For long after the cab had pa.s.sed around the corner Paul stood by the archway staring in that direction, but presently he aroused himself and returned to the courtyard. He tried the handle of James's door but learned that the bolt remained fastened, whereupon he determined to proceed to Thessaly's flat.

A definite change had taken place in the relations existing between himself and Flamby. For all her wildness and her reckless behaviour, that day she had appealed to him as something fragrantly innocent and bewilderingly sweet. The memory of the Charleswood photographs had a.s.sumed a different form, too, and he suddenly perceived possibilities of an explanation which should exculpate the girl from a graver sin than that of bravado. He had seen something in her eyes which had rendered such an explanation necessary, had found there something stainless as the heart of a wild rose. Devil-may-care was in her blood and he doubted if she knew the meaning of fear, but for evil he now sought in vain and wondered greatly because he had so misjudged her. He experienced a pa.s.sionate desire to protect her, to enfold her in careful guardianship.

He knew that he had not wanted to leave her at the gate of the studios, but he had only recognised this to be the case at the very moment of parting. He had never entertained an interest quite identical in anyone and he sought to a.s.sure himself that it was thus that a father thought of his child. He wondered if it had been her hair or her lips which had maddened Orlando James; he wondered why she had been in the studio; and a cold hatred of James took up a permanent place in his heart.

In the narrow thoroughfare connecting Victoria Street with that in which Thessaly's flat was situated were a number of curious shops devoted to the sale of church ornaments, altar candlesticks, lecterns, silk banners, ca.s.socks and birettas, statuettes of the Virgin, crucifixes and rosaries. Paul stood before the window of one, reading the t.i.tles of the books which were also displayed there, _Garden of the Soul, The Little Flowers_ of St. Francis of a.s.sisi. A phrase arose before him; he did not seem to hear it but to see it dancing in smoky characters which partially obscured a large ivory crucifix: "To shatter at a blow the structure of the ages." He recalled that Cardinal Pescara had used those words. His mood was unrestful and his brain was haunted by unaccountable memories, so that when he found himself in the shadow of the lofty campanile of Westminster Cathedral his spirit became translated to an obscure lane in Cairo. Faint organ notes reached his ears.

Thessaly received him in a little room having a balcony which overhung the street. Delicate ivory plaques decorated the walls and the fanciful curtains of Indian muslin hung like smoke of incense in the still air.

There were some extraordinary pastels by Degas forming a kind of frieze.

The evening was warm and the campanile upstood against a sky blue as a sapphire dome. The Cairo illusion persisted.

"Do you know, Thessaly," said Paul, "to-night I cannot help thinking of a scene I once witnessed in El Wasr. I formed one of a party of three and we were wandering aimlessly through those indescribable lanes. Pipes wailed in the darkness to an accompaniment of throbbing--throbbing of the eternal _darabukeh_ which is like the pulsing of evil life through the arteries of the secret city. Harsh woman-voices cried out in the night and bizarre figures flitted like bats from the lighted dance halls into the shadows of nameless houses. We came to a long, narrow street entirely devoted to those dungeon-like chambers with barred windows whose occupants represent all the cla.s.sified races of the East and all the uncla.s.sified sins of the Marquis de Sade. Another street crossed it at right angles and at the cross roads was a mosque. The minaret stood up blackly against the midnight sky and as we turned the corner we perceived what appeared to be another of the 'cages' immediately facing the door of the mosque. Out of the turmoil of the one street we came into this other and leaving discord and evil behind us entered into silence and peace. We looked in at the barred window. Woman voices reached us faintly from the street we had left and the muted pulse of the _darabukeh_ pursued us. Upon a raised dais having candles set at his head and feet reposed a venerable _sheikh_, dead. His white beard flowed over his breast. He reclined in majestic sleep where the pipes were wailing the call of El Wasr, and the shadow of the minaret lay upon life and upon death. Is it not strange that this scene should recur to me to-night?"

"Strange and uncomplimentary," replied Thessaly. "Whilst I have no objection to your finding an a.n.a.logy between my perfectly respectable neighbours and the women of the Wasr, the role of a defunct and saintly Arab does not appeal to me." Some reflection of the setting sun touched him where he stood and bathed him as in fire. The small tight curls of hair and beard became each a tongue of flame and his eyes glittered like molten gold. "Pardon my apparent rudeness, but I don't think you are listening."

"I am not," murmured Paul. "Your words reach me from a great distance.

My spirit is uneasy to-night, and whilst myself I remain in your ivory room and hear you speak another self stands in a vast temple of black gleaming granite before the shrine of a golden bull."

"You are possibly thinking of Apis. From Cairo you have proceeded to Sakkara. Or are the gaudy hue of my hair and the yeoman proportions of my shape responsible for the idea?"

"I cannot say, nor was I actually thinking of the Serapeum."

"You are not yourself. You have been studying the war news or else you have pa.s.sed a piebald horse without spitting twice and crossing your fingers."

Paul laughed, but not in the frank boyish way that was so good to hear.

"I am not myself, Thessaly, or if I am I do not recognise myself."

"You have committed some indiscretion such as presenting your siren-haired protegee, Flamby Duveen, to your wife."

"I have not," said Paul sharply.

"I am glad. He who presents one pretty woman to another makes two lifelong enemies."

"I did not know that you had met Flamby."

"She has been described to me and she sounds dangerous. I distrust curly-haired girls. They are full of electricity, and electricity is a force of which we know so little. Does the idea of a c.o.c.ktail appeal to you? I have a man who has invented a new c.o.c.ktail which he calls 'Fra Diavolo.' Viewed through the eyes of Fra Diavolo you will find the world a more cheery globe."

"Thanks, no. But I will smoke." From his coat pocket Paul took out a briar pipe and the well-worn pouch. "In a month, Thessaly, _The Key_ will be in the printer's hands. I found myself thinking of Pandora this morning. There are few really virtuous women and truth is a draught almost as heady I should imagine as Fra Diavolo."

"My dear Mario, you must admit that virtue is the least picturesque of the vices. When aggressive it becomes a positive disfigurement. The 'on guard' position, though useful in bayonet-fighting, leaves the aesthete cold. You would not have us treat our women as the Moslems do?"

"Women can rarely distinguish the boundary between freedom and license.

Honestly I should like to revise the position of woman in Europe and America before I entrusted _The Key_ to her keeping. Unmarried, she has quite enough freedom, married she has too much."

"Therefore she conceals her age and dyes her hair."

"Showing that she is not invulnerable to flattery."

"No woman is, and flattery may be likened to the artillery preparation which precedes a serious advance. But, my dear Mario, to deprive a woman of admiration is to deprive a fish of water. In London when a woman ceases to interest other men she ceases to interest her husband, unless he is not as other men. In Stambul on the contrary the odalisque who bathes in rival glances finally bathes in the Bosphorus with her charming head in a sack. Fortunately we are at war with Turkey."

"Have you considered, Thessaly, what appalling sins must have been committed by the present generation of women in some past phase of existence?"

"There are instances in which the sins belong to the present phase. But I agree with you that the women are suffering more than the men.

Therefore their past errors must have been greater. They are being taught the value of love, Mario. In their next incarnation they will remember. They will be reborn beneath a new star--_your_ star. Something perturbs you. You are hara.s.sed by doubts and hunted by misgivings. I have secured permission to toil up hundreds of stairs in order that I may emulate the priests of Bel and look out upon the roofs of Babylon.

This spectacle will cheer you. Join me, my friend, and I will show you the heart of the world."

IX

"Look," said Jules Thessaly, "below you stretches the Capital of the greatest empire man has ever known."

They stood in the topmost gallery of the campanile looking down upon a miniature London. The viridescent ribbon of the Thames bound bridge to bridge running thematically through a symphony of grey and green and gold. A consciousness of power leapt high within Paul. Only the sun was above him, the sun and the suave immensity of s.p.a.ce. How insignificant an episode was a human life, how futile and inept; a tiny note in a monstrous score. Below in the teeming streets moved a million such points, each one but a single note in this vast orchestration, a bird note, faint, inaudible 'mid the music of the spheres. Yet each to each was the centre of the Universe; all symbolised the triumph to the false Self-centre as opposed to the true G.o.d-centre. Men lived for the day because they doubted the morrow. Palaces and hovels, churches and theatres, all were products of this feverish striving of the ants to plumb the well of truth and scale the mountain of wisdom; to drain at a draught the gourd of life which the G.o.ds had filled in the world's morning. Thessaly began to speak again, standing at Paul's elbow, and his deep rich voice carried power and authority.

"Look at London and you look at an epitome of humanity. The best that man can do, and the worst, lie there beneath you. In that squat, grey, irregular mound which from earth level we recognise to be the Houses of Parliament, men are making laws. The laws which they are making are the laws of necessity--the necessity of slaying Prussians. Many of the larger buildings in the neighbourhood are occupied by temporary civil servants engaged in promulgating those laws. Thus by the pa.s.sing of an Act having twenty clauses, twenty thousand clerks are created and five more hotels sequestered for their accommodation. No laws which do not bear directly or indirectly upon the slaying of Prussians have been made in recent years. This is sometimes called government, but used to be known as self-preservation when men dressed in yellow ochre and carried stone clubs.

"Eastward over the Thames hangs a pall of smoke. It is the smoke of Silvertown. Left, right, and all about are other palls. They are created by the furnaces of works which once were making useful things and beautiful things; paints and enamels and varnishes, pottery and metal ware, toys for sport and instruments of science. To-day they make instruments of death; high explosives to shatter flesh and bone to pulp and powder, deadly gases to sear men's eyes, to choke out human life. It is called work of national importance, but Christ would have wept to see it. Squatting in Whitehall--look, the setting sun strikes venomous sparks from its windows--is the War Office. Ponder well the name of this imposing pile--the _War Office_. Nearly two thousand years have elapsed since the last of the Initiates delivered His Sermon on the Mount. See! the city bristles with the spires of His churches; they are as thorns upon a briar-bush. Look north, the spire of a church terminates the prospect; south, it is the same; east and west--spires, spires, spires. And squatting grimly amid a thousand shrines of Jesus Christ is the War Office--the _War_ Office, my friend. Watch how the spears of light strike redly into that canopy of foulness hanging above Kynoch's Works. A Ministry of Munitions controls all that poisonous activity. Mario, it is the second Crucifixion. The Jews crucified the Body; all the world has conspired to crucify the Spirit.

"The Word has failed. There lies the reading of your day dream, Mario, your dream of the _Sheikh_ of El Wasr. Look how the shadow of the campanile creeps out beneath us, over church and War-Office-Annexe, over life and over death. Religion is a corpse and the world is its morgue.

But out of corruption comes forth sweetness. No creature known to man possesses more intense vitality than the _dermestes_ beetle which propagates in the skull of a mummy. From the ashes of the Cross you arise. Christ is dead; long live Christianity. Behold the world at your feet. Courage, my friend, open the Gates and lead mankind into the garden of the G.o.ds."

X

That Paul had established a platform strong enough to support the tower of a new gospel became evident. His second book of Revelations, _The Key_, was awaited eagerly by the whole of the civilised world. In determined opposition to the wishes of Ba.s.sett, unmoved by an offer from an American newspaper which would have created a record serial price, Paul had declined to print any part of _The Key_ in a periodical. With the publication of _The Gates_, which but heralded a wider intent, he had become the central figure of the world. Politically he was regarded as a revolutionary so dangerous that he merited the highest respect, and the tactful att.i.tude of the Roman Church was adopted by those temporal rulers who recognised in Paul Mario one who had almost grasped a power above the power of kings.

"In Galileo's days," said Thessaly on one occasion, "a man who proclaimed unpalatable truths was loaded with chains and hurled into a dungeon. Nowadays we load him with honours and raise him to the peerage, an even more effectual method of gagging him. Try to avoid the House of Peers, Mario. Your presence would disturb the orthodox slumbers of the bishops."

On the eve of the opening of the German offensive Paul received a long letter from Don which disturbed him very much. It was the outcome of Don's last interview with Flamby and represented the result of long deliberation. "I have had a sort of brain-wave," wrote Don in his whimsical fashion, "or rush of intellect to the brow. I suppose you recognise that you are now the outstanding figure of the War and consequently of the world? Such a figure always arises out of a great upheaval, as history shows. His presence is necessary to the readjustment of shattered things, I suppose--and he duly arrives. I take you to stand, Paul, for spiritual survival. You are the chosen retort of the White to the challenge of the Black, but I wonder if you have perceived the real inwardness of your own explanation of the War?

"You show it to be an upcrop of that primitive Evil which legend has embodied in the person of Lucifer. Has it occurred to you that the insidious process of corruption which you have followed step by step through the art, the music, the literature, the religion and the sociology of Germany may have been directed by _someone_? If you are the mouthpiece of the White, who is the mouthpiece of the Black? It is difficult to visualise such a personality, of course. We cannot imagine Pythagoras in his bath or even Shakespeare having his hair cut, and if What's-his-name revisited earth to-morrow I don't suppose anybody would know him. I often find it hard to realise that _you_, the old Paul with the foul briar pipe and the threadbare Norfolk, really wrote _The Gates_, not to mention _Francesca_. But you did, and I have been wondering if the Other Fellow--the Field-Marshal of the Powers of Darkness--is equally disappointing to look at--I mean, without halos, or, in his case, blue fire. In short, I have been wondering if, meeting him, one would recognise him? I have tried to imagine a sort of sinister Whisperer standing at the elbows of Germany's philosophers, scientists, artists and men of letters; one who was paving the way for a war that should lay religion in ashes. And now, Paul, forgive me if I seem to rave, but conditions here are not conducive to the production of really good literature--I wonder if you will divine where this line of reflection led me? The Whisperer, upon the ruins of the old creeds, would try to uprear a new creed--his own. _You_ would be his obstacle.

Would he attack you openly, or would he remain--the Whisperer? To adopt the delightful mediaeval language of the Salvation Army, watch for the Devil at your elbow.... I wish I could get home, if only for a day, not because I funk the crash which is coming at any moment now but because I should like to see _The Key_ before, it goes to press...."

Paul read this strange letter many times. "The Whisperer ... would try to uprear a new creed--his own." Paul glanced at a bulky typescript which lay upon the table near his hand. _The Key_ was complete and he had intended to deliver it in person to Ba.s.sett later the same morning.

Strange doubts and wild surmises began to beat upon his brain and he shrank within himself, contemplative and somewhat fearful. A consciousness of great age crept over him like a shadow. He seemed to have known all things and to have wearied of all things, to have experienced everything and to have found everything to be nothing. Long, long ago he had striven as he was striving now to plant an orchard in the desert of life that men might find rest and refreshment on their journey through pathless time. Long, long ago he had doubted and feared--and failed. In some dim grove of the past he had revealed the secret of eternal rebirth to white-robed philosophers; in some vague sorrow that reached out of the ages and touched his heart he seemed to recognise that death had been his reward, and that he had welcomed death as a friend.

So completely did this mood absorb him that he started nervously to find Jules Thessaly standing beside his chair. Thessaly had walked in from the garden and he carried a flat-crowned black felt hat in his hand.

"If I have intruded upon a rich vein of reflection forgive me."

Paul turned and looked at the strong ma.s.sive figure outlined against the bright panel of the open window. The influence of that mood of age lingered; he felt lonely and apprehensive. He noticed a number of empty flower vases about the room. Yvonne used to keep them always freshly filled. He wondered when she had ceased to do so and why. "You have rescued me from a mood that was almost suicidal, Thessaly. A horrible recognition of the futility of striving oppresses me this morning. I seem to be awaiting a blow which I know myself powerless to avert. If we were at your place I should prescribe a double 'Fra Diavolo' but, failing this, I think something with a fizz in it must suffice. Will you give the treatment a trial?"

"With pleasure. Let it be a stirrup-cup, or, as our northern friends have it, a _doch-an-dorroch_."

Paul stood up and stared at Thessaly. "Do I understand you to mean that you are about to set out upon a journey?"

"I am, Mario. Like Eugene Sue's tedious Jew, I am cursed with a lack of repose. I sail for New York to-morrow or the following day."

"Shall you be long absent?"

"I cannot say with any certainty. There seems to be nothing further for me to do in England at present. I feel that England has ceased to be the pivot of the world. I am turning my attention to America, not without sparing a side glance for the island kingdom of the Mikado. You know how un.o.btrusive I am, Mario; I am taking no letter of introduction to President Wilson, nor if I visit j.a.pan shall I trouble official Tokio.