The Surakarta

Front matter

THE SURAKARTA

"You will not deny to me that you have the emerald?" Frontispiece. See Page 146

THE SURAKARTA

Mr. Hereford Entertains a Stranger from Java

THE SURAKARTA

I

MR. HEREFORD ENTERTAINS A STRANGER FROM JAVA

In appearance the offices which bore the name of the "Regan Estate—Wade Hereford, Administrator"—were only ordinary Chicago business offices. Business men, stenographers, clerks and boys, whose affairs took them past the neatly lettered doors of these offices, failed to differentiate them in any interesting way from those suites on either side.

Those whose affairs took them on the other side of the heavy doors noted nothing unusual. The suite by its location in the most desirable corner of an upper floor of one of Chicago's newest and tallest buildings, was removed almost entirely from the noises of the street. Heavy rugs stifled all sound of footsteps; the furniture, of massive design and deeply upholstered in leather, received or parted with a burden without a sound. Nothing in these rooms or in Hereford himself—imperturbable, carefully dressed, a little over thirty and member of all the city's best clubs—denoted how frequently, though at irregular and unforseen intervals, complications had been projected there from the furthest corners of the world to disturb the serenity of the office and of Hereford alike.

Wade Hereford—early in the thirty months since Matthew Regan, the packer, had left him sole executor of his estate—had learned to carry a minimum of one hundred thousand dollars subject to the immediate call of the only heir, Lorine.

More than once a demand for double this amount—additional to the regular monthly allowance—had tumbled out upon his desk, without warning, from the morning's mail. So long as these drafts upon him did not exceed in any twelve months the income from the estate, the executor had nothing to say. When they did Hereford had learned his second lesson—though not so promptly as his first—to protest in no more personal terms than:

Miss Lorine Regan, Peking—Mombasa, Cairo, Constantinople, or wherever she felt the need of money.

Dear Madam: The present value of the industrial stocks, bonds, real estate and other income-bearing principal property left you by your father is $8,540,000. This, invested at an average a trifle under seven per cent—for which all items will be sent you upon your request—bears income for this year of $597,000. Of this, a total of $536,000 has already been placed at your disposal. The balance of sixty-one thousand dollars—$61,000—is therefore all I am empowered to place to your immediate use, except in the event of any of those extraordinary exigencies provided for in your father's will.

There was nothing surprising, therefore, in her letter of this morning. Yet Hereford, having read with distinct uneasiness her curt notification to deposit one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to her check, put it aside unanswered.

Still more than that was due her. Its amount could be more than accounted for by preparation for another hunting party from Mombasa to Cairo; or by return of curiosity as to—and therefore the immediate and complete excavation of—the site of some early Assyrian city on whose mounds she might have lunched; or by another attempt—as in that one delirious month when the executor had learned that comment upon his ward's actions was forbidden—to break the bank of a fashionable European gambling place. Another turbine yacht would account for it; another private aeroplane plant, any one of a dozen more such caprices as these; though he knew, however, it would be none of these things which he called spe to mind, for he had learned thoroughly that his ward never repeated.

Yet it was not the certainty it would be something different that caused Hereford to frown now. It was the knowledge that this new caprice, whatever it might be, was evidently about to be carried out in his vicinity.

Hereford stared for many minutes over the city roofs, and slightly flushed as he comprehended that his ward, for the first time in his knowledge of her—which so far had been entirely by letter—had honored her source of income with a visit; for the hotel address to which he was to acknowledge receipt of her instructions was one in the city.

This proximity, with its promise of embarrassing complications for himself, made him anxious to learn her purpose in coming here. Whereas usually he held off and put to as much trouble as possible those coming to him on any business connected with his ward, he now instructed to have sent in at once the man whose card, engraved "James Annis," inscribed "Concerning Miss Lorine Regan," he had found upon his desk.

Old Matthew Regan—roughly powerful in mind and body—with the perspicacity that marked all he did, had chosen well the executor of his estate in favor of his daughter. On matters concerning her, impostors, swindlers and get-rich-quick individuals from the four quarters of the world invaded Hereford's office. The atmosphere of even the outer office chilled and discouraged them. Their carefully prepared stories began to disintegrate long before they had penetrated as far as Hereford himself. He, on his part, treated every stranger as an impostor until he had proved himself otherwise. Matthew Regan had known the world and his daughter both too well to select as his executor a man of pleasant and agreeable manners, but Hereford was a strong man who did things by direct methods. He had got so he could classify and frustrate scheming strangers as they entered his door.

But he could not classify the man who entered with a swinging step in answer to his summons. An American—sallow-skinned, lithe, with sun-bleached hair and brows—Hereford guessed he had spent many years away from the States. He saw by the careful grooming and new clothes that Annis had prosperous pockets now at least. He divined that Annis had spent more than a little of his life where one pre life itself only by alertness of mind and quickness of eye and hand.

The stranger took the seat Hereford had not offered him.

"I am on my way to New York from Java, Mr. Hereford," Annis explained. "I have been living in Java for the past six years. I was in Samarang when Miss Regan—who, I am told, is your ward—was there last year."

Hereford, looking steadily at him, said nothing.

"On the possibility that you have not been informed of the position into which Miss Regan put herself at that time I have dropped in to see you, as I believe—having observed what I have—is the duty of a gentleman."

"That is a phrase open to many construc Mr.—Annis." Hereford was studiously affronting.

"That2?"

"The duty of a gentleman."

If the man was, as he professed to be, an ally he failed to notice the insult; if he was an opponent he was worth heeding, for he did not flush. "I will hear what you have to say," Hereford decided promptly. "I am, as you seem to be informed, the executor of the late Matthew Regan's estate. My responsibility, however, is confined to financial affairs. His daughter was already of age when her father died. I am merely administrator of her estate. Miss Regan put herself into no position in Java regarding which she found it necessary to consult me as administrator."

"Then you have not heard of her engage to the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta?"

Hereford's eyes did not waver. The man might be merely trying to catch him. Who—he asked himself—was the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta?

"I thought so!" Annis nodded; he glanced round to see that the door through which he had entered was shut. "So you've really heard nothing at all of this?"

"You may assume so," Hereford granted unwillingly.

Annis smiled his satisfaction.

"Therefore you have had no reason particularly to investigate Javan society as yet. Am I right?"

"You mean I do not know who the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta is? Again you may assume so if you wish."

"I can tell you that much very briefly. Java, as of course you know, is one of the largest and it is by far the most populous and prosperous of the East Indies. It has a population of over thirty million Javanese proper, the Sudanese and the Madurese—all three brown men, of course, of Malay stock. Java soil is said to be the richest in the world, and before Java was taken over as a colony the native sultans were among the most luxurious and absolute rulers in the world. When the Dutch took over the island and began to govern it they had often to leave the native rulers alone. Gradually seventeen of the sultanates have been formed into what the Dutch call residencies, with a Dutch resident as ruler or adviser to the native ruler; but in two sultanates—those of Surakarta and Jokjakarta—the native sultans still govern under only the most formal supervision of the Dutch resident. The Soesoehoenan of Surakarta is one of these—the richest native ruler in Java, by far the most independent and powerful; most despotic and absolute in his sultanate, and by far the most interesting. He has no less than ten thousand servants in his palace and his palace walls are four miles about. He is an Oxford graduate of some six or seven years ago, I believe—that is, he is about thirty years old. He is an excellent oarsman, tennis and cricket player; and is also a most skillful and daring automobile driver. Before I left he was going in for aëronautics with a biplane and a monoplane."

"You're his ardent biographer, Mr. Annis."

"No; for I'm going to give you the reverse of his picture too. The last time I saw him he was taking part in a Mohammedan ceremony—in his native costume, which does not include trousers; and his harem now numbers upward of a hundred and fifty women—Malay, Hindu, European, black, white and black-and-tan."

"And you have dropped in to tell me that my ward, Miss Regan, has engaged to add herself to those?"

"Not at all; but she has engaged to marry him if he will give them up—including Alarna, his favorite and reigning wife; provided, also, he takes from Alarna and sends to Miss Regan the great emerald known as the Surakarta, as proof of it all. All of which he has done."

"I don't quite follow you now."

"I can't tell you everything from first hand, but I believe Miss Regan came to Java eight months ago?"

"You are asking me for information now."

"No; the exact date is of no importance. She was with a party of English—army people, I believe, who had just been to India. Most respectable people too—you understand, there was not even talk of a scandal about her."

Hereford put his hand briskly toward a bell.

Annis checked him.

"I understand—not even mention of the word scandal with that implication in connection with Miss Regan's name. Quite right, too, Mr. Hereford, since I understand she has always avoided scandal of that sort at least. They all went together to visit the Soesoehoenan. It seemed one of the men in the party knew him at Oxford. He entertained them all, I understand, in the most extravagant manner for a month or so. He, I have gathered from fair reports, at least interested Miss Regan. She shot with him, beat him at tennis, took him up and showed him how to volplane down in his machine. He seems to have dared her, I might say, to marry him. She agreed to do it if he would give up all his wives, including Alarna, and take from Alarna and—if he still wished her, Miss Regan, rather than all the rest after six months—send to her to keep absolutely the great Surakarta as his pledge. It is, as any lapidarist can tell you, the most remarkable and by far the largest and most valuable emerald in the world. It is, indeed, invaluable—clear, without flaw and, cut in perfect star contour, larger than a man's fist. But, more than its money value, it has represented for centuries the honor of the ruling family of Surakarta. It is a sort of palladium, the possession of which is the superstitious hold over the sultan's people. A pretender, possessing it, could soon overturn the Soesoehoenan and put himself on the throne. The sending of this stone to Miss Regan, therefore, is the most absolute pledge of his sincerity possible. In giving it to her he puts himself absolutely into her hands. If—as may be her plan—she keeps it in her possession at some bank or other safe place to which she may have access, at the first suspicion of disloyalty to her she need only give it to the sultan's cousin to seat him in the sultan's place, or turn it over to the Dutch for them to take from him his power; or she could ruin him in a dozen other ways. That is what the sending of the emerald means. And Miss Regan's receiving of it tomorrow means that she will marry him—will become the wife of this Malay, Mr. Hereford."

Hereford scrutinized him with narrowed eyes.

"The sending of this—receiving it—tomorrow?" he questioned. "What do you mean?"

The traveler, seeing that at last he had made his impression, struck the desk.

"I mean that the emerald is here—the Soesoehoenan's envoys have it here at this moment at the Hotel Tonty. Tomorrow morning they will deliver it to your ward; and she will take it and formally betroth herself to the Soesoehoenan—unless you prevent it."

"Of course you are quite disinterested in coming to tell me this—quite disinterested, Mr. Annis? They always are," Hereford said unpleasantly.

"I learned these facts in Java, as I said; and being on my way to New York I believed it only the part of a countryman of Miss Regan's to make sure that whoever was protecting her knew them too. I believed you might consider it your duty to interfere. If I have made a mistake and wasted my time I beg your pardon."

Hereford considered that a man living long among inferior and despised races—holding, perhaps, his memory of American women as an ideal—would undoubtedly act as Annis had just done.

"But if these are facts," he said uneasily, "why have I heard nothing of them? Less than this about Miss Regan has deeply interested the newspapers before now."

"The sultan, without doubt—if for considerations of safety alone—would conceal the fact that the suite he is sending here has with it the emerald. Miss Regan, perhaps, has too good a sense of a news sensation to allow anything to leak out prematurely."

Hereford's suspicions returned.

"You wish to leave me your address—or do you not?" he questioned caustically. "They sometimes leave an address—more often not."

"I intend to set out for New York this afternoon. If you wish I will send you my hotel from there."

He rose, waiting apparently for Hereford to rise too. The executor looked steadily at him and did not get up.

Hereford, as the other closed the door behind him, pushed a button.

"Mr. James Annis, who is just leaving here, expects to take a train this afternoon for New York," he directed. "I'd be glad to know for certain whether he does take that train. You understand? Be quick or you may lose sight of him!"

Nevertheless, for several minutes he sat scowling at the door through which Annis had gone, as though he expected the traveller to return—often other persons had pretended to leave in this way only to come back almost at once and betray the real motives in their stories by their demands for money. When fully five minutes had passed and no other sound had followed the double closing of the outer office door which had marked Annis' departure and that of the boy he had sent after him, Hereford swung his chair around uneasily.

Hereford of late had begun to flatter himself that in connection with Lorine Regan nothing could surprise him; but now he had been thoroughly surprised.

Plainly there were two things to be done immediately—a telephone call to the hotel his ward had given as her address, and another call to the Hotel Tonty, where the stranger had said the Javanese were staying. One of these told him that a party of Javanese gentlemen had registered late the evening before, about whom the management of the Hotel Tonty knew or would tell nothing; the other that Miss Regan had just arrived.

But it was quite impossible—considering the strained relations between himself and his ward—to go direct to Lorine with this fantastic story, of which he had no more evidence than the narrative of a total stranger. The mere mention of it, if there was no truth behind it at all, would be an insult which might destroy forever the influence, slight as it was, that he had been able to maintain over her.

Hereford went to the closet and got his hat.

The best thing obviously was a visit to Max Schimmel.

Max Schimmel

II

MAX SCHIMIMEL

Not many men knew enough, as did Hereford, to visit Max Schimmel when confronted by something that perplexed and bewildered them. Those who did found that to Max nothing was strange, very little was perplexing. If somewhere, sometime, he had not encountered the precise situation that disturbed his questioner he had seen some one else encounter and had helped some one else to overcome it.

Max occupied the second floor, which otherwise could not have been rented at all, of a two-story frame building belonging to the Regan estate. This frame building, fall into decay, was almost in the heart of the business district on property left unimproved by Hereford for business reasons. Besides the second floor, Max had the use of half the yard.

He was in this yard, which with carefully nurtured shrubs and vines he had converted into a garden, when Hereford found him. Beside him a stump-tailed Gila lizard in a little glass cage basked comfortably in the warm October sun, and at his feet a strange crimson-striped fish, which Hereford had not seen before, with long, featherlike fins streaked purple and crimson, flopped in a glass trough; but Max's attention was entirely absorbed by a tiny clay pot boasting one white sweet pea. He was measuring this sweet pea across and across with a fine wire scale so earnestly that he did not notice the entrance of his friend.

There was mystery about Max. Clerks, stenographers and business men often stopped their work to look down in perplexed curiosity from their high windows at him and his dwelling. They wondered who he was and what he did; but the bushy-haired little man, with a scarred, perpetually tanned face, ignored these looks. In his life nothing was definite since his birth in Schleswig-Holstein except his presence at Gravelotte, where he was lamed in his right knee. Exactly as in India and China Max had dwelt in the farthest inland and most inaccessible villages, as in Africa and Borneo he had disappeared in the most impenetrable jungles, so here in civilization he had elected to dwell where civilization was fully represented and men were found twelve thousand to the acre. Yet he seemed as unaware of the presence of these men as he was of Hereford, now that he stood beside him.

"Put it down, Max," Hereford directed. "I have something important to ask you."

Max only adjusted his scale more intently, recognizing the voice, but not turning his head.

"Ach! Imbortant!" he exclaimed. "It must be that some one is about to lose or to make money then; for that iss what beople here think iss imbortant. But what iss imbortant iss—this." He pointed to the sweet pea.

"Dangerous variety, Max?"

"Why not? Would it be imbossible to give to this sweet pea the poison of the Borgias? But then this pea would become an exception—therefore unimbortant. Wait but a minute now and I will tell you whether—if you had an ancestor with too long a shankbone, let us say, back in the time of Rameses—your children may be gawky with that same long shank; or whether—so far as now iss proved—our forevaters only so far back as Cleopatra can so determine our shanks. See, this which I measure we may call the shank of this flower; it iss one hundred and fifty generations of this flower back or three thousand human years—that only a single pea had this petal long. And look!"

"Well?"

"Opserve, my friend, from this sweet pea, if you are thinking of getting marriet, that your child may resemble any forevater for three thousand years."

"I am not thinking of getting married!" Hereford returned irritatedly.

Max turned with a bland smile. "Then what?"

"I came to ask you about emeralds, to get from you a list of the most precious emeralds in the world."

"The most brecious emerald in the world, my friend"—Max put the pot carefully down—"iss, beyont argument or doubt, the last little speck of green put by a man who loves ubon the finger of the lovet one."

"Then the next precious?"

"The next brecious would mean the largest, no doubt; and that—of course—iss the great Java emerald, the Surakarta. The next2"

"You need go no farther, Max."

"Ach!" Max said, with interest. "So it iss not about a list of emeralds you have come; but only about the great Surakarta?"

Hereford, looking carefully on both sides and under the bench where Max was sitting, sat down.

"That is true, Max. Where is it?"

"It iss in the tower of the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, my friend, where it has stayed six hundred years and will, perhaps, stay six hundred more in the steel box that was made that long ago to protect it. You will make no money out of the Surakarta, my friend. It iss not on the market to be sold; it iss not to be seen on exhibition even. Opserve a pretty story: Six hundred years ago there wass in that vertile island of Java a most cunning worker of metals. The Dutch had not yet come to the island, which was vertile then in brown men of intelligence as it iss vertile now in sugar and rice. This man could make statues of metal which, when one blew upon them, spoke words, as before that did the great stone statues of Egypt. He made faces out of steel which, when one pressed upon a lever, would change their exbression. So this man wass sent for by the Soesoehoenan that he might make a box which could be opened by no one who had not its secret; and in this box wass to be put the great Surakarta, which iss the sign of the sovereignty of Surakarta. While the Soesoehoenan holds that emerald no one can depose him; so it iss guarded as the heart of his power, and no one was to know the secret of the box but the Soesoehoenan and his favorite, so that in case the Soesoehoenan died the favorite still could open it. Then the man—this maker of metals—knowing what this meant, gafe a dinner to all his friends; and after the dinner he distributed to one and to another and gafe away all that he owned; and then he went and made the box; and after it wass finished, coming out, he was seized and strangled by order of the Soesoehoenan, as he had expected. Iss it not a bretty story?"

"And the emerald is all that they say of it, Max?"

"That, my friendt, I do not know; for I haf nefer seen it. But in Sumatra I met once a man who had seen it, and he said it iss not, but that there iss a small flaw in it. Whether that iss so or not iss something which I would like to know."

"I did not mean that, Max; I meant, the Javanese still—at least so I have been told—hold that strange superstition that the throne of Surakarta goes with the emerald?"

"To be sure. But in what iss that strange? What iss strange iss that the German William should be submitted to by all Germans as their ruler, when in broof he can show not efen an emerald!" Max lifted his chin in an argumentative manner. "An emerald iss at least an emerald; and when it iss the Surakarta it iss something more than an emerald. The man that hass that indeed hass something that is worth while."

The striped fish flopped with a loud splash in its glass trough, and Hereford frowned at the interruption to his thoughts. He felt now, with his irritation against his ward increased by his increased certainty, that it was imperative to see Lorine at once.

He got up and took leave of the little German.

Lorine

III

LORINE

Hereford hurried directly from Max to Lorine's hotel.

He was convinced now that behind all he had heard was an affair which, since it concerned the succession to a throne—if only a Malaysian throne—might indeed have involved his ward in some adventure more fantastically outrageous than all that had gone before.

Every few months, during the thirty in which he had been in charge of her affairs, Hereford had seen his ward's picture staring out at him from the newspapers, which gave generous space to her doings. Only a year before, upon the occasion of her starting the excavation of the Assyrian city, she had attained in the personal pages of one of the magazines the dignity of a careful fullpage halftone, with veil and sunshade, seated upon a camel. Before her father's sudden taking off, Hereford, then known only as banker to the firm but in reality closer in many ways than any other person to old Matthew Regan, had learned to look for the girl's face and figure, more especially in those Sunday papers which gave curious attention to the more extraordinary doings of Chicagoans abroad.

At that time, and even after her father's death he had found a sort of romantic interest in this undisciplined child who sped from corner to corner of the world merely at the dictates of her own caprice. But the events subsequent to his finding himself responsible for the actions of the girl had effaced this feeling, he thought, almost at once and fully.

As Lorine had been kept abroad by her father constantly from the time of Hereford's first association with him, he had never seen her. Once, after Matthew Regan's death, when business had called Hereford abroad, and again when affairs at home had made a holiday in Europe possible, he had offered to call upon her ostensibly to come to a more perfect understanding with her as to his own powers over her expenditures. Before then, however, through no fault of his own, his relations with her already had become strained and both times she had refused.

As an antagonist he had learned to respect her; for she was the only person in the world who had consistently thwarted and defeated him. But he recollected now, as he hurried toward her hotel, that, with all the surprising things she had done, she had never yet gone so far as to try to force her way into society; and he recalled all at once Matthew, her father,—militant and uncouth—with his head and neck of a triumphant bull and his vest spotted with dropped food. No doubt, he told himself, a Malaysian court, with its ten thousand half-clad attendants, might seem to her the easiest way to social distinction; and suddenly Hereford felt that now at last he knew her perfectly.

He was not in the least surprised, therefore, at the length of time she kept him waiting after he had sent up his card.

When finally he was ushered up he found a slender girl in a gray suit, with an abun of dark hair, busily writing at a desk. She occupied in the rather large room the only chair, though marks upon the heavy hotel carpet here and there showed where other chairs just now had stood. He reddened with annoyance at this obvious attempt to put him at a disadvantage. He crossed, pushed open determinedly the door of an inner room, seized a chair and set it near the desk.

Then for the first time she looked up.

Her gray-blue eyes maliciously and audaciously flashed at him and the blood glowed pink under her clear white skin. "Why, she is beautiful!" he thought in amazement, for her published pictures had shown her no more than pretty. Startled at finding her so different from what he had expected, he re standing with his hand on the back of the chair.

"After carrying that chair so far you might at least sit down," she offered. She seemed trying not to laugh.

He dropped into the chair.

He was trying unavailingly to reconcile her with his expectations of a flighty, undisciplined child. She was not a child, but a young and bewitching woman whose face showed the determination and tenacity, as the flash of her brilliant eyes showed the daring, of old Matthew Regan—but of Matthew Regan refined, cultured, self-disciplined by contact with many kinds of people; for he saw that to any one other than himself she would have appeared a person of graceful tact and, no matter where it might have been acquired, good breeding.

"So you are Mr. Hereford," she stated, "and—you are not bald?"

"You expected me to be bald?" he asked dryly.

"Just as certainly as your letters to me have shown that you suspected me of being blondined. May I ask to what I owe the honor of this visit?"

"It could have no excuse except business," he retorted curtly.

"Have I overdrawn so much as all that?" A smile hovered upon her lips; her skirts took the delicate outline of her body as she turned slightly.