The Mating of the Blades

Front matter

THE MATING OF THE BLADES

THE MATING OF THE BLADES

By

Chapter 1

THE MATING OF THE BLADES

CHAPTER I

A prologue—yet quite necessary to the tale—switching incongruously and illogically from the heart of Asia to the gray heart of London Town. Also introducing a dead Ameer, two oily, shuffling Babus out of Bengal, and a sandy-haired gentleman who likes the view of Poultney's Inn.

Thus, on an auspicious day in the dark half of the sacred month of Dhu'l-Hijja, did they bear to his last resting-place Syyed Mazud Mirza Ahmet Nazredeen el-Arabi el-Husseinyieh Kajar Gengizkhani, Ameer of Tamerlanistan and thirty-ninth of his dynasty, while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while the conches brayed and the tomtoms sobbed and reed pipes shrieked, while white robed, green turbaned Moslem priests chanted the liturgy, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the lapis blue sky in thick, wispy streamers and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud that lit up the palace and told to all Central Asia that the last male member of the Gengizkhani family—Zi'l-Ullah, “Shadow of Allah,” was their arrogant, hereditary title—had gone to join the spirits of his kinsmen in the seventh hall of Mohammed's paradise.

Out of the palace, that crowned the basalt hillside with turrets and bartizans and bell-shaped domes and swung down into the dip of the valley with an avalanche of bold masonry, they carried the dead Ameer; through the western gate, a crumbling marble structure, incrusted with symbolistic figures and archaic terra-cotta medallions, and topped by a lacy, fretted lotus-bud molding; through the maze of the town, with its crooked streets, its low, white houses, its cool gardens ablaze with peach and almond and scarlet flowering peepul trees; through the main bazaar that stretched like a Suruk rug dimmed by the Hand of Time into smoky purple and dull orange; on toward the river where the young sun had crumpled the morning mists into torn gauze veils.

Bolt upright, as during life, the corpse sat on a chair of state that spread up and out like the tail of a peacock. He was attired in his most splendid costume: the arms encircled by jeweled bracelets, shimmering necklaces of pearls and garnets and moonstones and yellow Poonah diamonds hanging to the waist shawl, a huge, carved emerald falling like a drop of green fire from the small, twisted turban, the face painted and powdered, the pointed beard care fully curled and dyed a vivid blue with indigo, between his feet his favorite kalian waterpipe, an immense affair of iron, inlaid with gold arabesques and studded with uncut rubies.

Almost grim, by contrast, was the naked, straight, six-foot blade which lay across his knees. Simple, it was, blue-gray, without engravings or ornaments of any sort.

All the dignitaries of the land were there to speed his soul.

There was Tagi Khan, Master of Horse, in purple silk, his wicked, shriveled old face topped ludicrously by a coquettish turban in pale cerise, beard and finger nails dyed a bright crimson with henna; Koom Khan, the sipar salar—the commander-in-chief, who had left behind his silver-tipped staff of office and was holding in his bony, brown right hand a large cluster of those dark violet lilies which the Persians call First Born Buds, to put upon the grave; the Sheik-ul-Islam, in green silk from head to foot, a miniature Koran bound in red and silver Bokharan leather stuck in his waist shawl; Gulabian, the Armenian treasurer, in sober black, fur capped; Tugluk Khan, the court architect, thinking morosely that his last work—the mausoleum of olive-veined Yezd marble which would house the Ameer by the side of his ancestors—was done.

Came Nedjif Hassan Khan, governor of the eastern marches, whispering to his twin brother and worst enemy, the sheik Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, governor of the western marches; came pipe bearer and slipper bearer and fan bearer; the palace eunuchs, huge, paunchy, plum-colored Nubians, arrogant, sneering; the chief executioner in motley red and black; and many, many others, with bowed head and dragging feet, in token of mourning.

Too, envoys from the neighboring lands; from the East, the Ameer of the Afghans, until thirty years earlier the hereditary foes of the Tamerlanis, had sent his youngest brother, Nasrullah Nadir Khan el-Durani; Persia was fittingly represented by lisping, mincing Mirza Markar Khan, who ogled the women, old and young, veiled and unveiled, as the cortège passed through the bazaar; the stony, cruel North had sent Bokharan chief, Khivan noble, and Turkoman grandee; while, from the South, Sir Craven Elphinstone, C.B., G.C.S.I, deputy resident at the court of Kashmere, slightly self-conscious, slightly nostalgic amidst the thousands of Asiatics, had crossed the Himalayas to tender the condolences of the Raj, the British-Indian government.

Everybody was there, except the late king's only child, the Princess Aziza Nurmahal who, according to the ancient custom, was sitting alone in the tower room of the palace harem, mumbling endless prayers and clicking off the ninety-nine holy names of Allah on her amber rosary; and the Ameer's best, oldest friend and prime minister, Hajji Akhbar Khan, on whom, a year before his death, he had conferred the honorable title of Itizad el-Dowleh—“Grandeur of the State.”

The cortège passed on, out to the willow fringed banks of the Ghulan River that lay across the mauve and rose mosaic of the town like a ribbon of watered silk.

River of grim tragedies!

River of sinister reputations; so sinister that there was not a Tamerlani who ever, knowingly, allowed a drop of it to pass his lips!

River which, for centuries, had been the grave of the thousands of Tamerlanis and raiding Afghans massacred in the narrow streets of the city or slain in fierce combats outside its brown, bastioned walls. Sorrowing widows, disgraced courtiers, vanquished pretenders, and fanatical dervishes had sought the solace of oblivion beneath its placid surface. Faithless wives and dancing girls had been hurled into its depths from a nearby tower that had been erected centuries before and for a reason known to but few had always been called “The Englishman's Boast."

On the river's farther bank stood the mausoleum.

And there they buried the last male member of the Gengizkhani family, while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while the conches brayed and the tomtoms sobbed, while the Princess Aziza Nurmahal cried her heart out, and while, in an opium shop near the bazaar of the mutton butchers on the northern outskirts of the town, the Babu Bansi, a typical Bengali from his round, greasy, chocolate-brown face to his openwork white socks, patent leather pumps, and striped cotton umbrella, bent over the prone form of his countryman, the Babu Chandra.

He made sure that the latter had succumbed completely to the bland, philosophic poppy drug, pressed half a golden toman into the grimy, much beringed fingers of the dancing girl who had filled and refilled the other's opium pipe and, if the truth be told, had made assurance doubly sure by doctoring the sizzling, acrid cubes with asclepias juice and dawamesk-hashish, slipped his hand into the unconscious man's waist shawl, brought out a key, and flitted into the street like an obese and nervous shadow.

As fast as his wobbly calves would let him, he ran to the office of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company of which his countryman was manager, clerk, despatcher, messenger, and factotum in general, opened the door with the stolen key, and busied himself with the telegraph board for half an hour.

Click-clack-clicketty-clack went his nimble fingers, sending a triumphant message across land and sea and land again.

After which, from a mysterious hiding-place about his stout person, he drew a sharp-edged hatchet and smashed the delicate telegraph instruments into a chaotic mass of wooden splinters and twisted copper wires.

Six hours and twenty minutes later, in a dingy, cobwebby office on the top floor of an architectural infamy on Upper Thames Street, just beyond the Fishmongers Hall, in the reeking heart of the City of London, a short, stocky, blue-eyed, sandy-haired man stepped away from the fly-specked window where he had been admiring the deceptively romantic outlines of Poultney's Inn.

“Half a jiff, old cockywax!" he called in answer to the insistent knocking at the door, opened it, and admitted a red-faced, red-capped, impudent messenger boy.

"Cyble, sir,” said the latter, “for—right-oh!—party by name of Gloops!”

“Right you are, young fellow-my-lad. That's our cable address. Hand it over. What you waitin' for? Eh? Tip? Chase yourself!”

“Aw—chyse yer own ruddy self!”

“Out you go!”

And the messenger boy made a hurried and undignified exit propelled by a square-toed, number nine and a quarter blucher whose owner the next second opened the cablegram.

“Gloops, London, England,” he read; and the message continued, in a typical Babu jumble of mixed metaphors and martyrized slang:

“Regret to report old Ameer jolly well popped underground. But ripping old silver lining to proverbial thunderstorm. Have discovered bloody cinch of pinching whole bally swag if Gloops uses gray matter. Do not cable here as have smashed expensive instruments into smithereens and cocked hat to annoy and harass the competition. Cable instead to Teheran using code. Am hot-legging it there like a sizzling whirlwind. Beg to repeat that collaring of swag is no end of ripping old cinch. Am writing particulars. Tell Gloops meanwhile should look up Burke's Peerage find bally old nobility family whose escutcheon is double headed lion and establish with them jolly old social relations.

“(Signed) Bansi.”

“My sainted grandaunt Priscilla Mary Jane!” murmured the sandy-haired man. “The whole swag! My word! Won't the guv'nor be pleased though! But what in the name of the three-cornered dooce does that Bansi lad mean by his allusion to Burke's Peerage? Well—I fancy the guv'nor will know.”

And he lit a rank woodbine cigarette and resumed the inspiring study of Poultney's Inn, drumming loudly, at rhythmic intervals, on the window pane.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

Giving an intimate but not indelicate “close-up” of an Oriental princess with eyes as black as grief and lips crimson as a fresh sword wound. There is furthermore mysterious talk of the Mating of Blades.

“Heavenborn!” wheezed the Babu Chandra, squinting through opium-reddened eyes. “Seventy-seven times seventy-seven bundles of indignity, injustice, and evil abuse have been heaped upon my head! A scoundrel of unmentionable ancestry, limited understanding, degenerate soul, and most ungainly body has robbed me of my substance! I appeal to the Heavenborn, the Protector of the Weak and the Pitiful!”—and he bowed before the Princess Aziza Nurmahal, clasping his pudgy hands across his pudgy stomach.

She looked at him, undecided what to say. Then her eyes swept about the audience hall where the dignitaries of the palace, from the commander-in-chief to the executioner, were squatting on mats, attended by servants who fanned them with silver-handled yak tails. Directly at her feet crouched her old nurse, Ayesha Zemzem, a Bakhtiari hill woman from the western wilds; lean she was and angular and brown as a berry, with an uptilted chin that rose defiantly to meet the sardonic lower lip, an immense beak of a nose, and eyes sharp as needle points.

The princess sighed.

Seated in the glittering, chilly depth of the great peacock throne that spread above her tiny, oval face with a barbaric blaze of emeralds and pearls and rubies and star sapphires, with her narrow, diminutive hand nervously clutching a scepter topped by an immense blue diamond known as the “Sea of Light,” with that little soft vagueness about her cherry lips and her eyes like black wells beneath the hooded lids, she looked childish, appealing, rather pathetic. There is something sinister in the relentlessness in which inheritance may force people into a position they are not framed to fill, thrusting power into their hands and judgments into their mouths, whether they desire it or not.

Thus with Aziza Nurmahal.

The peacock throne and the autocratic power which it embodied were meant for men of crunching, clouting, merciless strength of mind and body; men like her father, who had ruled his turbulent subjects with an iron, rather saturnine hand and with the loyal help of his old prime minister, Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh.

But the former was dead while the latter had left the country on a mysterious mission a day after Hakem Ali, the court physician, had decided that there was no hope for his master's life. And already intrigue was raising its flat head, was whispering, craftily, crookedly, in palace and bazaar and behind the curtains of the harems.

It had begun with the Master of Horse, Tagi Khan, openly accusing Gulabian, the Armenian treasurer, of having embezzled twenty thousand gold coins, which he had spent upon a nautch girl from the south. The Armenian had given the reply discourteous by producing three witnesses who swore upon the Koran that the shoe pressed on the other foot, that it was Tagi Khan who had stolen the money and imported the nautch from Kashmere, and that the latter had merely asked the Armenian for protection because the other, in a drunken fit, had threatened to split her pretty little nose with a dagger. At once the palace had divided into camps. Lies and calumnies had run like powder under spark. The outer courtyard had witnessed a murderous encounter with bucklers and naked blades between the twin brothers, who were respectively governors of the eastern and the western marches. The princess, not knowing if she should believe the party of Tagi Khan or that of Gulabian, was being caught between the upper and nether millstone, and, finally, a few days earlier, Koom Khan, the commander-in-chief, had approached her with the arrogant suggestion that, since she seemed not strong enough to rule, she should appoint him Firman Firma—Decreer of Decrees—regent, in other words.

But her pride had rebelled. The ancient Gengizkhani blood had screamed in her veins. Cutting insults ringing in his ears, she had sent Koom Khan from her presence—and to-day, in all that motley assembly of courtiers, there was not one whom she dared trust.

“Heavenborn!” the Babu commenced again.

She bit her lip. She blushed.

“I—I …”

She stammered, slurred, stopped; and a faint, withering snicker ran from sneering lip to sneering lip. Beards dyed blue with indigo and red with henna wagged and mocked. Fingers ablaze with precious stones opened and shut like the sticks of a fan to show the futility of all created things, but chiefly of woman. The Sheik-ul-Islam chanted a sonorous “Alhamdulillah!” and lifted his hands to heaven in a Pharisee gesture, as if to ask Allah to grant him patience: all signs which encouraged the Babu Chandra who ordinarily, being a Babu, would have walked softly and talked yet more softly in a gathering of Moslems.

He unclasped his pudgy hands from across his stomach, and stood up straight. There was now neither whine nor whimper in his voice as, very much after the manner of a latter-day, berry brown Robespierre, he addressed the princess:

“I demand justice! Here, in thy town, O Aziza Nurmahal, was I drugged, by a shameless dancing girl and by one Bansi; may this and that and especially this happen to him! For a week every day they drugged my little pipe of opium which I am forced to smoke because my spleen is yellow with a very much devouring sickness. When finally I was myself again, I discovered that Bansi had stolen the key to my office”—which was the truth—“and also one hundred and seventy rupees, five annas in Indian money and sixteen golden Persian tomans”—which was a lie. “Furthermore, he has smashed all the so expensive instruments of the Anglo-Indian Cable Company of which I am the deservedly trusted servant. I demand justice, Heavenborn!”

Aziza Nurmahal knew exactly what her father would have done under the same circumstances: just a gesture and a word to the executioner to give “one hundred and fifteen sticks to this pig of an infidel Babu who dares raise his voice in the presence of his betters.” For he had been a rough man whose entire philosophy of government had been a rough fact reduced to yet rougher order and who had always surrendered completely to the gods of his enormous, pagan resolution. She, on the other hand, had been taken direct from the to the throne room. She had not yet learned how to bury the poetry and the enthusiasms of her soft youth beneath the stony drag and smother of life.

She felt the contemptuous enmity of the crowd.

Again she stammered. Again there was a ripple of laughter and whispered, malign words; the Sheik-ul-Islam quoting with pontifical unction that power without wisdom was like a cloud without rain, Gulabian advancing artlessly that it is impossible to clap with one hand alone, and the governor of the eastern marches pleasantly completing the circle of Oriental metaphors by mentioning that some people were on horseback—while their brains walked on foot.

And then, suddenly, while the little princess eyes dimmed with welling tears, the old nurse rose and pointed a crooked, withered thumb at Chandra.

“Thou art a Babu,” she said in an even, passionless voice, “and tell me: who would believe a Babu—who would keep meat on trust with a jackal?”

The next moment, while the Babu collapsed into an obese heap, she faced the commander-in-chief, causing the laughter that had bubbled to his lips to choke out in a surprised, ludicrous ululation.

“And, as to thee, remember that the mules friendship is a kick—and that thou art a mule, while thou”—her inexorable thumb stabbing toward the governor of the eastern marches who was trying to hide behind his twin brother—“shouldst consider that, the dinner over, an ungrateful dog values not the spoon, that, with the Ameer dead, thou hast forgotten how he picked thee, a leprous and most disgusting child, from the fetid slime of the bazaar gutter and raised thee to a high seat of dignity!

“As to thee,” confronting the Armenian, “O thou cursed borrower of half-rupees, observe that a benefit conferred on an ingrate is a line written in water, while thou”—indicating the Sheik-ul-Islam—“wouldst do well to ponder over the Afghan saying that it is as impossible to make a priest speak the truth as to cover a kettledrum with the skin of a mouse!

“Away, all of ye! Out of the presence of the Heavenborn, O ye great cockroaches! Ye fathers of bad smells! Ye sons of noseless mothers! Out—spawn of much filth! Out—before I, a meek and defenseless woman …”

They did not wait to hear the rest of her threat. The Babu leading, the Sheik-ul-Islam bringing up the rear in undignified hurry, his sacerdotal robe standing out like a flag, they ran from the room, stumbling over each other, while Ayesha Zemzem, turning to console her mistress, found that the latter had burst into peals of laughter, rocking to and fro in an abandon of mirth.

“Ahee! Ahoo!” she laughed. “Did not the commander-in-chief tell me that Tamerlanistan needed a strong hand and a strong mind to rule my turbulent subjects? He was right—by Allah and by Allah! And it is thou who shalt be Firman Firma—Decreer of Decrees! It is thou who shalt be prime minister while Hajji Akhbar is away!”

And thus it happened that, a day or two later, in full durbar, the princess announced that a rough woman from the hills would hereafter be regent and that she should be addressed by the honorable title of Zil-i-Sultana, “Shadow of the Queen.” Nor, which is interesting to consider, was there very much surprise in the bazaars. For, since time immemorial, have the autocrats of Asia maintained the democratic principle that ability is the only qualification for the highest services; have they stooped among the crowd, clutched a common soldier, a slipper bearer, a tobacconist, a renegade, even a slave, and given him limitless power, absolutely disregarding all the barriers of birth and cultivation and asking of him nothing but success.

Thus it was Ayesha Zemzem who shared the princess' peacock throne when, shortly afterwards, Babu Chandra had been granted another audience.

This time he spoke softly. He did not mention the indignities which his fellow countryman had heaped upon him nor did he mention justice.

“Heavenborn,” he began; then, addressing the nurse who was looking upon him with a chilly, unpropitious eye, “and thou, O Shadow of the Heaven- born! I have the welfare of Tamerlanistan at heart …”

“Aughrr!” grunted Ayesha Zemzem, after the manner of an indignant camel. “I know, O baseborn! At seventeen per cent compound interest a minute, and a mortgage on the cow and the unborn calf!”

“No—no—by the Holy Trimurti!” stammered Babu Chandra. “I am a friend of this land—a friend of the Gengizkhani!”

“Right!” came the cutting rejoinder, “and it has indeed been said that he who has a Babu for a friend needs no enemy. Leave this room. We like not thy fat and indecent face.”

“But—” said the Babu.

“But—what, fat toad?”

“I came here on business!”

“Business? Dost thou want to buy or to sell?”

“Neither the one nor the other. I want to—give!”

For the first time, the princess opened her mouth.

“Give?” she asked, with a flash of even white teeth and a glint of merriment in her black eyes. “Who ever heard of a Bengali giving aught except false measure?”

“Rightly spoken!” chimed in the nurse. “Can a Babu be generous? Can a frog catch cold?”

But, nowise daunted by the avalanche of contumacious metaphors, Chandra continued that he had friends, rich and generous sahebs, who were anxious to pour gold into the land as one pours melted butter on rice.

“Millions and millions of golden tomans will they give to thee, O Aziza Nurmahal. They will irrigate the dry lands. They will bore for oil. They will develop coal and copper and ruby mines. They will cause the fruit orchards to yield ten times what they are yielding now. They will make all thy subjects rich and prosperous. All they want in return for such incredible generosity is”—he used the one English word known throughout Asia—“a concession!”

“Perhaps—” began the old nurse, an eager, greedy light in her eyes.

But the princess silenced her with a gesture and turned to Chandra.

“It is useless, O Babu-jee,” she said. “Often, during my father's life-time, didst thou approach him with the same words. I know. I was behind the zenana curtains, and listened. Thy countryman, the Babu Bansi, came to him with the same message …”

“Bansi is a liar! He is a …”

“Thou shouldst hear what he says about thee!” chuckled the nurse.

“Never mind,” the princess went on. “My father was always opposed to the sahebs and”—she, too, used the English word—“the concessions which they demand in payment of their shining generosity. He used to say that a concession means money—but that, never, never, does it mean happiness—to us, the people of Asia. For—and these, too, are my father's words—with every pound of gold do the sahebs bring three pounds of whiskey and strife and disease and unhappiness. I shall do as my father has done—until Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh, returns from the far places. Then he, being wise and old and loyal, shall decide. The audience is ended, O Babu-jee!”

“If only the Hajji would return!” she said that night to her old nurse.

“If only he would return—soon, soon!” she sobbed, a week or two later, when news had come that the governor of the eastern marches had returned to his provincial capital and was suspected of intrigues with the Ameer of the Afghans, while his twin brother, the governor of the western marches, was said to be hand in glove with a band of Persian marauders who were plundering the caravans going to Tamerlanistan.

“If only he would return!”

The words choked in her throat, and Ayesha Zemzem folded her in her withered old arms.

“Do not give wings to grief, little piece of my soul,” she crooned. “It flies swiftly without them. Remember the words of the Koran that it is the dust and grime which purify the great soul. Remember, too, the ancient prophecy of thy clan!”

“Yes!” said the princess. “I remember.”

From a taboret, she took the straight, simple sword that had rested across the knees of the dead Ameer during the funeral procession. Her narrow, white hand gripped the hilt.

“The old prophecy!” she whispered. “Out of the West he will come to save Tamerlanistan! Twin brother to the Gengizkhani through the mating of blades!”

She stepped to the window and looked out to where, above a sunset of somber, crushed pink, the gathering night was wrapping palace and town in her trailing cloak of black, shot with golden stars.

“Out of the West!”

And it seemed as if the West had heard, was giving answer.

A whisper seemed to come from very far, from beyond the sunset, suffusing her soul with a great sorrow and, too, a great hope and promise.

And so she stood there for a long time, listening to the silent whisper, looking out into the West, until the sun died in a sickly haze of coppery brown—decayed, it seemed, like the sun on the Day of Judgment—and the moon came up, stabbed on the outer horns of the world, dispassionate, calm, indifferent to the heart of man.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

Introducing the hero of this veracious tale, also his father, his brother, and a man whose really-truly name is Preserved Higgins. A sordid note is struck.

“Yes, m'lud,” replied Tomps, the butler, with a certain quaking complacency.

“I know it's a bit rough,” continued the old Earl of Dealle out of the depths of his armchair whose upholstery had seen better days. He leaned forward a little and lowered his, voice. His keen, wrinkled, rather wicked old face was in strange contrast with his homespun Saxon name: the lips thin, the cheek bones high, the. nose hawkish, exaggerated, and with flaring, nervous nostrils, the eyes beady and black, and the complexion suffused with, a golden-brown tinge.

“Rather rougher on you than on me,” he went on. “For I have only to eat with the creature while you have to wait on him, what? But—well—the creature has money, frightful, vulgar heaps of money, and my agent writes me he's willing to plop down a stiffish lot of the ready for the proper sort o' country estate, with ancestral portraits and ancestral defective plumbing and ancestral family spook all complete.”

“I understand, m'lud.”

“You jolly well ought to, Tomps. For if the creature rents Dealle Castle, there's a corkin' chance that I'll pay you the two years' wages I owe you.”

“Thank you, m'lud.”

“Therefore, treat him as if he were the Double Duchess—God bless her!—herself, even though his name is … I say, Tomps, what is the bounder's name?”

“Preserved Higgins, m'lud!”

The earl collapsed.

“Gracious me!” he exclaimed.

And from beneath his bushy white eyebrows he stole a glance at the possessor of the extraordinary name who was playing poker with two other men, the earl's sons by every last sign of physiognomy, in a corner of the vast, funereal, threadbare Tudor hall that gave on the sweet, yellow Sussex Downs, with a distant view of the sea that sparkled like a floor of emeralds. In back of the castle, toward Lewes and the Brighton & South Coast Railway, stretched thirty odd thousand acres of mixed farm and park land—mortgaged to the last brick, the last thatch, the last Tree of Heaven, the last, moss covered all-the-year-round—which, to quote the earl, had been in the possession of his family, the Wades of Dealle, “long before the Conqueror stuck his ugly Norman nose across the Channel.”

Last night Mr. Preserved Higgins had motored down from his palatial stucco monstrosity in London's Mayfair, with a letter from Redder, his lordship's agent, to “'ave a look at the plyce. That's my w'y o' doin' business. I looks, I tykes my choice, and I p'ys my tin, wot?”

Mr. Preserved Higgins was a remarkable man in more ways than one. Of course he was a self-made man. Everybody is, these days. Of course He dropped his h’ches. Everybody does, these days.

Born not far from Oxford Street, in a particularly odorous alley, once known as Hog Lane, which had given the late Mr. Hogarth a great deal of material for his scathing drawings, his early recollections had something to do with a pimply-faced, immensely stout woman who had called him “yer bleedin' little darlin' hynger” in moments of alcoholic tenderness; to give him clouts on the side of the head when the barmaid over at the “Rose and Elephant” had put too much gin in her good-morning half pint of “swipes.” His reputed father had been a sardonic navvy who had given him his Christian name of Preserved in a riotous mood because every one of his many other children had died a week or two after they had opened their lungs to the greasy soot of Hog Lane. Fate, kindly or otherwise, had preserved him, and the name had turned out to be singularly appropriate.

For, running away from home and board school at the ripe age of twelve and sailing before the mast to the Azores, afterwards to South Africa, he had arrived at the latter place at the high tide of the De-Beers diamond boom. Promptly he had deserted, had joined the South African Argonauts who pushed north to the , and, to believe certain tales that were rampant in Lombard and Threadneedle and Bishops- gate Streets, had laid the foundations of his vast for tune by the nefarious process called I. D. B., “illicit diamond buying” from thieving Kaffirs and Cape boys who worked in the Kimberley fields.

Since then he had preserved and caused to grow and multiply every farthing that had ever come his way. Everything he touched seemed to turn into gold. To-day he was a millionaire in pounds sterling, with a palace in the Mayfair, a steam yacht in the Solent, a game preserve in Scotland, a trout stream in Norway, a shiny, white, flower-bordered villa on the Riviera, a moor in Yorkshire, a flat in Paris, and with financial interests that reached from Chicago to Algiers, from Kamchatka to Timbuktu, from Spitzbergen to the Falklands. “Land Development” was the slogan on his letter head; and there was a chance that, at the next list of royal birthday honors, if the Conservatives to whose party fund he was a generous contributor continued in power, he would become Sir Preserved Higgins, Baronet.