The Flying Legion.
by George Allan England.
CHAPTER I
A SPIRIT CAGED
The room was strange as the man, himself, who dwelt there. It seemed, in a way, the outward expression of his inner personality. He had ordered it built from his own plans, to please a whim of his restless mind, on top of the gigantic skysc.r.a.per that formed part of his properties. Windows boldly fronted all four cardinal compa.s.s-points--huge, plate-gla.s.s windows that gave a view unequaled in its sweep and power.
The room seemed an eagle"s nest perched on the summit of a man-made crag. The Arabic name that he had given it--_Niss"rosh_--meant just that. Singular place indeed, well-harmonized with its master.
Through the westward windows, umbers and pearls of dying day, smudged across a smoky sky, now shadowed trophy-covered walls. This light, subdued and somber though it was, slowly fading, verging toward a night of May, disclosed unusual furnishings. It showed a heavy black table of some rare Oriental wood elaborately carved and inlaid with still rarer woods; a table covered with a prayer-rug, on which lay various books on aeronautics and kindred sciences, jostling works on Eastern travel, on theosophy, mysticism, exploration.
Maps and atlases added their note of research. At one end of the table stood a bronze faun"s head with open lips, with hand cupped at listening ear. Surely that head must have come from some buried art-find of the very long ago. The faint greenish patina that covered it could have been painted only by the hand of the greatest artist of them all, Time.
A book-case occupied the northern s.p.a.ce, between the windows. It, too, was crammed with scientific reports, oddments of out-of-the-way lore, and travels. But here a profusion of war-books and official doc.u.ments showed another bent of the owner"s mind. Over the book-case hung two German gasmasks. They seemed, in the half-dusk, to glower down through their round, empty eyeholes like sinister devil-fish awaiting prey.
The masks were flanked by rifles, bayonets, knives, maces, all bearing scars of battle. Above them, three fragments of Prussian battle-flags formed a kind of frieze, their color softened by the fading sunset, even as the fading of the dream of imperial glory had dulled and dimmed all that for which they had stood.
The southern wall of that strange room--that quiet room to which only a far, vague murmur of the city"s life whispered up, with faint blurs of steamer-whistles from the river--bore Turkish spoils of battle.
Here hung more rifles, there a Kurdish yataghan with two hand-grenades from Gallipoli, and a blood-red banner with a crescent and one star worked in gold thread. Aviator"s gauntlets draped the staff of the banner.
Along the eastern side of this eyrie a broad divan invited one to rest. Over it were suspended Austrian and Bulgarian captures--a lance with a blood-stiffened pennant, a cuira.s.s, entrenching tools, a steel helmet with an eloquent bullet-hole through the crown. Some few framed portraits of noted "aces" hung here and elsewhere, with two or three photographs of battle-planes. Three of the portraits were framed in symbolic black. Part of a smashed Taube propeller hung near.
As for the western side of _Niss"rosh_, this s.p.a.ce between the two broad windows that looked out over the light-spangled city, the Hudson and the Palisades, was occupied by a magnificent Mercator"s Projection of the world. This projection was heavily annotated with scores of comments penciled by a firm, virile hand. Lesser s.p.a.ces were occupied by maps of the campaigns in Mesopotamia and the Holy Land. One map, larger than any save the Mercator, showed the Arabian Peninsula. A bold question-mark had been impatiently flung into the great, blank stretch of the interior; a question-mark eager, impatient, challenging.
It was at this map that the master of _Niss"rosh_, the eagle"s nest, was peering as the curtain rises on our story. He was half reclining in a big, Chinese bamboo chair, with an att.i.tude of utter and disheartening boredom. His crossed legs were stretched out, one heel digging into the soft pile of the Tabreez rug. Muscular arms folded in an idleness that irked them with aching weariness, he sat there, brooding, motionless.
Everything about the man spelled energy at bay, forces rusting, ennui past telling. But force still dominated. Force showed in the close-cropped, black hair and the small ears set close to the head; in the corded throat and heavy jaws; in the well-muscled shoulders, sinewed hands, powerful legs. This man was forty-one years old, and looked thirty-five. Lines of chest and waist were those of the athlete. Still, suspicions of fat, of unwonted softness, had begun to invade those lines. Here was a splendid body, here was a dominating mind in process of going stale.
The face of the man was a mask of weariness of the soul, which kills so vastly more efficiently than weariness of the body. You could see that weariness in the tired frown of the black brows, the narrowing of the dark eyes, the downward tug of the lips. Wrinkles of stagnation had began to creep into forehead and cheeks--wrinkles that no amount of gymnasium, of club life, of careful shaving, of strict hygiene could banish.
Through the west windows the slowly changing hues of gray, of mulberry, and dull rose-pink blurred in the sky, cast softened lights upon those wrinkles, but could not hide them. They revealed sad emptiness of purpose. This man was tired unto death, if ever man were tired.
He yawned, sighed deeply, stretched out his hand and took up a bit of a model mechanism from the table, where it had lain with other fragments of apparatus. For a moment he peered at it; then he tossed it back again, and yawned a second time.
"Business!" he growled. ""Swapped my reputation for a song," eh?
Where"s my commission, now?"
He got up, clasped his hands behind him, and walked a few times up and down the heavy rug, his footfalls silent.
"The business could have gone on without me!" he added, bitterly.
"And, after all, what"s any business, compared to _life_?"
He yawned again, stretched up his arms, groaned and laughed with mockery:
"A little more money, maybe, when I don"t know what to do with what I"ve got already! A few more figures on a checkbook--and the heart dying in me!"
Then he relapsed into silence. Head down, hands thrust deep in pockets, he paced like a captured animal in bars. The bitterness of his spirit was wormwood. What meant, to him, the interests and pleasures of other men? Profit and loss, alcohol, tobacco, women--all alike bore him no message. Clubs, athletics, gambling--he grumbled something savage as his thoughts turned to such trivialities. And into his aquiline face came something the look of an eagle, trapped, there in that eagle"s nest of his.
Suddenly the Master of _Niss"rosh_ came to a decision. He returned, clapped his hands thrice, sharply, and waited. Almost at once a door opened at the southeast corner of the room--where the observatory connected with the stairway leading down to the Master"s apartment on the top floor of the building--and a vague figure of a man appeared.
The light was steadily fading, so that this man could by no means be clearly distinguished. But one could see that he wore clothing quite as conventional as his master"s. Still, no more than the Master did he appear one of life"s commonplaces. Lean, brown, dry, with a hawk-nose and glinting eyes, surely he had come from far, strange places.
"Rrisa!" the Master spoke sharply, flinging the man"s name at him with the exasperation of overtensed nerves.
"_M"alme?_" (Master?) replied the other.
"Bring the evening food and drink," commanded the Master, in excellent Arabic, guttural and elusive with strange hiatuses of breath.
Rrisa withdrew, salaaming. His master turned toward the western windows. There the white blankness of the map of Arabia seemed mocking him. The Master"s eyes grew hard; he raised his fist against the map, and smote it hard. Then once more he fell to pacing; and as he walked that weary s.p.a.ce, up and down, he muttered to himself with words we cannot understand.
After a certain time, Rrisa came silently back, sliding into the soft dusk of that room almost like a wraith. He bore a silver tray with a hook-nosed coffee-pot of chased metal. The cover of this coffee-pot rose into a tall, minaret-like spike. On the tray stood also a small cup having no handle; a dish of dates; a few wafers made of the Arabian cereal called _temmin_; and a little bowl of _khat_ leaves.
"_M"alme, al khat aja_" (the khat has come), said Rrisa.
He placed the tray on the table at his master"s side, and was about to withdraw when the other stayed him with raised hand.
"Tell me, Rrisa," he commanded, still speaking in Arabic, "where wert thou born? Show thou me, on that map."
The Arab hesitated a moment, squinting by the dim light that now had faded to purple dusk. Then he advanced a thin forefinger, and laid it on a spot that might have indicated perhaps three hundred miles southeast of Mecca. No name was written on the map, there.
"How dost thou name that place, Rrisa?" demanded the Master.
"I cannot say, Master," answered the Arab, very gravely. As he stood there facing the western afterglow, the profound impa.s.sivity of his expression--a look that seemed to scorn all this infidel civilization of an upstart race--grew deeper.
To nothing of it all did he owe allegiance, save to the Master himself--the Master who had saved him in the thick of the Gallipoli inferno. Captured by the Turks there, certain death had awaited him and shameful death, as a rebel against the Sublime Porte. The Master had rescued him, and taken thereby a scar that would go with him to the grave; but that, now, does not concern our tale. Only we say again that Rrisa"s life lay always in the hands of this man, to do with as he would.
None the less, Rrisa answered the question with a mere:
"Master, I cannot say."
"Thou knowest the name of the place where thou wast born?" demanded the Master, calmly, from where he sat by the table.
"_A_ (yes), _M"alme_, by the beard of M"hamed, I do!"
"Well, what is it?"
Rrisa shrugged his thin shoulders.
"A tent, a hut? A village, a town, a city?"
"A city, Master. A great city, indeed. But its name I may not tell you."
"The map, here, shows nothing, Rrisa. And of a surety, the makers of maps do not lie," the Master commented, and turned a little to pour the thick coffee. Its perfume rose with grateful fragrance on the air.