The Orchard of Tears - Sax Rohmer

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recollections of Sir Jacques that on the publication of Delilah he instructed his butler to say that he was abroad whenever I might call!"

      Fascinated as of old by his whimsical language, the cap-and-bells which he loved to assume, Paul watched affectionately the smiling face of Donald Courtier. Momentarily a faint tinge of melancholy had clouded the gaiety of Don's grey eyes; for this chance meeting had conjured up memories of a youth already slipping from his grasp, devoured by the all-consuming war; memories of many a careless hour treasured now as exquisite relics are treasured, of many a good fellow who would never again load his pipe from Paul Mario's capacious, celebrated and hospitable tobacco jar, as he, Don, was doing; of days of sheer indolent joy, of nights of wild and carefree gladness.

      "Good old Paul," he murmured, raising his glass. "Here's to the late Sir Jacques. So you are out of it?"

      Paul Mario nodded and took from the pocket of his threadbare golf jacket the very twin of Don's curved and blackened briar, drawing towards him the tobacco jar upon the table—a Mycenæan vase from the tomb of Rameses III. A short silence fell between them.

      "Frankly, I envy you," said Don suddenly, breaking the spell, "although I realise that actually you have suffered as deeply as many a man who has spent two years in the trenches. One cannot imagine the lyre of Apollo attuned to What's-the-name's marches."

      "Two years," echoed Paul; "is it really two years since we met?"

      "Two years on June the twenty-second. On June the twenty-second, nineteen hundred and fifteen, you saw me off from Victoria of hateful memory. I have been home six or seven times in the interval, but somehow or other have always missed you. I was appalled when I heard you had joined. God knows we need such brains as yours, but they would be wasted on the Somme; and genius is too rare to be exposed to the sniper's bullet. What are you doing?"

      The sympathy between the two was so perfect that Paul Mario knew the question to refer not to his private plans but to his part in the world drama.

      "Beyond daily descending lower in my own esteem—nothing."

      "Yet you might do so much."

      "I know," said Paul Mario. "But—it awes me."

      If his work had not already proved him, the genius of the man must have been rendered apparent by his entire lack of false modesty. Praise and censure alike left him uninfluenced—although few artists can exist without a modicum of the former: he knew himself born to sway the minds of millions and was half fearful of his self-knowledge. "I know," he said, and pipe in hand he gazed wistfully across the valley.

      A faint breeze crept through the fir avenue, bearing with it a muffled booming sound which was sufficient to raise the curtain of distance—never truly opaque for such as he—and to display to that acute inner vision a reeking battlefield. Before his shuddering soul defiled men maimed, blind, bleeding from ghastly hurts; men long dead. Women he saw in lowly hovels, weeping over cots fashioned from rough boxes; women, dry-eyed, mutely tragic, surrounded by softness, luxury and servitude, wearing love gifts of a hand for ever stilled, dreaming of lover-words whispered in a voice for ever mute. He seemed to float spiritually over the whole world upon that wave of sound and to find the whole world stricken, desolate, its fairness mockery and its music a sob.

      "At the moment, no doubt," said Don, "you feel as though you had been knocked out of the ring in the first round. But this phase will pass. The point is, that you never had any business in the ring at all. No quarrel ever actually begins with a blow, and no quarrel was ever terminated by one. Genius—perverted, I'll grant you, but nevertheless genius—started this war; and we are English enough to think that we can end it by brute force. Pass the matches."

      "You are really of opinion," asked Paul dreamily, "that I should be doing my utmost if I stuck to my last?"

      "Unquestionably. There are a thousand and one things of vital interest to all humanity which have not been said yet, which only you can say, a thousand and one aspects of the Deluge not yet presented to the world. Above all, Paul, there are millions of poor bereaved souls who suffer dumbly and vaguely wonder for what crime they are being punished."

      "Would you have me tell them that their faith, their churches, are to blame?"

      "Not necessarily. The churches will receive many a hard knock without you adding your quota. Merry England has always nourished the 'Down-wither'; we breed the 'Down-withers'; and they will raise their slogan of 'Down with everything' soon enough. I see your part, Paul, as that of a reconstructor rather than a 'Down-wither.' Any fool can smash a Ming pot but no man living to-day can make one. You think that the churches have failed?"

      "On the whole, yes. If we here in England are firm in our spiritual faith, why are the churches empty at such an hour as this and the salons of the crystal-gazers full?"

      "Because we are not firm in our spiritual faith. But many of us know and admit that. The point is, can you tell us why, and indicate a remedy?"

      Paul Mario's expression grew wrapt, and he stared out over the valley into a land which it is given to few ever to explore. "I believe I can," he answered softly; "but I dare not attempt such a task without the unshakable conviction that mine is the chosen hand."

      "I am glad to hear you say it; those doubts prove to me that you recognise the power of your pen. They are fools who hold that a ton of high-explosive is worth all the rhetoric of Cicero. It was not Krupps who plunged the Central Empires into the pit, Paul, but Bernhardi, Nietzsche and What's-his-name. Wagner's music has done more to form the German character than Bismarck's diplomacy. Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth means more to England than Magna Charta."

      "I agree."

      "When the last of our marshals has stuck the last of his pins in the last war map, all the belligerents will still be of the same opinion as before the war began. The statesman of to-day is perhaps past praying for, but your book will help to form the statesman of to-morrow."

      "You dazzle me. You would make me the spiritual father of a new Europe."

      "And a new America. Why not? You have heard the call and you are not the man to shirk it. Lesser men than you have tried—all honour to them if they were sincere—to voice the yearnings, the questions, the doubts, of a generation that has outgrown its spiritual garments. All the world feels, knows, that a new voice must come soon. The world is waiting for you, Paul."

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      Flamby Duveen lay flat amid the bluebells, one hand outstretched before her and resting lightly upon a little mound of moss. It was a small brown hand and she held it in such a manner, knuckles upward, and imparted to it so cunning and peculiar a movement that it assumed quite an uncanny resemblance to a tiny and shrinking hare.

      Some four feet in front of her, at the edge of a small clearing in the bluebell forest, from a clump of ferns two long silky ears upstood, motionless, like twin sentries, and from between the thick stalks of the flowers which intermingled with the ferns one round bright eye regarded the moving hand fascinatedly.

      Flamby's lips were pursed up and a soft low whistle quite peculiar in tone caused the silky ears of the watching hare to twitch sharply. But the little animal remained otherwise motionless and continued to study the odd billowy motions of the brown hand with that eager wonder-bright eye. The whistling continued, and the hare ventured forth from cover, coming fully twelve inches nearer to Flamby. Flamby constrained her breathing as much as was consistent with maintaining the magical whistle. Her hand wriggled insinuatingly forward, revealing a round bare arm, brown as a nut upon its outer curves and creamy on the inner.

      The hypnotised subject ventured a foot nearer. Flamby's siren song grew almost inaudible above the bird-calls of the surrounding wood, but it held its sway over the fascinated hare, for the animal suddenly sprang across the space intervening between himself and the mysterious hand and sat studying that phenomenon at close quarters.

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