 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
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.
| Tales of the jazz age | |