by Talbot Mundy
“I’d like to see that,” I suggested.
“Mr. Ramsden, that is presumption. Among the Israelites none was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies. You must attain to the level of high-priesthood before it would be even safe to show you what our initiate found. That initiate of ours was led to find the gold plates through great self-abnegation and sincerity; and none can get the right to see what he found, in any other way.”
“Was his name Gulad?” I asked her, and she looked startled, but recovered instantly.
“Yes,” she said; “his name was Gulad.”
“Mameluke Gulad?”
“Yes. But he has taken the name of Moses. That is the prerogative, and in fact the duty of all initiates.”
“I’d like to see him,” I said. “Is he in New York?”
She paused a long time before answering that. Finally she lied by innuendo.
“No,” she said, “you can’t possibly see him at present.”
“The janitor told me that he is in your apartment now.”
“That janitor!” She smiled, but looked hideously angry — then fell back on flattery.
“Mr. Ramsden,” she said at last, “I told you that those who understand the Law of Moses attain to more than the usual measure of discernment. It is clear to me that you are no ordinary man. Whether you are destined to be one of us or not, I do not know, but I feel impelled to grant your request. Honesty is a key that opens doors.”
She pressed an electric button, and the door was opened by the meek man of sixty, who smiled like a verger viewing a bishop, at close quarters. She tossed him her order, and in another minute in came Gulad, the meek individual closing the door behind him silently.
“Moses, this is Mr. Ramsden. He has expressed a strong desire to see you.”
Gulad-Moses looked irritated. He was black of countenance, with quite a lot of yellow in the whites of his brown eyes. Patient I dare say; cynical certainly. Dressed in black evening clothes, with a fair-sized diamond in his shirt-front. An upstanding, lithe figure, as are many Abyssinians, but with the unmistakable Abyssinian head that doesn’t provoke confidence, whichever angle you view it from.
Moses-Gulad looked at me, failed to make me feel uncomfortable, recognized my suspicion of him, and made no effort to seem friendly.
“Why do you wish to see me?” he demanded.
He stood with that sort of sneer on his handsome lips that can be turned into a smile on the instant if necessary — standing deliberately close in order to compel me to look up at him, which is a trick understood by most bullies. It was mighty tempting to send him staggering back on his heels.
“I came to see those gold plates you brought from the Near East,” I answered.
“Who told you anything about them?”
If you’ve never heard an Abyssinian trying to take the upper hand of a white man you don’t know insolence. Mrs. Aintree looked positively scared, and something that may have been tact, or may have been just foolishness, impelled me to save the situation for her.
“A gentleman named Brice described them to me,” I answered. Gulad-Moses began to betray nervousness, but covered it pretty well.
“Mr. Brice will have to be arrested if he tries to interfere with me!” he retorted. “Brice heard of my discovery, and has been trying ever since to get possession of the plates on all sorts of pretexts. He and Allison are nuisances — two crooks — who don’t yet realize what kind of man they have to deal with! Tell them from me that I’ve stood all the nonsense I’m going to.”
“I’m not a public messenger,” said I. “I’m interested in those gold plates.”
He laughed cynically, and turned his back. But the mirrors served my purpose as well as his. Instead of his catching the expression of my face off-guard as he intended, he betrayed his own. It was malignant, alert, cunning, and combined with a dislike of me and a suddenly born distrust of Mrs. Aintree — or so I read it. He threw one swift look sidewise at her that should have made her blood run cold if she had seen it. Then, facing suddenly about again, he sneered:
“I suppose you are one of those newspaper people? Tell your newspaper that for a million dollars they may see the box in which the plates are kept, and that is all!”
“Really, Mr. Ramsden, they can’t be shown to any except initiates,” Mrs. Aintree explained, in an effort to calm the atmosphere. Gulad-Moses was beginning to pace the floor and work himself into a passion.
“Already too many have seen them!” the black man snarled, pausing in front of her. “Too many fools have seen them! I warned you. I warned you. I warned you! I told you what would happen if you talked! A man is a fool to trust a woman! You admitted to this person that you had seen the plates — you fool!”
She bit her lip. Before she could answer him he turned on me.
“I don’t care for your newspapers! Tell your newspaper, and tell Brice and Allison that I laugh at them. The police shall arrest Brice and Allison if they annoy me. I am an American. I have a lawyer who will protect my interests. Brice and Allison are liars and crooks, and that is all I have to say!”
At that he stalked out of the room and slammed the door.
“You must excuse him,” said Mrs. Aintree. “Possession of those plates and the responsibility have wrought on his nerves. He is hardly himself. He is normally the very essence of politeness. But even Moses of the Exodus, you know, used to fly into a rage at times. We who have spiritual vision, Mr. Ramsden, have more to bear than other people, and should be excused if at times our tempers get the better of us. Is he right in assuming that you represent a newspaper?”
“No,” I said. “Brice and Allison interested me, that’s all.”
“I suppose that is the Mr. Brice who called on me in Jerusalem along with a Mr. Grim. I wondered at the time what their real object was. Gulad tells me they have been persecuting him for years. He says that Brice managed to steal the most important of the plates. Did Mr. Brice confess to you that he has one of the plates in his possession?”
“I’m not Mr. Brice’s confessor,” I answered. “You haven’t told me yet about your plans.”
“You mean the agenda of the P.O.P? We have none in the usual meaning of the word. We will bring light to the colored races and let the light do its own work. When you take two and multiply by two, you don’t choose the result; it becomes four automatically. When we teach what we know to people who are as yet in darkness, the result is equally logical and takes care of itself. It is our business to sow the seed. The growth is sure to upset human calculations.”
“I’ve heard anarchists make statements similar to that,” I said.
“Ah! Anarchists. Well, they have the courage of conviction, hut no knowledge. We have both. Moreover, we have authority in writing done thousands of years ago by the man who gave the ten commandments to the Israelites.”
“Then you mean to upset the world, if you can?” I asked her.
“Do you deceive yourself that the world is worth leaving as it is?” she retorted.
“My impression is that you and your friends are planning wholesale murder, anarchy, rape, ruin, and misery simply for sake of the power it may bring you personally.”
“Strange!” she said. “My intuition told me you are capable of understanding — even of being one of us. But we sometimes make mistakes. You’ve nothing to do with the police? Well, Mr. Ramsden, let me give you some advice. For your own sake let this matter drop! Don’t try to interfere with us! You would find yourself up against a knowledge — a power — a force that you are incapable of understanding. You will be ground to powder! And now I have important work to do, and must bid you good evening.”
We shook hands, and I laughed and went. But she did not laugh. In the mirrors I could see her scowling at my back.
CHAPTER V. “Oh you Promis’ Lan’!”
GREAT men and women have great vision but can keep their two feet on the ground. Frogs who would be oxen let their vision carry them away into realms of sheer absurdi
ty, where all sense of proportion vanishes.
I don’t doubt Mrs. Aintree had tremendous vision. I don’t doubt she thought she was entirely right. She fondly imagined Gulad was a man of destiny sent to help her by the Powers that Be, whereas he was an obvious character, using her for his own purposes. The worst of it is that the visionaries seem able to do more harm in twenty minutes than the other fellows can accomplish good in twenty years.
I had seen and heard enough to convince me that Mrs. Aintree was contemplating not much less than revolution under the thin veneer of religion.
So I pulled Meldrum Strange out of bed at his hotel and thrashed the problem out with him from the beginning. Finally we sent for Brice and Allison at midnight, and they agreed to place the whole investigation in our hands; but Allison was so anxious over his loss of the plates that he made me the strangest proposal I ever listened to.
“Man,” he said, “ye’ll be honest as long as it pays d ee vidends, I haven’t a doubt of it. I’m a poor man, but I’ll mak’ it profitable for ye to be honest. In the course o’ cir-r-cumstances, if ye’ve any skill in following clues, the r-rascals who’ve stolen those plates away will be offering ye money to corrupt ye — more by a verra great deal than I could pay ye. But I take it ye’re a reasonable man. Ye talk like one who has a fair pride. Ye’ll keep a fair bar-r-gain. So if ye’ll turn down any offer o’ cor-r-uption, I’ll give ye the half o’ my savings, just to encourage ye. Ye shall have an auditor’s cer-rtificate, and the half of all I’ve got! It isn’t much, I’m warning ye, but honest money will feel better in y’r pur-r-se than a lar-r-ger sum gotten by standing in wi’ Gulad and his like.”
I hardly knew whether to laugh or swear at him, and ended by doing both. He would have been far more satisfied if I had agreed to take his money. The next thing the dour old faithful did was to hire another detective agency to keep an eye on me. Their man came to me perfectly frankly that afternoon, and to save trouble I promised to write out a daily report of my doings and mail it to his firm!
* * * * *
WHEN evening came, and Aloysius Jackson put in his appearance, I took a taxi to the corner of Fifty-ninth and Ninth, where Aloysius pointed out a narrow door in a red brick, building less than half a block away. There were stores on either side of the front entrance, but the four upper stories were all shuttered and there was nothing to show what use was made of them, except for the three letters P.O.P. done roughly in white paint on the lefthand side of the dim hallway, where one cobwebby light burned overhead. But the wooden stair-treads showed the marks of countless heavy feet, and the recently varnished handrail was already beginning to show fresh signs of wear.
I made Aloysius go up first, and followed him, as a precaution against surprise, but there was nobody up there yet. The echo of our footsteps died away as we rested at last in front of a door, on which some former employees of a tailoring concern had scrawled their opinion of the boss together with an alleged portrait of the gentleman.
“That air gallery is inside here, Misto’ Ramsden, sah. Got no key, sah.”
He felt less afraid of me at the moment than of the dusky brethren who might call him to account for admitting me. “You all might bus’ that ole door in,” he suggested, trembling.
“Open her up,” I said, “or—”
A look at my fist convinced him. He pulled out his clasp-knife, inserted the big blade cleverly, forced back the catch, and stood aside to let me pass through on to a narrow gallery that extended the whole length of one end of a room about sixty feet by thirty. The walls were white-washed, the windows shuttered, and the only light came down from a dusty factory skylight that reflected the glare from an electric advertisement on a neighboring roof. The floor of the room below was arranged to seat about a hundred people on inexpensive folding chairs, and at the end opposite to the gallery was a small platform covered with red carpet, against which, along one side, stood a piano that had decidedly seen better days.
There was a pile of reserve chairs stacked against the gallery railing near one end; so I spread those out a little, cautioned Aloysius Jackson, and shut myself in. The only entertainment during the hour that followed was provided by a rat, whom curiosity devoured, but who stubbornly refused to make friends because I had no food to offer him except tobacco.
Then came the sound of voices, footsteps on the stairs below, a snatch of song, and the jingle of keys, followed by Aloysius Jackson opening the door to search the gallery for strangers. The lights in the hall were switched on suddenly, and the fear on Jackson’s face was something to marvel at. He shut the door behind him, walked the length of the gallery noisily to call attention to the fact that he was doing his duty, cautioned me with a finger raised to his lips, and let himself out again, slamming the door with a noise like a thunderclap. A minute later I heard him reporting to somebody below that the gallery was empty.
The hall began to fill rapidly with colored men, and one of them went to the piano, beginning to play all the latest ragtime airs with that peculiar careless ease that no white man ever seems able to imitate successfully. Some of them pushed chairs out of the way and began to dance, and when a dozen colored women entered, the place was in an uproar for several minutes. It was about as little like a religious meeting as a bicycle resembles Camembert cheese.
The initiates began to arrive after a while, and sat on the platform in a row with their backs against the wall, all dressed alike in well-tailored black suits. Aloysius Jackson, who seemed to be acting janitor for the day, shuffled about arranging chairs, glancing up in my direction every now and then. Through the interstices of the stacked-up chairs I counted nine initiates, running the gamut of shades between black and ivory. They were a self-satisfied, well-fed, smug-looking lot.
* * * * *
THE ragtime continued almost until the moment when Mrs. Aintree walked up the aisle in evening dress with orchids on her bosom, followed by Gulad-Moses. Then the tune changed, and everybody stood up, bursting into song —
“If there’s a devil, and it’s true, true, true,
Who’d rob the devil of his due, due, due — ?”
It stopped when she reached the platform. There she stood facing them with one hand raised, her back to the initiates, and Gulad stood half a pace behind her. The utter silence in which the congregation waited for her to speak was fair evidence of her hold over them. They didn’t even shift their feet or glance about. You could hear the long gasp as one or another grew tired of holding his breath.
“Friends,” she began after a full minute, and then paused. She knew the full value of keeping them waiting. “I am glad to see so many of you here this evening. Has the gallery been searched?” From the back of the hall Aloysius Jackson answered that it had been, his voice quavering.
“Who is that?” she demanded. “You, Aloysius? You searched? Very well. I want to emphasize the need of always doing that. We cannot be too careful. Anyone might lurk up there and overhear things that must not be made public for the present.”
No general commanding ever addressed his staff with more aplomb than she displayed. Her voice rang with emphasis, and her attitude was one of absolute command.
“We will have only one hymn tonight,” she went on, “and we will leave that for the end of the meeting. There have been complaints about the noise we make, and the sooner we get our own hall, where we can follow inspiration without restraint, the better. Let there be more whole-heartedness! Let me see you give more generously — fewer dimes and quarters, and many more dollar bills! Show by your generosity in giving to our cause — that your claim to be entitled to self-determination is not nonsense, as your critics say it is. Let the key-note of your loyalty be Give — Give more — Give magnificently!”
I did not dare move to look around, but it struck me that her speech was falling flat. The initiates behind her, who presumably drew salaries to pay for their fine clothes, beamed approval, but I heard no murmur from the congregation signifying eagerness to pour cash into
the coffers. She sensed the backwardness, for she changed her tone.
“Why am I your leader? Because in no other way can you enter your promised land and come into your God-given rights. Remember the Children of Israel. Before they were able to spoil the Egyptians they had to obey their leader and give all their gold and silver to the common fund. It was after they had done that, not before, that their leader showed them how to appropriate the wealth of their taskmasters and then led them through the wilderness into a land flowing with milk and honey.”
That suited them better. There began to be a little restlessness. Talk about plunder just over the skyline was more agreeable than demands for cash down.
“Perhaps you are bewildered,”she went on. “Perhaps your courage fails when you think of the power of the people who oppress you, who grow richer every day from your starved and unappreciated efforts. But the children of Israel labored under the whip to make bricks without straw, and they broke the yoke! How? By concerted effort in obedience to their divinely chosen leader! Remember that we have the precise instructions of that identical leader engraved on gold, and buried away in the sands of Egypt until at the appointed time your new Moses rediscovered them!”
At that reference to himself Gulad did not actually pat himself on the back, or make any specific gesture; nor did he smile broadly, or say anything; but he came out of a mood of meditative discontent into the broad sunshine of complacency like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, and I could almost feel his self-esteem physically from where I crouched.
“Perhaps you feel discouraged by the thought that all your promised land is occupied by alien peoples,” Mrs. Aintree went on. “I answer you: Remember the children of Israel. They were four hundred years in bondage. It was often their fate, as yours has been, to be carried away into captivity. But they returned, laden with the spoils of their captors.”