by Talbot Mundy
They applauded that part of her speech, clapping and stamping their feet, the noise increasing until one big buck in the middle of the hall bawled out:
“Oh you promis’ lan’! Oh you li’l land o’ milk an’ honey! We’s on our way!”
She held her hand up, and silence fell as if she had touched the button that controlled them.
“It may seem an insuperable obstacle to you,” she continued, “that that vast continent of Africa — your native land — your birthright — is all staked out by European powers, whose trespass is upheld by armed men and artillery. But remember again the children of Israel! They marched into a land that also was occupied by trespassing nations whose military power was considered overwhelming in that day. And what happened? The Lord fought for the children of Israel, and the trespassers were put to the sword and driven out in confusion. The Lord will fight for you, if you obey your leader and respect this new Moses.”
The new Moses preened himself again, but she did not step aside to let him make a speech, and I began to get the hang of the situation. There was rivalry between her and Gulad. He had the gold plates. She had the congregation and the gift of speech. They had tried to combine in partnership, but were as jealous of each other as a pair of rival politicians. I think it crossed his mind to step forward and begin to say something, but she forestalled him with a contralto voice that rang down the hall magnificently.
“You are known as the People of Pisgah. Why? Because you have vision. Because you can rise to the heights of inspiration and discern the destiny in store for you — destiny that depends on strict obedience! You are more fortunate than the children of Israel — for many reasons — in many ways.”
“Oh you promis’ lan’! You promis’ lan’! You milk an’ honey, we is on our way!”
“You have their example. You have the record of mistakes they made. You can judge how they failed and suffered when they disobeyed. But when they were utterly obedient how they surged on to one success after another, becoming possessed, because they were obedient, of all the wealth of their enemies! On those terms, will you obey or not?”
That got them. The hall broke into tumult. They were willing to promise anything on terms of quid pro quo, and their enthusiasm broke bounds until she once more raised her hand. This time she had more difficulty in getting them to be quiet, and it was two or three minutes before she could make her voice heard. Then she struck the vein of promises again.
“You are more fortunate than the children of Israel! They had a land of milk and honey to go to, but it was a little land with limitations, surrounded on every side by enemies. You have a whole vast continent surrounded by the sea! The sea that surrounds Africa will protect you! They had a waterless desert to traverse, and it took them forty years. For you there is only a friendly sea that can be crossed in fourteen days, or less! They had to enter a land that was full from end to end of enemies. For you there waits a continent, where millions of your own race will receive you with open arms — with tumults of rejoicing! They will make common cause with you to drive the tyrants from your coasts.”
That set pandemonium loose. Some of them began singing. I caught fragments of three different hymns from opposite ends of the room, and one bull throat drowned out all the others, roaring —
“Oh, you’ve got to be a lover of the Lord, of the Lord,
If you want to go to heaven when you die—”
The man at the piano struck a chord, and in a moment they were on their feet; but she stilled them with a gesture of magnificent command. A weaker woman, a less clever one in her own way, would have let them shout themselves hoarse and sing themselves into hysteria. But she chose to show authority and check them in the same sort of way that a skillful driver controls his horses after giving them their heads for half-a-minute. There was lightning in her eyes and regal power in her gesture. They grew still.
“You are more fortunate than the children of Israel! They walked. They had to content themselves with such trifles as were considered wealth in those days. They drew on the resources of Egypt in a hurry, taking what could be obtained to balance their account with the Egyptians, who were poverty-stricken compared with your oppressors. You are in no hurry! You have the wealth of a continent to draw on, such as neither Babylon or Rome could show in their palmiest days. Is obedience a too great price to pay for that advantage?”
Then came the gist of her address — the rhubarb in the sugarcoated pill — the point that made Gulad blink and swallow, taking all the gilt off the ginger-snap of being the new Moses.
“Obey me,” she thundered, “and your continent — your promised land — is yours!”
Obey her, not Gulad.
Well, they promised her. They rose like one man to their feet and filled that hall with a din surpassing the dust-laden tumult of political conventions. It was no wonder that complaints had been received about the noise. The pianist cut loose like one man playing a duet, but made no impression on the din; I could see his hands moving and his figure swaying, but heard no note of the music; and the dry dust rising off the floor and swaying in clouds about the hanging electric lights made me cough until the tears came. But I was perfectly safe up there; they were much too excited to hear me.
It must have been fifteen minutes before order was restored. There were individuals who had to be forcibly suppressed. One man upset half-a-dozen chairs and danced until their occupants fell on him and forced him to the floor, where he lay under the lot screaming with idiotic laughter. And through it all Mrs. Aintree stood smiling patronizingly, every now and then turning to say a word to Gulad, who sulked and said nothing. When more or less silence fell at last I thought she was going to bring Gulad forward and let him say something; but not a bit of it.
“It does my heart good,” she said, “to see you so enthusiastic in a righteous cause — so enjoying your clear vision of success. But don’t forget that from your Pisgah height you see the promised land without the miles that lie between. There are difficulties to be overcome that lie in wait for you, difficulties not surmountable except by patience and persistence. We need courage, pertinacity, and secrecy combined. Courage that will throw off tyranny. Pertinacity that shall not flinch or falter when your tyrants bring about delay in order to keep you a while longer in thrall to them. Secrecy that shall confound the enemy by keeping him in the dark as to our plans. Dare all things! Persevere in the face of delay! Say nothing! Tell nobody! These are my injunctions to you.”
She paused to let another outburst of enthusiasm have a full two minutes’ lease before continuing with the self-satisfaction of the demagogue who feels the crowd helpless under hand.
“And why this secrecy? Are we afraid? Not we! But if you warn the Egyptians in advance your chance will be gone. We have work to do before we make our exodus. Our missionaries must go out to Africa and prepare our friends yonder for what is coming. We must raise funds. We must teach. Our propaganda must extend to the towns and hamlets, not only of New York and West Virginia, but of all the United States, and Canada and South America as well!
“Most of you are destined to be missionaries. As porters, as hotel servants, as laborers — in all the menial capacities to which your tyrants have reduced you — you will go forth and sow the seed, working whenever opportunity presents itself. And since every laborer is worthy of his hire, your expenses will be paid from the contributions to our cause that you yourselves take up. The half of every dollar that you take, you keep; the other half you forward to headquarters, where it will be used to swell the general fund. There will be no auditing; no check on you. We People of Pisgah must learn to trust one another before we can expect to have an empire at our feet.”
That sentiment struck home! Neither South Sea Bubble nor Blue Sky Mining stock ever looked better to investors than that proposal to share and share alike in all the voluntary contributions without audit. The few faces that I could see took on an expression of hopeful avarice that would have passed muster in the zoo at
mealtime, and the initiates on the row of chairs at the rear of the platform beamed almost drunkenly.
“And now,” she said, “we have made almost noise enough in this neighborhood for one night. It is our usual course to conclude these meetings with prayer suitable to the occasion; but there is a stipulation in the lease that we must be out of this hall by ten o’clock, and I shall have to trust you to say your prayers at home on this occasion.
“We will conclude our meeting with your favorite hymn that I wrote specially for you, and that I think most of you know by heart. During the course of the hymn our initiates will pass among you and take up a collection, and at the conclusion I will ask you to pass out of the hall quietly and disperse, calling as little attention to yourselves as possible.”
The man at the piano struck up. They rose to their feet excitedly, and burst into the song I had heard earlier in the evening:
“If there’s a devil, and it’s true, true, true,
Who’d rob the devil of his due, due, due?
In the dark the devil’s lurking,
For our downfall ever working,
But we’ll laugh to see his finish in his own bad brew!
Let the devil wear the shackles that he forged — so — well!
Ours shall be the kernel, his the empty shell!
For the Lord the earth is ridding
Of the fools who did his bidding,
And they’ll tumble with the devil into Hell — Hell — Hell!”
I didn’t stay to hear any more, but took my chance of opening the gallery door unseen and slipping out. Nevertheless I was seen from the platform, or at any rate the door was seen to move. Four big black men came out of the door below and intercepted me, demanding insolently what I wanted.
“Is this where the K. of P. meetings are held?” I asked.
“Cain’t yo’ read?” demanded one of them. “Don’t it say P.O.P. down thah on that wall?”
“What was you doin’?” asked another one, crowding me close. He may have got his muscle heaving coal, and he seemed rather to relish the prospect of a scuffle with a white man. It’s fortunate that colored men have good thick skulls, or there would have been a case for the coroner. One made the gross mistake of getting between me and the stairs to bar my way, and as his jaw was thrust out quarrelsomely I hit that first. He went over backwards and crashed downstairs on his head and shoulders before the other three could razor in, and I took the stairway at a running jump, landing on my victim as I passed, taking out of him any wind that might have remained, and surely delaying pursuit because he lay across the stairs and they had to feel their way over him in semidarkness.
Once outside there was no further danger. Men whom Meldrum Strange had sent came on the run the minute I showed myself. They were most of them colored men, who had worked for banks and suchlike institutions, but two were white. I ordered the colored men to shadow the initiates; the white men’s job was to watch Mrs. Aintree and her accomplice Gulad, not interfering with them but instantly reporting the first sign of any contemplated move.
Then I phoned Meldrum Strange and set off in a hurry to find Terence Casey, for I wanted his advice. But hurry did not help me much. That boast of his that I would know where to get in touch with him at any time was easy to say off-handedly but not demonstrable. I chased him from pillar to post, by phone, messenger, taxicab, and on foot, being sent on from one place to another by secret-service men, every one of whom had seen him that evening because he had been the rounds and given them instructions for what they said was an important case.
And I found him at last near midnight, in a little back room over a place that had once been a saloon, pulling off his socks preparatory to getting into bed with his shirt and trousers on. There was a telephone beside the bed, and I guess he used that place habitually.
“Well?” he said smiling, as an old woman ushered me into the room. “How’s the new case coming? Have ye cut y’r eye-teeth yet?”
“I told you it was a case for the police,” I answered, “and it is.”
“Sit ye down on the bed, Ramsden me boy, and unburden the sorrows av y’r soul. Tell me all about it.”
I repeated to him word for word all that I could remember of Mrs. Aintree’s speech, and added my own comments.
“Damn,” said Casey, when I had finished. “Go home and sleep, unless ye want to share this bed with me. That’s nothing! Ye should have heard the devils talk in Butte around the mining camps. She’s just a hot-air expert out for exercise and small change. You go home to bed, me boy, and dream about y’r fee ye’ll get from Brice and Allison!”
CHAPTER VI. “No form of abstinence. No fasts. No saints’ days.”
MELDRUM STRANGE tried to interest the Attorney General’s department, but without success. Terence Casey’s secret report on the subject was a deciding factor. He denied to me having sent in any such report, but with a smile in his eye.
“Ye’re like all amatchoor daytectives, Ramsden, me boy. Ye think that y’r case is a lallapolooser, and all the departments are banded together wi’ red tape to keep ye from savin’ the body politic. Ye’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes — good reading too; I don’t blame ye. But I’m busy. Go an’ ‘tend to y’r case an’ don’t worry me. When ye’re weary of such foolishness; go back to huntin’ iliphints — a game ye understand.”
But we don’t have to be guided by political considerations or by the barometric state of someone’s bile in Washington, D.C. We put our whole force on the problem, regardless of expense. Jeremy wrote from London that two white missionaries and a number of colored ones were actively preaching similar doctrines to Mrs. Aintree’s in the London slums and other places where the floating colored population could be found. And Grim wrote from Egypt to much the same effect, adding that the story of the gold plates had spread southward into the Sudan and was causing the Administration no small concern. Moses being regarded as a mighty prophet by Christian and Mohammedan alike, the colored missionaries were finding no difficulty in spreading their new doctrine, which found readier acceptance because it included the expulsion of all the white races from Africa forever. Grim wrote:
The thing looks bad, and is growing worse. The natives are getting cockier than ever and less inclined to reason. The story of those gold plates has gone to their heads. They’re beginning to talk already about reversing the position and subjecting the white races to their dark authority.
The mystery is where all the money comes from to finance these missionaries. None of them do any work. I’ve traced a small part of their funds to random subscriptions taken up locally, but there seems to be a central fund that baffles discovery. The money being spent out here greatly exceeds the receipts from donations, so it’s obvious someone is paying the piper. These missionaries out here live like fighting cocks, and are growing arrogant. One thing that makes their propaganda easy is that they preach no form of abstinence. No fasts. No saints’ days. No Ramadan with its forty days of thirst and hunger. The conventional moralities are all scoffed at. A man according to their doctrine may have as many wives as he can support, or can be induced to support him. They object to too much prayer, and teach that a man’s instincts are his own best guide. You can imagine how such a doctrine as that will draw adherents from all quarters.
There’s someone in authority. When a missionary gets orders to go elsewhere, he goes, and another takes his place. They teach absolutely strict obedience, and keep the source of the orders a mystery; but there’s a man who calls himself Moses who gets cables in code from New York. I’ve managed to get copies of some of the cables, but can’t puzzle out the code because I can’t discover what book the numbers refer to.
This is all too ably thought out and organized to be the work of Mrs. Aintree. That woman is only half-clever. I believe you will find that there’s some much abler man or woman behind her, who uses her for a stalking horse to hide his or her own identity. Whoever it is certainly displays a knowledge of the native races far beyond the
ordinary as well as an understanding of crowd-psychology in general.
If you examine Mrs. Aintree’s antecedents you may discover from whom she got her ideas. They’re distinctly second-hand. And my advice is the same old stuff I was always rubbing into you when we hunted together in Arab country. Get close. Be patient. Stay on the job until you force a showdown. Appear to give the enemy a free hand and “Stop, Look, Listen!” Watch out you don’t get murdered. Mrs. Aintree, I think, would draw the line at murder personally, but not impersonally. I know her sort; they preach, and some fanatic does the killing, as happened in the case of Lincoln and McKinley and lots of others I could mention.
Above all, don’t be discouraged by official cold water and what may look like official impediments placed in your way. Don’t talk, or consult authorities. Root right in until you’ve found the individual who’s really running things, and then go for him bald-headed. Yours for peace without perquisites.
— GRIM.
As a matter of fact we had already followed in most respects the line Grim recommended. For instance, we had looked up Mrs. Aintree’s past, and nothing could afford better proof of Grim’s almost uncanny judgment than the result of our inquiries. She had been connected with a School of Esoteric Thought conducted in Boston, Massachusetts, by an East Indian named Pananda, whose teachings had had considerable vogue until Mrs. Aintree, who seems to have been his favorite pupil, led a revolt against him and tried to set up a school of her own in opposition.
* * * * *
I MADE a trip to Boston and called on this man Pananda. He was living in style in a house in the Fenway, had a Chinese butler, and kept me waiting in an extravagantly furnished anteroom for three quarters of an hour as if he were an up-to-date physician with a fashionable practice. I might have been more impressed by his importance if there had been anybody else on the waiting list, or if I hadn’t been curious enough to look about me. There was a peculiar arrangement of mirrors in the room that brought to mind the somewhat similar arrangement in Mrs. Aintree’s apartment, so I sat still and examined them, going about it as carefully as if I knew I were being watched.