Romance Island Part 19

Mentally St. George added another barrel to the cargo of _The Aloha_, and wondered if the _Sentinel_ would start botanical gardens and a lighting plant and turn them to the account of advertisers.

All the time, mile upon mile, was unrolling before them the unforgetable beauty of the island. So perfectly were its features marshaled and so exact were its proportions that, as in many great experiences and as in all great poems, one might not, without familiarity, recall its detail, but must instead remain wrapped in the glory of the whole. The avenues, wide as a river, swept between white banks of majestic buildings combining with the magic of great ma.s.s the pure beauty of virginal line. Line, the joy of line, the glory of line, almost, St. George thought, the divinity of line, was everywhere manifest; and everywhere too the divinity of colour, no longer a quality extraneous, laid on as insecure fancy dictates, but, by some law long unrevealed, now actually identified with the object which it not so much decorated as purified. The most interesting of the thoroughfares led from the Eurychorus, or public square, along the lagoon. This fair water, extending from Med to Melita, was greenly sh.o.r.ed and dotted with strange little pleasure crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed and contemplated, was anch.o.r.ed the imperial trireme, with delicately-embroidered sails and prow and p.o.o.p of forgotten metals.

From within, temple music sounded softly and was never permitted to be silenced, as the flame of the Vestals might never be extinguished. Here on the sh.o.r.es had begun the morning traffic of itinerant merchants of Med and Melita, compelled by law to carry on their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely.

Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns, were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for commerce--ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint perfumes of the native orris and algum. Street musicians, playing tunefully upon the zither and upon the crowd, wandered, wearing wreaths of fir, and cl.u.s.tered about stalls where were offered tenuous blades, and statues, and temple vessels filled with wine and flowers.

At the head of the street leading to the temple of Baaltis (My Lady--Aphrodite) the prince's motor was checked while a procession of pilgrims, white-robed and carrying votive offerings, pa.s.sed before them, the votive tablet to the Lady Tanith and the Face of Baal being borne at the head of the line by a dignitary in a smart electric victoria. This was one of the frequent Festival Emba.s.sies to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why, in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something at which the prince had hinted away off in another aeon, in another world, when St. George had first seen him, and there followed ten minutes of talk not to be forgotten.

"Would it be possible for you to tell me, your Highness," St. George asked,--and thereafter even a lover must have forgiven the brief apostasy of his thought--"how it can be that you know the English?

How you are able to speak it here in Yaque?"

The motor moved forward as the procession pa.s.sed, and struck into a magnificent country avenue bordered by trees, tall as elms and fragrant as acacias.

"I can tell you, yes," said the prince, "but I warn you that you will not in the least understand me. I dare say, however, that I may ill.u.s.trate by something of which you know. Do there chance to be, for example, any children in America who are regarded as prodigies of certain understanding?"

"You mean," St. George asked, "children who can play on a musical instrument without knowing how they do it, and so on?"

"Quite so," said the prince with interest.

"Many, your Highness," affirmed St. George. "I myself know a child of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever having been taught, or knowing in the least how he does it."

"Do you think of any one else?" asked the prince.

"Yes," said St. George, "I know a little lad of about five, I should say, who can add enormous numbers and instantly give the accurate result. And he has no idea how he does that, and no one has ever taught him to count above twelve. Oh--every one knows those cases, I fancy."

"Has any one ever explained them, Mr. St. George?" asked the prince.

"How should they?" asked St. George simply. "They are prodigies."

"Quite so," said the prince again. "It is almost incredible that these instances seem to suggest to no one that there must be other ways to 'learn' music and mathematics--and, therefore, everything else--than those known to your civilization. Let me a.s.sure you that such cases as these, far from being miracles and prodigies, are perfectly normal when once the principle is understood, as we of Yaque understand it. It is the average intelligence among your people which is abnormal, inasmuch as it is unable to perform these functions which it was so clearly intended to exercise."

"Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn--as we understand 'learn'?"

"Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering this principle. After that, all knowledge--all languages, for instance--everything--belongs to us."

St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima Thule. It was all right--what he had just been hearing was a part of this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet _he_ was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic, perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to call them in!

"That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?"

he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too--"

The prince shook his head, smiling.

"I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I could, at present, send a wireless communication without the apparatus--though it will be only a matter of time until that is accomplished, too."

St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.

"Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper, for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a place as Yaque?"

The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue which terminates in the Eurychorus before the Palace of the Litany.

St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end stood Mount Khalak. _She_ must have pa.s.sed over this very ground.

"There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no such place as Yaque--as you understand 'place.'"

"I beg your pardon, your Highness?" St. George doubted blankly. Good Heavens. Maybe there had arrived in Yaque no Olivia, as he understood Olivia.

"You showed some surprise, I remember," continued the prince, "when I told you, in McDougle Street, that we of Yaque understand the Fourth Dimension."

McDougle Street. The sound smote the ear of St. George much as would the clang of the fire patrol in the midst of light opera.

"Yes, yes," he said, his attention now completely chained. Yet even then it was not that he cared so absorbingly about the Fourth Dimension. But what if this were all some trick and if, in this strange land, Olivia had simply been flashed before his eyes by the aid of mirrors?

"I find," said the prince with deliberation, "that in America you are familiar with the argument that, if your people understood only length and breadth and did _not_ understand the Third Dimension--thickness--you could not then conceive of lifting, say, a square or a triangle and laying it down upon another square or triangle. In other words, you would not know anything of _up_ and _down_."

St. George nodded. This was the familiar talk of college cla.s.s-rooms.

"As it is," pursued the prince, "your people do perfectly understand lifting a square and placing it upon a square, or a triangle upon a triangle. But you do not know anything about placing a cube upon a cube, or a pyramid upon a pyramid _so that both occupy the same s.p.a.ce at the same time_. We of Yaque have mastered that principle also," the prince tranquilly concluded, "and all that of which this is the alphabet. That is why we are able to keep our island unknown to the world--not to say 'invisible.'"

For a moment St. George looked at him speechlessly; then, in spite of himself, a slow smile overspread his face.

"But," he said, "your Highness, there is not a mathematician in the civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional s.p.a.ce does exist it can not possibly be inhabited."

"Quite so," said the prince, "and yet here we are."

And, if you come to think of it--as St. George did--that is the only answer to a world of impossibilities already proved possible. But the vista which all this opened smote him with irresistible humour.

"Ah well now, I suppose, your Highness," he said, "that our ocean liners sail clean through the island of Yaque, then, and never even have their smoke pushed sidewise?"

The prince laughed pleasantly.

"Have you ever," he asked, "had occasion to explain the principles of hydraulics, or chess, or philosophical idealism to a three-year-old child, or a charwoman? You must forgive me, but really I can think of no better comparison. I am quite as powerless now as you have been if you have ever attempted it. I can only a.s.sure you that such things _are_. Without Jarvo or Akko or some one who understood, you might have sailed the high seas all your life and never have come any nearer to Yaque."

St. George reflected.

"Is Yaque the only example of this kind of thing," he asked, "that the Fourth Dimension would reveal?"

"By no means," said the prince in surprise, "the world is literally teeming with like revelations, once the key is in your hands. The Fourth Dimension is only the beginning. We utilize that to isolate our island. But the higher dimensions are gradually being conquered, too. Nearly all of us can pa.s.s into the Fifth at will, 'disappearing,' as you have the word, from the lower dimensions. It is well-known to you that in a land whose people knew length and breadth, but no _up_ and _down_, an object might be pushed, but never lifted _up_ or put _down_. If it were to be lifted, such a people would believe it to have 'disappeared.' So, from you who know only three dimensions, Yaque has 'disappeared,'

until one of us guides you here. Also we pa.s.s at will into the Fifth Dimension and even higher, and seem to 'disappear'; the only difference is that, there, we should not be able yet to guide one who did not himself understand how to pa.s.s there. Just as one who understands how to die and to come to life, as you have the phrase, would not be able to take with him any one who did not understand how to take himself there..."

St. George listened, grasping at straws of comprehension, remembering how he had heard all this theorized about and smiled at; but most of all he was beset by a practical consideration.

"Then," he said suddenly, the question leaping to his lips almost against his will, "if you hold this key to all knowledge, how is it that the king--Mr. Holland--could get away from you, and the Hereditary Treasure be lost?"

The prince sighed profoundly.

"We have by no means," he said, "perfected our knowledge. We are at one with the absolute in knowledge--true. But the affairs of every day most frequently elude us. Not even the most advanced among us are perfect intuitionists. We have by no means reached that desirable and inevitable day when our minds shall flow together, without need of communication, without possibility of secret. We still suffer the disadvantage of a slight barrier of personality."

"And it is into one of these lapses," thought St. George irreverently, "that the king has disappeared." Aloud he asked curiously concerning a matter which was every moment becoming more incomprehensible.

"But how, your Highness," he said simply, "did your people ever consent to have an American for your king?"