The Dark Star by Robert W. Chambers (best fiction novels of all time TXT) 📖

find a congenial soul in this same Cossack whom we all call Alak.” She added maliciously: “His only logic is the impulse of the moment, and he is known as Prince Erlik among his familiars. Erlik was the Devil, you know––”

He was announced at that moment, and came marching in—a dark, handsome, wiry young man with winning black eyes and a little black moustache just shadowing his short upper lip—and a head shaped to contain the devil himself—the most reckless looking head, Neeland thought, that he ever had beheld in all his life.

But the young fellow’s frank smile was utterly irresistible, and his straight manner of facing one, and of looking directly into the eyes of the person he addressed in his almost too perfect English, won any listener immediately.

He bowed formally over Princess Naïa’s hand, turned squarely on Neeland when he was named to the American, and exchanged a firm clasp with him. Then, to the Princess:

“I am late? No? Fancy, Princess—that great booby, Izzet Bey, must stop me at the club, and I exceedingly pressed to dress and entirely out of humour with all Turks. ‘Eh bien, mon vieux!’ said he in his mincing manner of a nervous pelican, ‘they’re warming up the Balkan boilers with Austrian pine. But I hear 328 they’re full of snow.’ And I said to him: ‘Snow boils very nicely if the fire is sufficiently persistent!’ And I think Izzet Bey will find it so!”—with a quick laugh of explanation to Neeland: “He meant Russian snow, you see; and that boils beautifully if they keep on stoking the boiler with Austrian fuel.”

The Princess shrugged:

“What schoolboy repartée! Why did you answer him at all, Alak?”

“Well,” explained the attaché, “as I was due here at eight I hadn’t time to take him by the nose, had I?”

Rue Carew entered and went to the Princess to make amends:

“I’m so sorry to be late!”—turned to smile at Neeland, then offered her hand to the Russian. “How do you do, Prince Erlik?” she said with the careless and gay cordiality of old acquaintance. “I heard you say something about Colonel Izzet Bey’s nose as I came in.”

Captain Sengoun bowed over her slender white hand:

“The Mohammedan nose of Izzet Bey is an admirable bit of Oriental architecture, Miss Carew. Why should it surprise you to hear me extol its bizarre beauty?”

“Anyway,” said the girl, “I’m contented that you left devilry for revelry.” And, Marotte announcing dinner, she took the arm of Captain Sengoun as the Princess took Neeland’s.

Like all Russians and some Cossacks, Prince Alak ate and drank as though it were the most delightful experience in life; and he did it with a whole-souled heartiness and satisfaction that was flattering to any hostess and almost fascinating to anybody observing him.

His teeth were even and very white; his appetite 329 splendid: when he did his goblet the honour of noticing it at all, it was to drain it; when he resumed knife and fork he used them as gaily, as gracefully, and as thoroughly as he used his sabre on various occasions.

He had taken an instant liking to Neeland, who seemed entirely inclined to return it; and he talked a great deal to the American but with a nice division of attention for the two ladies on either side.

“You know, Alak,” said the Princess, “you need not torture yourself by trying to converse with discretion; because Mr. Neeland knows about many matters which concern us all.”

“Ah! That is delightful! And indeed I was already quite assured of Mr. Neeland’s intelligent sympathy in the present state of European affairs.”

“He’s done a little more than express sympathy,” remarked the Princess; and she gave a humorous outline of Neeland’s part in the affair of the olive-wood box.

“Fancy!” exclaimed Captain Sengoun. “That impudent canaille! Yes; I heard at the Embassy what happened to that accursed box this morning. Of course it is a misfortune, but as for me, personally, I don’t care––”

“It doesn’t happen to concern you personally, Prince Erlik,” said Princess Naïa dryly.

“No,” he admitted, unabashed by the snub, “it does not touch me. Cavalry cannot operate on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Therefore, God be thanked, I shall be elsewhere when the snow boils.”

Rue tuned to Neeland:

“His one idea of diplomacy and war is a thousand Kuban Cossacks at full speed.”

“And that is an excellent idea, is it not, Kazatchka?” 330 he said, smiling impudently at the Princess, who only laughed at the familiarity.

“I hope,” added Captain Sengoun, “that I may live to gallop through a few miles of diplomacy at full speed before they consign me to the Opolchina.” Turning to Neeland, “The reserve—the old man’s home, you know. God forbid!” And he drained his goblet and looked defiantly at Rue Carew.

“A Cossack is a Cossack,” said the Princess, “be he Terek or Kuban, Don or Astrachan, and they all know as much about diplomacy as Prince Erlik—or Izzet Bey’s nose.... James, you are unusually silent, dear friend. Are you regretting those papers?”

“It’s a pity,” he said. But he had not been thinking of the lost papers; Rue Carew’s beauty preoccupied him. The girl was in black, which made her skin dazzling, and reddened the chestnut colour of her hair.

Her superb young figure revealed an unsuspected loveliness where the snowy symmetry of neck and shoulders and arms was delicately accented by the filmy black of her gown.

He had never seen such a beautiful girl; she seemed more wonderful, more strange, more aloof than ever. And this was what preoccupied and entirely engaged his mind, and troubled it, so that his smile had a tendency to become indefinite and his conversation mechanical at times.

Captain Sengoun drained one more of numerous goblets; gazed sentimentally at the Princess, then with equal sentiment at Rue Carew.

“As for me,” he said, with a carelessly happy gesture toward the infinite, “plans are plans, and if they’re stolen, tant pis! But there are always Tartars in Tartary and Turks in Turkey. And, while there are, 331 there’s hope for a poor devil of a Cossack who wants to say a prayer in St. Sophia before he’s gathered to his ancestors.”

“Have any measures been taken at your Embassy to trace the plans?” asked Neeland of the Princess.

“Of course,” she said simply.

“Plans,” remarked Sengoun, “are not worth the tcherkeske of an honest Caucasian! A Khirgize pony knows more than any diplomat; and my magaika is better than both!”

“All the same,” said Rue Carew, “with those stolen plans in your Embassy, Prince Erlik, you might even gallop a sotnia of your Cossacks to the top of Achi-Baba.”

“By heaven! I’d like to try!” he exclaimed, his black eyes ablaze.

“There are dongas,” observed the Princess dryly.

“I know it. There are dongas every twenty yards; and Turkish gorse that would stop a charging bull! My answer is, mount! trot! gallop! and hurrah for Achi-Baba!”

“Very picturesque, Alak. But wouldn’t it be nicer to be able to come back again and tell us all about it?”

“As for that,” he said with his full-throated, engaging laugh, “no need to worry, Princess, for the newspapers would tell the story. What is this Gallipoli country, anyway, that makes our Chancellery wag its respected head and frown and whisper in corners and take little notes on its newly laundered cuffs?

“I know the European and Asiatic shores with their forts—Kilid Bahr, Chimilik, Kum Kale, Dardanos. I know what those Germans have been about with their barbed wire and mobile mortar batteries. What do we want of their plans, then––” 332

“Nothing, Prince Erlik!” said Rue, laughing. “It suffices that you be appointed adviser in general to his majesty the Czar.”

Sengoun laughed with all his might.

“And an excellent thing that would be, Miss Carew. What we need in Russia,” he added with a bow to the Princess, “are, first of all, more Kazatchkee, then myself to execute any commands with which my incomparable Princess might deign to honour me.”

“Then I command you to go and smoke cigarettes in the music-room and play some of your Cossack songs on the piano for Mr. Neeland until Miss Carew and I rejoin you,” said the Princess, rising.

At the door there was a moment of ceremony; then Sengoun, passing his arm through Neeland’s with boyish confidence that his quickly given friendship was welcome, sauntered off to the music-room where presently he was playing the piano and singing some of the entrancing songs of his own people in a voice that, cultivated, might have made a fortune for him:

“We are but horsemen,
And God is great.
We hunt on hill and fen
The fierce Kerait,
Naiman and Eighur,
Tartar and Khiounnou,
Leopard and Tiger
Flee at our view-halloo;
We are but horsemen
Cleansing the hill and fen
Where wild men hide—
Wild beasts abide,
Mongol and Baïaghod,
Turkoman, Taïdjigod,
Each in his den.
333 The skies are blue,
The plains are wide,
Over the fens the horsemen ride!”

Still echoing the wild air, and playing with both hands in spite of the lighted cigarette between his fingers, he glanced over his shoulder at Neeland:

“A very old, old song,” he explained, “made in the days of the great invasion when all the world was fighting anybody who would fight back. I made it into English. It’s quite nice, I think.”

His naïve pleasure in his own translation amused Neeland immensely, and he said that he considered it a fine piece of verse.

“Yes,” said Sengoun, “but you ought to hear a love song I made out of odd fragments I picked up here and there. I call it ‘Samarcand’; or rather ‘Samarcand Mahfouzeh,’ which means, ‘Samarcand the Well Guarded’:

“‘Outside my guarded door
Whose voice repeats my name?’
‘The voice thou hast heard before
Under the white moon’s flame!
And thy name is my song; and my song is ever the same!’
 
“‘How many warriors, dead,
Have sung the song you sing?
Some by an arrow were sped;
Some by a dagger’s sting.’
‘Like a bird in the night is my song—a bird on the wing!’
 
“‘Ahmed and Yucouf bled!
A dead king blocks my door!’
‘If thy halls and walls be red,
Shall Samarcand ask more?
Or my song shall cleanse thy house or my heart’s blood foul thy floor!’
334  
“‘Now hast thou conquered me!
Humbly thy captive, I.
My soul escapes to thee;
My body here must lie;
Ride!—with thy song, and my soul in thy arms; and let me die.’”

Sengoun, still playing, flung over his shoulder:

“A Tartar song from the Turcoman. I borrowed it and put new clothes on it. Nice, isn’t it?”

“Enchanting!” replied Neeland, laughing in spite of himself.

Rue Carew, with her snowy shoulders and red-gold hair, came drifting in, consigning them to their seats with a gesture, and giving them to understand that she had come to hear the singing.

So Sengoun continued his sketchy, haphazard recital, waving his cigarette now and then for emphasis, and conversing frequently over his shoulder while Rue Carew leaned on the piano and gravely watched his nimble fingers alternately punish and caress the keyboard.

After a little while the Princess Mistchenka came in saying that she had letters to write. They conversed, however, for nearly an hour before she rose, and Captain Sengoun gracefully accepted his congé.

“I’ll walk with you, if you like,” suggested Neeland.

“With pleasure, my dear fellow! The night is beautiful, and I am just beginning to wake up.”

“Ask Marotte to give you a key, then,” suggested the Princess, going. At the foot of the stairs, however, she paused to exchange a few words with Captain Sengoun in a low voice; and Neeland, returning with his latchkey, went over to where Rue stood by the lamplit table absently looking over an evening paper. 335

As he came up beside her, the girl lifted her beautiful, golden-grey eyes.

“Are you going out?”

“Yes, I thought I’d walk a bit with Captain Sengoun.”

“It’s rather a long distance to the Russian Embassy. Besides––” She hesitated, and he waited. She glanced absently over the paper for a moment, then, not raising her eyes: “I’m—I—the theft of that box today—perhaps my nerves have suffered a