CHAPTER XIII - THE PALACE OF PALMS
The sun dipped behind the western buildings, and the glare of the glow on fort and Temple and encircling wall was like phosphorescent fire. I saw the guards stirring in their enclosure. The Airscouts’ Fortress shone, hard and brilliant, against the sky.
I gathered my wits together. I had seen the hidden things, and, because I knew of none other to whom to turn, I resolved to appeal to David. Esther, the prey of these insane degenerates when she awakened ... David’s own secret troubles ... could we not aid each other? Might not two men accomplish something in these evil days?
I turned to the right across the bridge that led to the Airscouts’ Fortress. The sentinel stood still, watching me. He raised his Ray rod, not to threaten me, but to salute, and I remembered that the airscouts had no love for the Guard, and hence must be under Lembken’s control. He took me for a priest. But the weapon shook in his hand, and the astonishment upon his face matched that on mine. I recognized the man Jones, who had brought me to London.
“I want to leave this hell!” I cried. “Which way? Which way?”
“You want—you want—?” he stammered.
“The Strangers’ House. I am lost here—”
He looked at me in utter perplexity.
“Help me!” I pleaded. “Show me the way!”
The door behind him opened, and there stepped out a man of about fifty years, dressed in white, with a golden swan on each shoulder. Jones stepped aside and saluted him. The newcomer approached me. His hard, clean-shaven face was impenetrable, and his eyes burned with a dull fire. Behind him crept a second figure; it was the old priest.
“There he is! Seize him!” he shrieked.
The first man laid his hand on my shoulder. “I am Air-Admiral Hancock,” he said. “You are to accompany me to Boss Lembken.”
I went with him across the bridge into a doorway set in the west side of the Temple building. I expected again to see the vast interior beneath me, but we entered a narrow corridor and stepped into a small automatic elevator. In a moment we had shot up and halted inside the Palace entrance. Hancock opened the door of the cage.
We were standing in a spacious hall, bare, save for the hanging tapestries and heavy Persian rugs on the mosaic floor. It was half dark, and there was a perfume that made my head swim. Before the curtained aperture opposite us stood a negro boy, with a Ray rod in his hand. As we approached he threw the curtain aside and saluted us.
There were soft solar lights in the next room, which was rose-red, and decorated and furnished in the style of Louis Quatorze. Another negro stood in the doorway opposite; he, too, saluted and threw the curtain back.
The third room was enameled in blue. The blue lights gave it an unearthly aspect, which was increased by the baroque style of its ornamentation. The perfume was stronger.
The negro at the door of the fourth room was a giant. He wore the uniform of an eighteenth century grenadier. His scarlet coat and white pigtail formed vivid spots against the dull-gold curtain. The room within was dark. We waited on the threshold.
At first I could see nothing. Then, gradually, the outlines of the room came into sight. There were low divans and rugs, and mirrors on every wall multiplied them. I heard a rasping sound, and a blotch of crimson and green became a brilliant macaw that scraped its way with its sharp claws from end to end of a horizontal perch. Behind it I now saw the white gleam of Lembken’s robe; then the couch on which he lay; then the girl who crouched, fanning him, at his feet; then the rotund form of the old man, the sharp eyes and the heavy jowl with the pendulous cheeks.
“I have executed your orders, Boss,” said the Air-Admiral.
The old man rose upon his feet heavily and came puffing up to us. His heavy soft hands wandered about my robes, patting me here and there, while he puffed and snorted like some sea monster.
“You haven’t a knife or a Ray rod?” he inquired suspiciously. “You haven’t anything to harm me? I am an old, weak man. I am the people’s friend, and yet many want to kill me.”
He seemed to satisfy himself with the result of his inspection, and withdrew to his couch, picking up a Ray rod and resting it across his knee.
He dismissed Hancock and the girl. She rose to her feet briskly, with a mechanical smile. She was about twenty years old, it seemed to me, but there was a hardness and cruelty about her mouth that shocked me, and the soul behind the mask of youth seemed centuries old.
“Amaranth wanted to stay, to hear what I was going to say to you,” said Lembken, “but I make everybody mind his own business in the People’s House. Besides, she might have fallen in love with you. I like to have good-looking people about me.” He looked at me and at the Ray rod, and then at me again; then, with a petulant gesture, he sent the weapon flying across the room.
“There! You see I trust you!” he said, smiling. “Sit down beside me. We understand each other, so we will be frank. Men such as we are above deceptions. You ought to be about a hundred and twenty-eight years old!”
He spoke jocularly, and yet I could see that he wished to be sure I was the man he sought. Evidently he knew my history. He heaved a sigh of immense satisfaction when I acquiesced.
“I was not sure it was you,” he said. “One has to be cautious when so much depends on it. And Sanson was beginning to suspect, but he does not know that I discovered Lazaroff’s papers. Sanson does not know everything, you see, Arnold. What do you think of his Rest Cure, as the people term it? It is his, not mine, you know.”
“I think he is Satan himself,” I answered quickly. Yet I was not sure that I preferred this perfumed degenerate to Sanson, with his maniac cruelty.
A smile crept over the flabby face. Lembken looked pleased. He placed his hand upon my shoulder.
“A classical scholar,” he said. “You refer to the mythical ruler of the infernal realms. Assuredly we shall soon understand each other. Sanson is a strong man. When I meet strong men I let them be as strong as they want to be. They break themselves to pieces. In a democracy like ours there is no room for strong men. Sanson doesn’t understand that. He thinks the Mayor of the Palace is going to step into the shoes of the Roi Fainéant. But the Roi Fainéant always wins—if he sits still. I am the Roi Fainéant.”
I was so amazed at the strange psychology he was disclosing that I found no answer ready. I knew he was dissembling some deep-laid purpose, but why he had need of me I could not imagine. And the man’s affectation of good-will almost began to delude me.
“Do you like David’s daughter?” he began, so suddenly that I started. “Ah!” he continued, shaking his finger waggishly, “one seldom sees a woman approximating so closely to the Sanson norm. There is an attachment, if I know young men. How would you like her for your own? I hit the mark, then?”
Before I could reply he was on another tack.
“Now, there is Hancock,” he resumed. “He is a Christian, and ought to go to the defectives’ shops, according to the law Sanson made. But I don’t care. I would just as soon have Christianity as the Ant, or Mormonism, as they have in America. I don’t like tyranny. If I had my way everyone would be perfectly free. Sanson doesn’t see that he has embittered the people. He is harrying them with his laws, and they blame me. I am the people’s friend.”
With a sudden, hoarse scream the macaw flew from the bar and perched on Lembken’s shoulder, where she sat, preening her plumage and croaking at me. “The people’s friend,” she screamed, and broke into choking laughter.
“So you see it is entirely to your interest to help me and not Sanson,” Lembken continued. “Reasonable men cement their friendships with self-interest. Come, let me look at you.”
He touched some switch near him, and the room was illuminated with a blaze of solar light. The golden ants upon his robes leaped into view. He turned on the divan heavily and stared into my face.
“Yes, I can trust you,” he said in approbation. “Well, Sanson will learn his error in four days’ time. You shall live here with me and have a life of pleasure. You need never think about the world below. We do exactly what we please; that is my rule in the People’s House.”
“The People’s House!” screamed the macaw, leaving his shoulder and fluttering back to her perch, from which she surveyed us coldly, head on one side. “The People’s House! The people’s friend!” she alternated, in a muttering diminuendo.
“My head aches today,” said Lembken petulantly. “That is why I am sitting here. There has been an accident: one of our ladies fell down through an open door. It made my head ache.”
I knew he lied when he spoke of an accident. I knew that she had thrown herself down. The lie brought back my mind to its focus; and in that instant my lips were sealed, and my half-formed intent to throw myself on Lembken’s mercy, pleading for Esther and our love, died.
“So we shall talk tomorrow,” Lembken continued. “For the present you are one of us. You see your interest lies in joining us, and the part you have to play in return will be short and not difficult for a man of your discernment. That small part will be paid, four days hence—”
I was sure that it concerned Esther now. “And will be all, and afterward your life will be free from all laws and bonds. You never need leave the People’s House unless you want to. Here everyone does as he pleases. Come, Arnold, I will show you the gardens.”
He stood up, puffing, and gave me his arm like an old friend. The man’s manners were fascinating. I could well understand how he had worked his way to power. There was the good-fellowship of the twentieth-century demagogue, but there was more; there was discernment and culture; and there was more still; there was a corrupting influence about his candor that seemed to strike its deadly roots down into my moral nature and shrivel it.
We passed out through the empty rooms. The Palace was level with the Temple roof; there were no steps. There was no stairway at all, for the whole structure, which seemed to extend from side to side of the vast roof, consisted of a single story. We passed out between two giant negroes, who stood like ebony statues. And now I saw that the four rooms in which I had been, comprised only the smallest portion of the building, which was set out irregularly, receding here to leave space for a little lawn, projecting there, evidently to enclose a garden. And I discovered why the interior was so dark; there were no windows—at least, on this side of the Palace.
It was a fairyland. I thought of the old palaces at Capri. Here, high above the swarming streets, a man might take his pleasure in ease indeed. The crystal walls must have been sound-proof, for not a murmur from below reached us. I heard the music of bubbling brooks, the cries of birds among the trees, the faint tinkle of a guitar or mandolin struck somewhere in the recesses of the ramified buildings.
We were traversing a graveled path that ran between the Palace and the crystal wall. Looking down, I could see the glow circle of the fortress. It had grown dark; the lights which lit our way, that I had thought daylight, were from the solar vents, concealed so skilfully that they shed a soft, diffused radiance everywhere, as of afternoon. We turned the angle of the building, and I stopped short and looked in involuntary admiration at the scene before me.
We might have stepped into the heart of some Amazonian forest, for we were in a tangled wilderness of palms and other tropical trees. The air was filled with the scent of orange flowers, and in a grove near me clusters of the bright fruit hung from the weighted boughs. From the dank earth sprang clusters of exotic, flaming flowers, and ferns. Huge vines knotted themselves about the trunks of trees, through whose recesses flew flocks of brilliantly plumaged birds. The path became a trail, meandering between the trees and crossing rushing brooklets. The vast concavity of the dome above was like an arched heaven of blue, studded with golden stars.
“What do you think of the People’s House, Arnold?” Lembken inquired, turning heavily upon me.
“It is a paradise,” I answered.
I was amazed to see two tears roll down his cheeks. It was the same strange yielding to emotional impulse that I had discerned before. So might Nero have wept over his fiddle.
“It is the reward of those who are the chosen of the people,” he answered. “It will be your reward, Arnold. You must dream over this tonight, and tomorrow we will make our compact. I have reserved quarters for you. You will meet nobody you do not wish to meet. That is the chief charm of the People’s House; we meet only for our festivities; otherwise we are quite free. Come, Arnold!”
The scene, the atmosphere, the fearful personality of Lembken seemed to appeal to some being in me whose hideous presence I had never suspected. A deadly inertia of the spirit was conquering me. Esther, my love of a hundred years, became in memory elusive as a dream to me. The sensuous appeal of this wonderland swept over me.
We had threaded the recesses of the groves, passing secluded arbors of twisted vines, pergolas and rustic cottages about which clung the scarlet trumpets of pomegranate flowers; now the crystal walls came into sight again, and, as we approached, a gust of wind blew the door open. Instantly, to divert my senses from that soul-destroying dominance, there rushed in, the murmurs of the city, the voices of the multitude below, and, above all, clear and distinct, the wild accents of the whitebeard, who had denounced the pleasure-palace that afternoon.
“Woe to you, London, when your whitecoats sit with their harlots in the high places! Woe! Woe!”
I could not see him; through the door I saw only the circle of the enclosing walls, a luminous orb beneath, and the glare of the huge Ray guns; beyond were the mighty buildings. Lembken put out his hand and closed the door. The voices were cut off into silence. I glanced at him, but his brow was untroubled and serene.
He led me across a little, shelving lawn, through a small gateway. There was nobody in the tiny close, surrounded by a high marble wall. There were no windows in the little house before me. It might have held two rooms.
“Three rooms,” said Lembken, as if he had read my thoughts. “Good night, Arnold. Remember, we do what we like to do in the People’s House. There are no laws, no bonds. Dream of this paradise that shall be yours, and open the third door softly.”
He left me. I pushed the first door open and entered.
It was a bedroom, furnished in the conventional style which had not changed appreciably during the century, but all in ebony or teak, and luxurious almost beyond conception. The floor was covered with a thick-piled Bokhara rug, of red and ivory, and exquisite texture.
I passed through the inevitable swing door. The second room was fitted as a combination library and dining-room. There was an ebony bookcase, filled with magnificently bound books, a sideboard on which stood wines and distilled liquors, a heavy dining-table, armchairs.
This room had a window, and, looking out, I was surprised to see beneath me the bridge that led to the Airscouts’ Fortress, and, at the end of it, a figure in blue, the white swan on his breast brilliant in the glare of the solar light over his head.
I passed on. But instead of the swing door the further wall contained a door of heavy, iron-bound wood, with bolts of steel. Then I remembered Lembken’s words: “Open the third door softly.”
The bolts moved in their sockets with hardly a sound. I drew them; I opened the door and passed into a tiny chamber.
A girl in white, with the palm badge upon her shoulder, was standing there. The room had been dark; the sudden influx of the solar light from the library showed me the pallid face and blazing eyes of her whom I had least thought to see before me—Elizabeth!
CHAPTER XIV - THE HOUSE ON THE WALL
She stared at me with eyes that seemed to see nothing; and then a look of recognition came into them, and a twitching smile upon her lips. She put her arms out and came unsteadily toward me. She threw her right arm back. I caught her hand as it swung downward, and the dagger’s razor edge grazed my shoulder.
The next moment she was fighting like a trapped panther. I could not have imagined that such strength and fierceness existed in any woman. She twisted her wrists out of my grasp time and again, and we wrestled for the dagger till the blood from my slashed fingers fouled my priest’s robe. Each of the stabbing blows she dealt so wildly would have driven the dagger in to the hilt.
I grappled with her, caught her right arm at last, and forced it upward, but we swayed to and fro for nearly a minute before I mastered her. Even then she had one last surprise in store, for, when she saw that she was beaten, she drew her dagger hand quickly backward, and I seized the point of the blade within an inch of her breast. I forced her fingers open brutally, and the steel fell to the floor. Then she wrested herself away, and crouched in the corner, watching me, motionless, but still ready to leap. Her gasping breaths were the only sound in the room.
“Elizabeth!” I cried. “I am not here to harm you. Look at me; listen to me!”
Her eyes were fixed on my face in terror that precluded speech. How she watched me! Only once did her glance waver, and that was toward the dagger on the floor. I kicked it backward with my heel.
“Elizabeth, listen to me!” I implored her. “I did not know that you were here, and I do not know how you came here. I want to help you. I want to take you home to David!”
“Ah!” she said, shuddering. “This is what you whites call a romance in the style of the first century B.C., a fashionable pastime, to dress yourselves as blues or grays and worm your way into the homes of your prospective victims, in order to study them, and see whether they suit your taste and are worth adding to your collection. I have read of that in the Council factory novels. But there was never any romance in it to me. So I appeared to suit you, after my father had taken you into his home so trustingly? You deceived him; but you never deceived me.”
I saw her glance turn to the dagger again.
“Elizabeth, you are talking nonsense,” I said, with an affectation of brusqueness. “Let us sit down in the next room, and I propose a compact. You shall take the dagger, provided you do not attempt to harm yourself with it till you have heard me. Is that agreed?”
She scrutinized me for half a minute. Then she nodded. I preceded her into the library with an affectation of indifference which I was far from feeling, for I heard her stoop to pick the dagger up, and wondered each instant whether I was about to feel the point between my shoulders. However, my faith appeared to inspire her with a measure of confidence, for she followed me into the middle room and consented to sit down.
But when I faced her, toying with the blade and all aquiver with the reaction from the terrific nerve-tension, I could hardly find words to utter. Whatever purpose Lembken might have in using me, I had the full measure of his mind. He had thought that my three weeks spent in David’s house had inspired me with a passion for the girl; and he had brought her here, to leave her helpless in my power, a lure to bind me to his interests beyond the possibility of double-dealing.
Before I could begin, Elizabeth collapsed. She began to weep without restraint. I could only wait till she grew more composed. I stared out through the window, looking down toward the Airscouts’ Fortress, whose roof rose perhaps twenty feet beneath me.
I saw the sentry with the swan badge, pacing below. Above him was the luminous wall of the fortress, and over it, floating in the air, was a host of ghostly shapes, airplanes encased in their phosphorescent glow armor, which, as I watched them, rose one by one into the air, circled, and flitted noiselessly away toward the south, like bubbles blown by children.
It could not have been late, for curfew had not come into operation, and London was ablaze with the solar light; but the crowds had gone home and everything was quite still. As I withdrew from the window Elizabeth rose and came timidly toward me.
“Arnold, have I done you a wrong?” she whispered.
“You misunderstood me,” I answered. “But you could not have thought otherwise. If we understand each other now we can help each other—isn’t that so?”
She seized me by both arms and gazed into my face with an imploring, pitiful appeal that wrung my heart.
“Then I thank God,” she said, “for that impulse which held me from self-destruction. Arnold, do you remember that promise I made to you one day? I remembered it; I remembered it, and it was that alone which stayed my hand this afternoon, when the emissary from Lembken came, and there was only the one barred door between us, and I stood behind it, with the knife at my breast. Then I resolved to keep my promise to you, and to let them bring me here, and—to kill Lembken—but it was you! When you disappeared from the Strangers’ House this morning we feared for your safety. We thought you had been seized or lured away. Then my father was summoned on some pretext back to the Strangers’ Bureau, and the airscout came—Lembken’s man. I thought I was for Lembken—”
She broke off, and I took her hands in mine.
“Elizabeth,” I said, “my dear, I do not understand anything of what you tell me. How could they bring you here against your will?”
She looked at me in amazement.
“No, I see you do not understand,” she answered. “And yet you are dressed as a priest. I cannot tell you now. But the airscout who had been sent for me was sorry when he saw that I was not willing, like most women. He took the knife from me, but afterward he let me keep it; he was kind and promised to carry the news to Jones, our friend. The airscouts are disloyal to Lembken, and hate his cruelty, but he dared not disobey. We went by scoutplane from the roof, and Lembken’s women took me and clothed me in this dress of palms, and carried me here, laughing at me. They did not find the knife. I hid that; I meant to serve the Province and the world by killing Lembken. But then I saw you, Arnold, and—and—”
She burst into a new storm of weeping. I drew her to me and placed her head on my shoulder. I felt a cold, burning fire of resolution in my heart which never disappeared. Something, some spiritual door was opened in me. I became part of the wretchedness of the world and suffered its sorrows; pleasure seemed the worst part of life then. I think, too, I loved Esther the better because of that compassion.
When at last Elizabeth raised her head I was struck by the transformation in her appearance. It seemed the reflection of my own determination. I had put forth my will and conquered, and her own seemed one with mine.
“I am going to save you, Elizabeth,” I said. “You are not destined for this earthly hell.”
“Arnold, are you yourself in danger here?” she asked.
“Only of hell-fire,” I answered.
“You must save yourself and not think of me,” she said.
I bade her sit down, and went back to the entrance of the little house. I had half expected that the door would have been locked, but it stood open, having become unhasped, and the sickly odor of the pervading perfume clung to the warm, stale air. I crossed the close to the gate that led into the garden of palms, and stood there in hesitation.
The solar lights had been turned off, and all was dark, except for varicolored lanterns twinkling among the trees. Yet I was aware of souls peopling that darkness. I heard the tinkle of stringed instruments; I had the sense of hidden beings in the undergrowth. If hell can wear the mask of beauty, surely it did that night.
I crossed the lawn and began to skirt the graveled path that extended before me, working my way toward the front of the Palace. The squat, white building glittered against the darkness. Nobody stirred at the entrance; there were no lights, but always I had the sense of something watching me.
At last I saw the crystal walls on the west side, and, beyond them, the phosphorescence of the glow buildings. I stood in hesitancy. On my right stood the thickets; on my left the crystal ended in a stone wall. There was no egress except through the Palace itself. Lembken left nothing to surprise.
As I turned I heard the rustle of stealthy footsteps near me. A red spark drew my eyes along the vista of the orange trees, whose perfumed flowers dispelled the cloying odor of the scented night. I saw a Mænad’s face, framed in a leopard skin, peering at me above a bank of hibiscus. I thought I recognized the girl Amaranth; but it vanished with the dying of the spark, and subdued laughter followed it.
All that was evil in the world seemed to have its focus there. I felt it, breathed it, once more its psychic dominance oppressed me heavily. I saw with sudden intuition why, in a world less stable, witches were burned, how passionately the souls of simple men fought for their heritage of truth and law. This was the negation of life, of all that struggling life that aspired upward, and set its heel upon the serpent’s head. Old myths, made real in this new light, flashed into memory.
I hurried back to the close and fastened the gate behind me. The sweat was dripping from my forehead when I regained the safety of the little house. I burst from the first room into the second.
Elizabeth was not there.
I ran into the third room. She was not there, either. Terror gripped me. Had she been lured away during the few minutes of my absence? It seemed impossible. She would have died there.
Then my eyes fell on something that hung outside the window, dangling, as it seemed, from a fixed point above. It was a rope ladder, and moving outward. As I watched, I saw it begin to rise in a succession of short jerks.
I grasped it with my hands. It pulled me from the floor. I clung to it, striving to get my feet upon the rungs. It drew me to the level of the window, but I would not let go. It pulled me through the window-gap, and I swung far out above the Airscouts’ Fortress. Over me I saw the dark outlines of an unshielded scoutplane, high in the air.
I swung by my hands at the rope’s end, like the weight of a pendulum, making great transverse sweeps that carried me high above the bridge, from end to end of the fortress roof. I saw the courts revolve beneath me. I swept from the crystal wall out into nothingness, and London was a reeling dance of phosphorescent maze. Then the ladder began to descend. I felt the roof of the fortress touch my feet, wrenched my numbed hands away, and fell. A moment later the airplane dropped beside me as noiselessly as an alighting bird, and two men sprang from it and seized me.
One was the airscout Jones. He caught me by both arms and forced me backward. But the other leaped at my throat. It was David; and he would have strangled me, had not Jones pulled him away.
Then, to my vast relief, Elizabeth ran forward, interposing herself between us. “Arnold is not to blame!” she cried. “He tried to save me!”
It pulled me through the window-gap, and I swung far out above the Airscouts’ Fortress
David’s hands fell to his sides. The airscout caught me by the arms and pulled me toward an elevator entrance. He forced me into the cage, the others following, and we descended a few feet, emerging into a small, bare room with walls of unsquared stone.
Jones sent the elevator up and pulled the door of the shaft to.
“Now you can speak. You have five minutes to explain yourself,” he said. He pulled a Ray rod from his tunic and looked at David, who nodded.
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