
head-dresses caught the sun for a moment before the
trap-door descended and engulfed them all.
Kismine clutched John's arm.
"Oh," she cried wildly, "where are they going?
What are they going to do?"
"It must be some underground way of escape—"
A little scream from the two girls interrupted his
sentence.
"Don't you see?" sobbed Kismine hysterically.
"The mountain is wired!"
Even as she spoke John put up his hands to shield
his sight. Before their eyes the whole surface of the
mountain had changed suddenly to a dazzling burning
yellow, which showed up through the jacket of turf as
light shows through a human hand. For a moment
the intolerable glow continued, and then like an extinguished
filament it disappeared, revealing a black waste
from which blue smoke arose slowly, carrying off with
it what remained of vegetation and of human flesh. Of
the aviators there was left neither blood nor bone—they
were consumed as completely as the five souls who had
gone inside.
Simultaneously, and with an immense concussion,
the château literally threw itself into the air, bursting
into flaming fragments as it rose, and then tumbling
back upon itself in a smoking pile that lay projecting
half into the water of the lake. There was no fire—
what smoke there was drifted off mingling with the
sunshine, and for a few minutes longer a powdery dust
of marble drifted from the great featureless pile that
sound and the three people were alone in the valley.
XI
At sunset John and his two companions reached the
high cliff which had marked the boundaries of the Washingtons'
dominion, and looking back found the valley tranquil
and lovely in the dusk. They sat down to finish the
food which Jasmine had brought with her in a basket.
"There!" she said, as she spread the table-cloth and
put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it. "Don't they
look tempting? I always think that food tastes better
outdoors."
"With that remark," remarked Kismine, "Jasmine
enters the middle class."
"Now," said John eagerly, "turn out your pocket and
let's see what jewels you brought along. If you made
a good selection we three ought to live comfortably all
the rest of our lives."
Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and
tossed two handfuls of glittering stones before him.
"Not so bad," cried John, enthusiastically. "They
aren't very big, but—Hello!" His expression changed
as he held one of them up to the declining sun. "Why,
these aren't diamonds! There's something the matter!"
"By golly!" exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look.
"What an idiot I am!"
"Why, these are rhinestones!" cried John.
"I know." She broke into a laugh. "I opened the
wrong drawer. They belonged on the dress of a girl
who visited Jasmine. I got her to give them to me in
exchange for diamonds. I'd never seen anything but
precious stones before."
"And this is what you brought?"
"I'm afraid so." She fingered the brilliants wistfully.
"I think I like these better. I'm a little tired
of diamonds."
"Very well," said John gloomily. "We'll have to
live in Hades. And you will grow old telling incredulous
women that you got the wrong drawer. Unfortunately
your father's bank-books were consumed
with him."
"Well, what's the matter with Hades?"
"If I come home with a wife at my age my father is
just as liable as not to cut me off with a hot coal, as they
say down there."
Jasmine spoke up.
"I love washing," she said quietly. "I have always
washed my own handkerchiefs. I'll take in laundry
and support you both."
"Do they have washwomen in Hades?" asked Kismine
innocently.
"Of course," answered John. "It's just like anywhere
else."
"I thought—perhaps it was too hot to wear any
clothes."
John laughed.
"Just try it!" he suggested. "They'll run you out
before you're half started."
"Will father be there?" she asked.
John turned to her in astonishment.
"Your father is dead," he replied somberly. "Why
should he go to Hades? You have it confused with
another place that was abolished long ago."
After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread
their blankets for the night.
"What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up
at the stars. "How strange it seems to be here with one
dress and a penniless fiancé!
"Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed
the stars before. I always thought of them as great big
diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten
me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my
youth."
"It was a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's
youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."
"How pleasant then to be insane!"
"So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know
any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a
year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness
that we can all try. There are only diamonds
in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby
gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will
make the usual nothing of it." He shivered. "Turn
up your coat collar, little girl, the night's full of chill
and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who
first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few
hours."
So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.
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