Romance Island Part 18

"Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."

"No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods mixed something horrid."

"A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"

proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.

"Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food--it's molten history, that's what it is. Think--this is what they had to eat at the cafes boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in s.p.a.ce. Don't tell me--"

He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially, distractingly natural.

"I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.

And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when people die _they_ don't notice any difference, either?"

"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's going to look in print. Think of Cra.s.s--digging for head-lines."

St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl; but there were times--

"Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the absolute."

Amory nodded.

"Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out with the camera, while the light is good."

The lateness of the hour of their arrival at the palace the evening before had prevented the prince from receiving them, but he had sent a most courteous message announcing that he himself would wait upon them at a time which he appointed. While they were abiding his coming, Rollo setting aside the dishes, Amory smoking, strolling up and down, and examining the faint symbolic devices upon the walls'

tiling, St. George stood before one of the cas.e.m.e.nts, and looked over the aisles of flowering tree-tops to the grim, grey sides of Mount Khalak, inscrutable, inaccessible, now not even hinting at the walls and towers upon its secret summit. He was thinking how heavenly curious it was that the most wonderful thing in his commonplace world of New York--that is, his meeting with Olivia--should, out here in this world of things wonderful beyond all dream, still hold supreme its place as the sovereign wonder, the sovereign delight.

"I dare say that means something," he said vaguely to himself, "and I dare say all the people who are--in love--know what it does mean,"

and at this his spirit of adventure must have nodded at him, as if it understood, too.

When, in a little time, Prince Tabnit appeared at the open door of the "porch of light," it was as if he had parted from St. George in McDougle Street but the night before. He greeted him with exquisite cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested certain of his smile.

"I wonder," he asked with engaging hesitation when he was seated, "whether I may have a--cigarette? That is the name? Yes, a cigarette. Tobacco is unknown in Yaque. We have invented no colonies useful for the luxury. How can it be--forgive me--that your people, who seem remote from poetry, should be the devisers and popularizers of this so poetic pastime? To breathe in the green of earth and the light of the dead sun! The poetry of your American smoke delights me."

St. George smiled as he offered the prince his case.

"In America," he said, "we devised it as a vice, your Highness. We are obliged to do the same with poetry, if we popularize it."

And St. George was thinking:

"Miss Holland. He has seen Miss Holland--perhaps yesterday. Perhaps he will see her to-day. And how in this world am I ever to mention her name?"

But the prince was in the idlest and most genial of humours. He spoke at once of the matters uppermost in the minds of his guests, gave them news of the party from New York, told how they were in comfort in the palace on the summit of Mount Khalak, struck a momentary tragic note in mention of the mystery still mantling the absence of the king and repeated the announcement already made by Ca.s.syrus, the premier, that in two days' time, failing the return of the sovereign, the king's daughter would be publicly recognized, with solemn ceremonial, as Princess of Yaque. Then he turned to St.

George, his eyes searching him through the haze of smoke.

"Your own coming to Yaque," he said abruptly, "was the result of a sudden decision?"

"Quite so, your Highness," replied St. George. "It was wholly unexpected."

"Then we must try to make it also an unexpected pleasure," suggested the prince lightly. "I am come to ask you to spend the day with me in looking about Med, the King's City."

He dropped the monogrammed stub of his cigarette in a little jar of smaragdos, brought, he mentioned in pa.s.sing, from a despoiled temple of one of the Chthonian deities of Tyre, and turned toward his guests with a winning smile.

"Come," he said, "I can no longer postpone my own pleasure in showing you that our nation is the Lady of Kingdoms as once were Babylon and Chaldea."

It was as if the strange panorama of the night before had once more opened its frame, and they were to step within. As the prince left them St. George turned to Rollo for the novelty of addressing a reality.

"How do you wish to spend the day, Rollo?" he asked him.

Rollo looked pensive.

"Could I stroll about a bit, sir?" he asked.

"Stroll!" commanded St. George cheerfully.

"Thank you, sir," said Rollo. "I always think a man can best learn by observation, sir."

"Observe!" supplemented his master pleasantly, as a detachment of the guard appeared to conduct Amory and him below.

"Don't black up the sandals," Amory warned Rollo as he left him, "and be back early. We may want you to get us ready for a mastodon hunt."

"Yes, sir," said Rollo with simplicity, "I'll be back quite some time before tea-time, sir."

St. George was smiling as they went down the corridor. He had been vain of his love that, in Yaque as in America, remained the thing it was, supreme and vital. But had not the simplicity of Rollo taken the leap in experience, and likewise without changing? For a moment, as he went down the silent corridors, lofty as the woods, vocal with faint inscriptions on the uncovered stone, the old human doubt a.s.sailed him. The very age of the walls was a protest against the a.s.sumption that there is a touchstone that is ageless. Even if there is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh, heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold.

In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that this is love, as Love itself loves to be.

They emerged in the appeasing air of that perfect morning, and the sweetness of the flowering trees was everywhere, and wide roads pointed invitingly to undiscovered bournes, and overhead in the curving wind floated the flags and streamers of those joyous, wizard colours.

They went out into the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey that he has taken long ago--Long Ago and Far Away are the great touchstones--and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and delight--wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia Holland might be met. As for the wonder, that had taken some three thousand years to acc.u.mulate, as nearly as one could compute; and as for the delight, that had taken less than ten days to make possible; and yet there is no manner of doubt which held high place in the mind of St. George as the smooth miles fled away from hurrying wheels.

Such wheels! Motors? St. George asked himself the question as he took his place beside the prince in the exquisitely light vehicle, Amory following with Ca.s.syrus, and the suites coming after, like the path from a lanthorn. For the vehicles were a kind of electric motor, but constructed exquisitely in a fashion which, far from affronting taste, delighted the eye by leading it to lines of unguessed beauty. They were motors as the ancients would have built them if they had understood the trick of science, motors in which the lines of utility were veiled and taught to be subordinate. The speed attained was by no means great, and the motion was gentle and sacrificed to silence. And when St. George ventured to ask how they had imported the first motors, the prince answered that as Columbus was sailing on the waters of the Atlantic at adventure, the people of Yaque were touring the island in electric motors of much the same description, though hardly the clumsiness, of those which he had noticed in New York.

This was the first astonishment, and other astonishments were to follow. For as they went about the island it was revealed that the remainder of the world is asleep with science for a pillow and the night-lamp of philosophy casting shadows. Yet as the prince exhibited wonders, one after another, St. George, dimly conscious that these are the things that men die to discover, would have given them all for one moment's meeting with Olivia on that high-road of Med. If you come to think of it, this may be why science always has moved so slowly, creeping on from point to point.

Thus it came about that when Prince Tabnit indicated a low, pillared, temple-like building as the home of perpetual motion, which gave the power operating the manufactures and water supply of the entire island, St. George looked and understood and resolved to go over the temple before he left Yaque, and then fell a-wondering whether, when he did so, Olivia would be with him. When the prince explained that it is ridiculous to suppose that combustion is the chief means of obtaining light and heat, or that Heaven provided divinely-beautiful forests for the express purpose of their being burned up; and when he told him that artificial light and heat were effected in a certain reservoir (built with a cla.s.sic regard for the dignity of its use as a link with unspoken forces) St. George listened, and said over with attention the name of the substance acted upon by emanations--and wondered if Olivia were not afraid of it. So it was all through the exhibition of more wonders scientific and economic than any one has dreamed since every one became a victim of the world's habit of being afraid to dream. Although it is true that when St. George chanced to observe that there were about Med few farms of tilled ground, the prince's reply did startle him into absorbed attention:

"You are referring to agriculture?" Prince Tabnit said after a moment's thought. "I know the word from old parchments brought from Phoenicia by our ancestors. But I did not know that the art is in practice anywhere in the world. Do you mean to a.s.sure me," cried the prince suddenly, "that the vegetables which I ate in America were raised by what is known as 'tilling the soil'?"

"How else, your Highness?" doubted St. George, wondering if he were responsible for the fading mentality of the prince.

Prince Tabnit looked away toward the splendour of some new thought.

"How beautiful," he said, "to subsist on the sun and the dust.

Beautiful and lost, like the dreams of Mitylene. But I feel as if I were reading in Genesis," he declared. "Is it possible that in this 'age of science' of yours it has not occurred to your people that if plants grow by slowly extracting their own elements from the soil, those elements artificially extracted and applied to the seed will render growth and fruitage almost instantaneous?"

"At all events we've speculated about it," St. George hastened to impart with pride, "just as we do about telephones that will let people see one another when they talk. But nearly every one smiles at both."

"Don't smile," the prince warned him. "Yaque has perfected both those inventions only since she ceased to smile at their probability. Nothing can be simpler than instantaneous vegetation.

Any Egyptian juggler can produce it by using certain acids. We have improved the process until our fruits and vegetables are produced as they are needed, from hour to hour. This was one of the so-called secrets of the ancient Phoenicians--has it never occurred to you as important that the Phoenician name for Dionysos, the G.o.d of wine-growers, was lost?"