# The Swinging Caravan/Victory

pp. 193–221.

### VICTORY

"APPALLING! Absolutely appalling!" Jerome Townsend, who was Prince Alexander Semionovitch Demidoff's second at the duel, characterized it. But Townsend was very English, therefore very sentimental and romantic beneath his carefully polished veneer of prosy Anglo-Saxon correctness, chilled to just the right temperature.
I, personally, was unable to see anything appalling in it. I considered that Prince Demidoff had remained steeled to the last in the armor of his Slav idealism. Had fate dealt differently with him, disillusion would have waxed stronger as the simplicity of his faith declined. He would have changed gradually from a dreamer to a doer; would have had to struggle with the dark and unreasonable forces of life. And he was a Russian, congenitally pessimistic, potentially destructive.
It happened in the days before Central Asia, from Bokhara to the Persian Gulf and from Samarkand north to the Siberian tundras and south to the Afghan hills, its lees stirred by the war's Bolshevist aftermath, began to ferment—ethically at first, since revolution commences usually with psychological indigestion of the few before it slops over into the crude, physical actualities of the many.
At that time I had had homesick, bitter-sweet imaginings about the Central Asia of my early youth, the broad sweep of yellow, brittle summer across the steppes and the long, white, blighting winter months, the hard little hamlets tucked neatly into the folds of bister-brown foot-hills, the ancient towns wiped by the hand of time into blurred patterns—towns with cruel, rapacious hearts that regretted the days when the Tartar Crescent trod the Slav Cross under spurred heel, towns still redolent of the dead centuries when fur-capped Grand Khans sent arrogant edicts to the princes of the houses of Romanoff and Strogonoff and Shouiski, and when the flat-faced, red-skinned warriors of the Golden Horde whipped their shaggy Mongol ponies to the loot of the western world.
So I had gone home, collecting on the way not things, not bits of cracked Persian porcelain in dove-blue, nor frayed scraps of antique Turkoman rugs, but memories—nostalgic pictures—rapidly etched impressions of mosques swelling like the tolling of bells beneath a vaulted, steel-gray sky; of dwarfish stone idols, reminiscent of the days before Islam swamped the Buddha's gentler creed, glowing from their iron-barred wayside shrines in the light of seven crimson, panegyrical candles; of the massive projections of square, granite-clouted bastions chanting the epic of vanished dynasties; of palaces of khan and ameer and sultan tearing the heavens with clawlike copings and turrets; of black nights on the steppes and the green stars sneering down with a sort of cosmic insouciance; of ruddy harvests climbing up to the hyacinth of the farther hills; of all that Asian scattering and converging of line and color, wholly without set design, wholly without logic or purpose, yet throbbing with the rhythm of a distinct racial elegy.
There were, too, other impressions, more human and more poignant, to be collected and stored away against the coming of homesick dreams. Impressions of crowds and individuals, Asiatics and Europeans, bubbling in the same cauldron of barter and lies and politics. Impressions of the crash of race against race, faith against faith, and civilization against civilization, which is the curse, perhaps ultimately the salvation, of Central Asia. Impressions of the trade-marks and mile-posts of Russia's jostling progress—a railway depot, a garage, a cabaret, a church, a German cocotte, a bundle of bald commercial statistics, an American globe-trotter, a printing-press, and a gray-coated sergeant of the Viborg Regiment getting dismally drunk upon a bottle of Monopol vodka—jutting sharply into the veiled, fanatical focus of Tartar life and prejudices.
Impressions, finally, of race whispering temptingly to race across the chasm of inherited distrust, whispering often with the soft lips of women; and, most clearly etched in my brain, the impression of Suzanne de Cassagnac's golden-red, unlikely hair shimmering in a bobbed whorl, of her narrow feet, her white hands, as she tripped across the stage of the Apollon Music Hall which, typically, sardonically, was flanked on the right by a gray, jerry-built barrack of Russian infantry, and on the the left by the little pink and orchid mosque of Bala-i-Hawa, dedicated to Bokhara's patron saint.
The music brushed out with tinkly violin pizzicatos and the cello's honey-smooth undertones, accompanying her song that dropped across the amber footlights with the nasal, metallic cadencing of the Paris gutters:
"Fantassins, officiers, colons
Montaient à l'assaut d' mes mam'lons,
I's m' prenaient pour eun' citadelle, A Grenelle..."
"A Grenelle!" she echoed the last words, her voice peaking up a shrill octave, while the music finished with a clownish, slap-stick stammering of bassoon and clarinet, and she disappeared into the wings with a silken rustling of her short, circular skirt, her left foot stabbing high into the air in an impudent, gaminesque farewell kick.
"Bravo!"
"Bravo!"
"Encore! Encore!"
"Bravissimo!"
Came applause, like far thunder, steadily bloating, jerking, thumping and droning in hectic beats, then growing into a solid phalanx of sound as Russian vied with Tartar and Turkoman, the former clapping white-gloved hands, the latter rattling crooked daggers in silver scabbards with a vicious, steely crackle.
"She is superb!" whispered Prince Alexander Semionovitch Demidoff, captain in the Black Hussars, to his friend Jerome Townsend, attached to His Brittanic Majesty's consular service.
Demidoff was very young, perhaps twenty-five. He was very handsome in a startling way, with his thick black hair curling over an ivory-white forehead, the curve of his short Roman nose with the wide, nervous nostrils, the intensely red mouth. There were also his eyes, brown, gold-flecked, curiously innocent, yet curiously tense—the eyes of a dreamer, or of a fanatic. The whole man seemed a figure of romance, seemed like the subtle vagary of some forgotten century when men walked about with rapiers at their sides, ready to fight a duel to the death or to write a cloying madrigal for the sake of a woman's smile.
"Superb!" he repeated.
"Right-o!" agreed the Englishman. "That last song of hers—tremendously fruity, what?"
At a table across the hall sat Timur Kadjar Khan, the Tekké Turkoman chief, recently returned from a two years' visit to France and amazingly Parisianized, his waxed mustache and pompadoured hair giving the lie to his high cheekbones, and his gold-rimmed monocle to his beady, black Tartar eyes.
He turned to his companion, the Viscount Jean-Marie de Broglie, of the French consular service, breaking the barrier of Moslim reticence.
"Charming, that little Suzanne!" he said. "But expensive! Notice that cabochon emerald on her left hand?"
"Too big to be genuine."
"Absolutely genuine, though. Cost me the yearly revenue of ten of my villages. Forty thousand francs at Pollock's in the rue Royale."
"Suzanne does come high, doesn't she?" smiled the Frenchman.
"Very. For, there are too all her current bills which I have to foot—and her regrettable infidelities. Why—" he laughed; the man's Europeanization at this moment was immense, fantastic, incredible, "she explains both her bills and her infidelities with one of those typical puns of hers—tells me that every woman wants—oh—a little change occasionally."
"Superb!" said Demidoff for the third time, while all over the music hall the shouts of "Encore! Encore!" were growing phrenetic in their insistence. "I believe that I love her. Her eyes are very sweet, very innocent."
"Very—what?" demanded Townsend.
Prince Demidoff paid no attention to his friend's astonished query. He hardly heard.
"And her hair—" he continued, speaking as if to himself, "it is like a promise, like a hope of forgotten dreams. It is like a sudden, high wonder of sunsets. Dear God—" and there was in his eyes all the poetry of his twenty-five years, all the motley imaginings and the self-hurting mysticism of his Russian soul, "her hair is like her heart—clear and golden——"
Townsend was becoming embarrassed because, being English, he did not like to see the nakedness of an alien soul. He was becoming frightened because he knew the other well, knew his soft, slow Slavic sweetness, knew that his imagination was all boyish and quixotic and silvery-white, clear of the vague, tongue-showing satyr shapes which rot the core of western Europe.
Theirs was a strange friendship. For Townsend was the other's opposite in every last characteristic. He was of the British, British. The Townsends, to quote his own words, "ate Sussex mutton and drank Sussex ale long before William the Conqueror stuck his ugly Norman nose across the Channel." Beef and Brawn was his slogan, Empire and Mastery—and damn all foreigners! But, somehow, he loved Prince Demidoff with an almost feminine tenderness of which he was half ashamed. He wanted to protect him; wanted no harm to come to him.
And he felt harm now; felt is subconsciously, psychically; felt it like something slimy and gray and loath some.
"Look here, Sascha," he said. "You don't by any chance mean to sit there and tell me with a straight face that this small, carrot-topped Parisian chanteuse has got her barbs into you—that you—oh—" again he grew embarrassed, squirmed at the word—"love her?"
"I adore her. I stand aside in the shade under the tree of her loveliness, with my head bent——"
"My sainted Grandaunt!" exclaimed the Englishman. "Tremendously poetical, old bean! Absolutely top-hole! I know. I was an Oxford undergrad once and loved the daughter of a harness-maker on High Street and bought three hunting-saddles from her dad I didn't need and addressed her in Latin serpentine verses and Pindaric dithyrambs. Right-o! Love is like the measles. But you are such a serious young blighter. Let me tell you——"
The rest of his sentence was swallowed in an avalanche of sound as the orchestra switched into a syncopated belching of drum and flute to introduce the next number on the program, a team of American negroes. They danced on flat-footedly, with the quaint, jungly grace of their breed. But the audience would have none of them just now. They wanted Suzanne.
"Encore!"
"Encore!"
A short, purple-faced, bow-legged colonel of Cossacks rose and waved an imperious hand toward the stage.
"Poshall!" he shouted to the negroes. "Clear out!"
The negroes laughed good-humoredly, motioning to the wings where Suzanne was waiting.
"Encore! Encore!" came the insistent demand.
And then, when the polite western European phrase did not accomplish the desired result, the Russians in the audience, figuratively speaking, tucked their trousers into their boots and became purely Slav. They broke into ringing, dramatic Russian words of praise:
"Bozhestvenno!"
"Vosskititelno!"
"Akh—ona bezpodobna!"
"Prevosskodno!"
They wanted her, demanded her, increased their applause a hundredfold when finally she came on the stage, laughing, throwing kisses right and left.
Suddenly the applause stopped. Came a void of silence. Suzanne de Cassagnac recommenced her song:
"Quand j'vois les fill's de dix-sept ans,
Cela m'fait penser qu'ya ben longtemps,
Moi aussi j' l'ai été pucelle, A Grenelle..."
Again the clamor was deafening. Hands clapped. Daggers rattled.
"Akh—golubushka!" cried a hearty, ruddy-skinned Russian butcher, still fetid with the smell of the mutton that he had carved during the day. He reached into his plaited leather belt, took out a well-filled purse, and threw it on the stage. He could afford it, he declared naïvely, loudly. Didn't he handle the mess contracts for the officers of the Tcherkess Cossacks, and were not the latter, with their resplendent, cherry-red tunics and their silver-and-ivory cartridge belts, famed as the best horsemen and the greatest gourmets in all the Russias?
An official of the Bokharan Ameer's palace, with long, effeminate hands and a beard dyed crimson with henna, rose and walked up to the stage. No European, no Christian, was going to outdo him in a gesture of magnificence. He bowed, purred polite Persian words of admiration that wound up with a sonorous: "Ee mudud Allah!" drew from his thumb a ten-carat canary diamond set in hammered platinum and dropped it at Suzanne's feet.
She bent. She picked up both purse and ring. She was very French, very logical, very practical.
Still the tumult and the excitement continued crescendo. Flowers were thrown on the stage, gloves, money, jewels. A young Turkoman chief from the Merv oasis contributed a gold-sheathed dagger with emerald-studded hilt that his ancestor had blooded six hundred years before, when he had followed Ghinghiz Khan, the Mongol Emperor, to the conquest of the western world. A drunken Circassian prince parted with his bench-made, patent-leather pumps, declaring with alcoholic tearfulness that he hoped they would protect Mademoiselle's narrow feet against the harsh pebbles on the road of her life. A white-bearded councilor of the Russian-Central Asian Forestry Department, who was old enough to have known better, unpinned from his lapel the blazing decoration of the Red Eagle and tossed it across the footlights.
The scene was Russian. It was Asiatic. It was barbarous and splendid.
And all the while Suzanne de Cassagnac smiled and laughed and waved her thanks:
"Merci! Merci, mes amis!"
She gathered her harvest, including every last flower and glove and cuff-link and Russian ruble and Bokharan toman gold-piece, including even the Circassian prince's patent-leather pumps, with the help of her severe, black-frocked Breton maid who had come from her dressing-room. She did it quite shamelessly, as a simple matter of common sense. She was the sort of woman who could not talk to an archangel without winking at him and making him feel self-conscious. But she was Latin to the core: she had a steadily growing bank account at the Credit Lyonnais in Paris.
"Merci! Ah—merci, merci, mes amis! Au revoir! A demain!" Then to her maid, in an undertone: "Are they not stupid cattle, Marie-Claire?"—and she was off into the wings with a final pirouette.
Even after the negro team had danced on again with soft shuffling steps and a haunting melody reminiscent of Louisiana's canebrake and corn, the crowd continued in a ferment of excitement. There were still scattered, explosive "Bravos!" There was still staccato hand-clapping. There were still glistening blue eyes of Slav, glistening black eyes of Tartar and Turkoman.
It was not that the Frenchwoman was beautiful. Indeed, she was not. Nor could she sing three notes in tune. Nor was her dancing exceptionally graceful. But—"extraordinary!" Jerome Townsend admitted. "She has a certain something—a—oh—how shall I put it——"
"She has soul—a great and fragrant sweetness of soul!" said Demidoff; and he added, in a curiously cold and even voice, "I shall marry her."
"What—?" The Englishman sat up, startled out of his usual phlegm. "Did you say that..."
"If she will have me."
"You don't mean it, man. You can't."
"I do."
"You're mad—stark, raving mad!"
"I was never more sane in my life—nor more determined."
"Great God!"
Townsend was thoroughly upset. He knew both the man and the woman. He knew that Suzanne de Cassagnac, socially, ethically, and morally, was nothing except a very thrilling product of tasteful sloth, scabbed with luxury and diseased with privilege, always petting her own hard thoughts and puncturing the lives of strangers with the dagger-point of her personality. And this man, this tense-souled idealistic Don Quixote of the steppes—"the sort of blighter," Townsend described him later on, "whose long suit, inevitably, is Honor spelled with a large, capital, bull-necked H!"—spoke of her fragrant sweetness of soul; spoke of marrying her....
"Lou, Lou, I love you, I love you, that's true—"
came the negroes' low, slurring drawl, brushing out across the footlights.
"Adorable, our little Suzanne!" said a captain of Tcherkess Cossacks at the next table.
"Absolutely!" agreed his companion, the same white-bearded councilor of the Forestry Department who had unpinned his decoration and tossed it at her feet. "Still—" he sighed, "she is meant for you youngsters, not for men like me. At my age forbidden fruit is mostly canned——"
"I wonder if she has brains, Boris Fedorovitch?"
"What is the difference, Dmitri Petrovitch? At least she has brains enough to know that the world wants nothing of her—except herself."
"Her hair—" exclaimed the Cossack, "it intoxicates me!"
"Stick to vodka, little brother. It is less expensive—and far less poisonous."
From the other end of the music hall, ringing sharp and clear through the pall of silence that had dropped after the negro team had danced off amidst scattered, weak applause, came the voice of Timur Kadjar Khan, the Turkoman chief:
"Why—no, my friend!" addressing the Viscount de Broglie. "One cannot exactly love such a woman."
Townsend looked at Demidoff, wondering if the other had heard the sharp, ironic comment. It did not appear that he had. He was quiet, serene, starry-eyed.
Townsend gave a little shudder. There was something which he wanted to tell the other; wondered how he might.
Here, in his friend's heart, was an illusion which should be uprooted and which he himself could uproot by a word, the statement of a brutal fact. All he had to do was to relate the truth, that Suzanne de Cassagnac had played a fleeting but hectic part in his own life before Timur Kadjar Khan, the Parisianized Turkoman, had stepped on the scene with his gold, his cabochon emeralds. But Townsend's code of honor was rigid. It did not permit him to speak in such a fashion about a woman who had been an intimate factor in his life. And, even supposing that he sacrificed his code of honor on the altar of friendship, would Demidoff believe him? And, if he did believe, would it influence him except to strengthen his obstinacy? The man was a Slav, an idealist, a fanatic, a dreamer——
"You aren't serious, are you?" he stammered finally, hedging for time, knowing well what the answer would be.
"Quite serious. I shall ask her tonight."
It was then that, suddenly, the Englishman made up his mind to tell the truth. It embarrassed him, made him feel uneasy. So he commenced in a roundabout way.
"Look here," he said. "You won't think me a cad, will you, Sascha?"
"Why should I?"
"Because of what I am going to say to you."
"Yes?"
"Well—oh—I fancy it's quite the jolly old ticket, quite fair, you know, to find out all about the chap who's going to marry your sister, what? But when it comes to the woman...."
"Wait!" interrupted Demidoff.
"Let me say what I have to say. When it comes to the female of the species, the girl who's going to marry your best pal, then—what's the term? Right-o! Chivalry! That's what we are supposed to have. I hate the bally word. It's the sort of asininity which tries to make us believe that all girls, no matter what their past life, once somebody pops the question and mentions bridal veil and orange-blossoms, turn miraculously into sweet innocents of sixteen or thereabouts and wear cunning little chaplets of pale-blue flowers. Well—I ain't going to be that sort of a driveling hypocrite—not where you are concerned, Sascha. You'll hate me for it, but I am going to——"
"Please let me say a word, Jerome!"
"Afterwards! First you'll listen to me!"
"But I know what you are going to tell me!"
"Eh?"
"Yes," continued the Russian, still in his cold, curiously even voice. "You mean to tell me that Suzanne—and you—and Timur Kadjar Khan——"
"What? You know?"
"I am neither blind, nor a fool."
"Blind? No. Evidently not. I see that now. But—" Suddenly, at a flash, as the full realization of the other's intent burst upon him, a towering rage swept over the Englishman, leaving his brain crimson and dry, "but—as to not being a fool—well—" his voice rose, "you are a fool! You're the biggest, damnedest, hopelessest fool that ever escaped from a lunatic asylum!"
Prince Demidoff smiled, leaned back in his chair, and stretched his legs.
"Oh?"
He was not in the least excited or angry. His eyes seemed to look far beyond the glittering, smoke-wreathed, crowded music-hall at which they stared. Presently he narrowed them, focused them on his friend, and bent forward, the tips of his slim hands toying with his champagne glass, his face jutting sharply into the circle of the rose-shaded electric candle in the center of the marble-topped table, accentuating the smooth forehead, the Roman nose, the hooded, dreamy eyes.
"Listen, Jerome," he said very calmly.
"What for? I hate to see a chap I'm fond of crucifying himself."
"Listen just the same." Again Demidoff smiled, rather a pitying smile. "I feel sorry for you."
"You—feel sorry—for me?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you are such a hopeless Anglo-Saxon, top-heavy with self-righteousness and greasy with the oil of standardized, made-to-order virtues. Why—" his voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, "am I the fool—I—because I am man enough, decent enough, to deny that purity is some sort of cruel, blood-stained fetish which, once broken or spotted, ruins a woman's life forever? Because I believe, as I do believe, that purity is a quality of the soul, and not of the body? You are the fool, Jerome, not I!"
"You make me sick!" came the Englishman's rough rejoinder.
"Very well." Demidoff rose.
"Where are you going?" asked Townsend pushing back his chair.
The other walked away, picking his way among the tables, crossing to the other end of the hall. Townsend followed.
"I am awfully sorry, Sascha," he said. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."
"You didn't, Jerome."
"I'm glad, old chap," replied Townsend; then, as the other walked steadily on, suspicion flashed through his mind. "Where are you going?" he repeated.
"You wouldn't approve. You wouldn't—" Demidoff interrupted himself to exchange courtly greetings here and there with acquaintances and brother-officers: "Zdrassivouitie, Dmitri Petrovitch!"
"Kak projivaietie, Alexander Semionovitch?"
"Dozafftra, Kniaz Narishkine!"
"I want to know where you are going!" demanded Townsend, putting a restraining hand on his friend's arm.
"To speak to Timur Kadjar Khan."
"What—? You don't mean you are going to pick a row with him——?"
"Of course not. Why should I?"
"Well—then—what do you intend——?"
Townsend did not have a chance to finish the question, for by this time they had crossed the hall and reached Timur Kadjar Khan's table. The Turkoman was relating the latest boulevard gossip to the Vis count de Broglie, spicing it with epigrammatic comment:
"You see, my friend, the only excuse she could offer for wanting a divorce was that she was tired of living alone. So the judge..."
"I beg your pardon!" interrupted Demidoff. He was in the somber, silver-laced uniform of the Black Hussars. He saluted formally, clicking his spurred heels. "Timur Kadjar Khan, I believe?"
"The same." The Turkoman rose and bowed politely, dropping his eyeglass.
"I am Prince Demidoff—Alexander Semionovitch Demidoff."
"Charmed, I am sure. Won't you—?" The other waved a hospitable hand toward the empty chair and half-empty champagne bottle.
"No, thank you."
"Then—to what may I attribute the honor——?"
"I came to ask you something, Khan."
Townsend suppressed a groan. He looked at Viscount de Broglie whom he knew slightly, and shrugged his shoulders as if to tell him that it was not his fault, that he could not help it, happen what might. So far the exchange of words between Russian and Turkoman had been courtly and banal. But, somehow, the atmosphere seemed charged with an undercurrent of dramatic suspense. There was an atmosphere of expectation, of waiting, tensely, silently, for something. Even the strangers at near tables, Russians for the most part, thus keenly sensitive to psychic influences, felt it. There was a distinct sound of breath sucked in, of glasses clicking as hands trembled, of feet shuffling uneasily, of the very waiters, placid, stolid peasants, stopping in their rounds, trays gripped in clenched hands, standing stock-still, heads craned forward, like pointers at bay. When just then the music brushed out with an Argentine tango, people turned and looked at the orchestra leader reprovingly, as if resenting his interference.
"I came to ask you something, Khan," repeated Demidoff.
"If I can be of any service to you, Prince?" replied the Turkoman.
"You can."
"Indeed?"
"Of a very great service."
"Ah—?"
Timur Kadjar Khan stared at the other out of his oblique Tartar eyes.
"Yes." Demidoff's voice was as passionless as fate. His words dropped slowly, one by one, like icicles. "Are you—pardon me, Khan—but are you in love with Mademoiselle Suzanne de Cassagnac?"
A paunchy, vodka-soddened major of artillery at a neighboring table heard the question.
"Bozhe moy—my God!" he whispered.
Viscount de Broglie sat up straight. He wondered if he should believe his ears. He glanced at the Turkoman. The latter, for a moment, forgot both his French and his Russian. He forgot his careful veneer of European culture.
"Kaudira mutluk!" he exclaimed thickly, in his native Turki. "Almighty Creator!"
After all, he was an Asian and a Moslim. There was not a single command in the Koran which, likely, he had not trod under foot at some time or other of his life. But there was still, eternal, unchanged, unchangeable by all the West's jeering, jostling progress, his prejudice where woman was concerned. To be questioned about any one of his harem, be she his wife, mother, sister, daughter, or mistress, by an outsider, was insufferable. It went against every rule of his ethical code. It was an insult to be wiped out in blood.
Almost automatically his hand reached for the place where, were he dressed native style, he would be carrying his broad-bladed handjar dagger. All he encountered was a delicate French platinum watch chain, set with small but exquisite pearls. And at the touch, suddenly, ironically, he remembered his spiked mustache, his pompadoured hair, his monocle, and the years that he had spent in Paris. He shut his eyes completely for a moment, and his face, yellow as old parchment, seemed to grow indifferent, dull, almost sleepy.
Presently he opened his eyes again. He smiled.
"I fail to understand, Prince, why this little—ah—affair of mine should interest you," he said.
"It does, though. Vitally!" came the Russian's reply. "Really—I am not trying to pry into your life. But would you mind telling me? Do you love her?"
The Turkoman was silent. He was conscious of recurring rage, rage of jealousy, and not of outraged Islamic ethics this time, as he looked at Demidoff, standing there motionless before him, tall and young and good-looking. Then his double rage, of jealousy and wounded ethics, mated with a third: rage of race against race. For a moment he crystallized in his heart all the contempt and hate that Slav and Tartar have felt for each other ever since the latter rode their shaggy Mongol ponies out of Central Asia and up to the Kremlin walls, sweeping over the steppes with torch and scimitar. But once more he controlled himself outwardly, and his words when they came were quiet enough:
"I flatter myself that I am a gentleman, and a man of taste."
"Meaning what, Khan?"
"That—" and each word stood out distinctly, as if each were a grave and separate fact, "naturally I could not exactly love such a woman."
"I do love her," Demidoff replied simply.
"How very distressing!" The Turkoman's reply held the thud of an insult. "Still, if you love her, why tell me? Tell her! More logical, it would seem."
"How could I," rejoined Demidoff, "before I knew your feelings? If you did love her I wouldn't...."
"Confess to her your own love?"
"Just so!" Demidoff was very stiff.
"Charming of you," smiled the other, "to be so concerned about my honor."
"I was not thinking of your honor, Khan. I was considering my own."
"Oh—?" The Turkoman's face was like a carved mask. But in back of the oblique, beady eyes his brain was in a crimson travail of fury. "In other words," he added, steadying his accents with an effort, "you love Suzanne, you know now that I do not, and so you ask me to give her up? You ask it of me as—ah—a favor?"
"A very great favor," admitted Demidoff, and his voice shook a little as his own rage rose flush with the other's, a rage, just like the other's, composed of jealousy and outraged ethics and racial aversion.
"I grant the favor," said Timur Kadjar Khan, bowing from the hips. He straightened; lit a cigar. "Do you know why?"
"Well?"
"Suzanne is growing a little too expensive. For of course you are aware that I put up for her financially?"
"Oh, yes." Demidoff's upper lip began to tremble. He grew very white. His fingers played nervously with the silver tassel of his sword belt.
Townsend sensed the tumult in his friend's soul. He stepped up close to him, coughing discreetly, putting his strong hand on the other's arm. He looked imploringly at Viscount de Broglie, who raised his eyebrows as if to say that he would have nothing to do with all this.
"And, I suppose," the Turkoman went on ruthlessly, "you are going to offer her more money than I, finer jewels?"
"I shall offer her my name," said Demidoff, and he saluted, clicked his heels, and turned away, followed by Townsend.
Timur Kadjar Khan stared after him, the rage in his heart surging in deadly waves. He was an Oriental to the core, thus a practical man, a materialist whose essence of life was a fact and not a dream. The other, he said to himself, was a fool, guilty of the madness of a fixed, spiritual idealism. And he hated a fool more than he hated a rogue.
"You kept your temper admirably," commented the Viscount de Broglie. "For a moment it looked like pistols for two and coffee for one."
"It may yet," replied the other.
"Oh, no. You lost your chance. You can't force a quarrel on him now. It would be too obvious."
"He is going to force the quarrel, not I."
"How?"
"Listen!" smiled the Turkoman, waving a hand in the direction of Demidoff, who had stopped a few feet away to light a cigar and whose voice drifted across with a purring distinctness.
"Yes," the Russian was saying to Townsend, "there is that pearl diadem which the Tsaritsa gave to my grandmother, Alona Vassilievna. It will look very beautiful on Suzanne's golden hair. It will stab little points of silver into that glorious aureole. Jerome—tell me—was there ever such hair in all the world?"
"Ah," breathed the Turkoman. "We have a saying at home among the tents of my tribe that no worm-eaten bean remains without a half-blind measurer. We have, too, a saying that the camel which travels too often to Mecca returns lame at last."
"I always mistrust you," laughed de Broglie, "when you break out with a rash of Oriental metaphor."
"You should!" replied Timur Kadjar Khan.
He rose.
"Prince!" he called loudly. "Prince Demidoff!"
The latter turned.
And again, suddenly, a shiver of expectation, tragic, tense, brushed over the hall. The music broke off with a jarring discord as a B-string snapped. Like so many automatons, all obeying the same control-button, heads craned.
"Yes?" said Demidoff, retracing his steps. "What is it?"
"Oh—just a trifle. Did I not hear you ask just now if there was in all the world such hair as Suzanne's? Well—" as Demidoff came nearer, white-faced, trembling a little, "there is! Quite a lot of it, in fact! At Vautreuil's in Paris where Suzanne buys hers! You see, when I first met her, three years ago, her hair was black, black as night, black as..."
He did not finish the sentence.
"You lie!" said Demidoff; and he struck him smartly on the left cheek with his gloves.
That night Alexander Semionovitch Demidoff tried to explain to Jerome Townsend—who was very English—that the duel was inevitable; that he could not apologize for insult and blow; that in lying about Suzanne's hair, the Turkoman had really polluted her character, her soul, her inner and sacred self. Then, when his friend had left him, he prayed at length to Kyrill, his patron saint, and then he slept like a little child, for he had no fear and knew that he was going to kill the other.
The next morning he ate a hearty breakfast and, accompanied by his second, Jerome Townsend, drove out to a little clearing in the oak forest not far from the Samarkand Gate. There, beneath a tight, vaulted sky of rose and gray, with Bokhara's domes and minarets etching the far horizon, Timur Kadjar Khan shot him through the heart, and so Townsend wired to his parents in sleepy old Kazan and took him back to his rooms.
He looked handsome and boyish and romantic and very happy as he lay there in state, with the great, yellow candles and the flowers and the little ivory crucifix in his folded hands, and the acolytes swinging sweet-smelling incense pots on silver chains, and the tall, bearded, miter-capped Russian priest booming out the Chant of the Departed in the Faith:
“Poutnik otdekai, ot zla zachechiony
Borbe i moukam nasstal konietz;
Keegn sabliu protch, ne boudesh bolie voyvat
Pobeda iesst tvoia e vetchny tvoi pokoy!"
("Pilgrim, rest, from ill defended! Strife and striving now are past;
Sheathe thy sword, the war is ended,
Thine the victory, home at last!")
And Suzanne de Cassagnac came. Timur Kadjar Khan himself had told her of the affair, the insult, and the duel.
"I am sorry, my dear," he had said. "But I shall have to leave Bokhara at once and go back to the tents of my tribe and live the simple life until this blows over."
Now she knelt at Alexander Semionovitch Demidoff's bier and, somehow, in her hollow, tinselly soul, she thought of the many men whom she had known, how each had plotted and schemed and lied, and how the only honest knight in all the world was this dead boy. Then she thought of his mother; then of her own; and she felt very sad. She sobbed and cried, and her shaking body caused the tall candles to tremble, and some of the hot wax dropped on her golden hair—the golden hair which had killed Demidoff. Then she walked home in the purple-lidded dusk, back to her house, not far from the mosque of Bala-i-Hawa, which reflected her own soul in her pink and white boudoir, with its elusive, elaborately framed water colors, toilet articles of crystal and gold, and pillows of orchid satin covered with lace.
"Marie Claire," she said to her Breton maid, "I have a frightful headache."
"Shall I rub Madame's temples with eau-de-cologne?"
"Please."
"Madame," said Marie Claire a few moments later, as her skilled hands smoothed the throbbing temples, "what has happened to your hair?"
Suzanne de Cassagnac looked into the mirror.
"Oh—" she exclaimed, rather annoyed. "Some hot wax dropped on it!"
"I shall send this one at once to Paris, to M. Vautreuil. Madame can wear the old one until this returns."
"I suppose I shall have to," sighed Suzanne. "Please—take a little more eau-de-cologne! I can't stand these emotional intermezzos!"
And she closed her eyes.