# The Adventures of Million Dollar Smith/The Second Hundred Thousand

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, July 1925

### The Second Hundred Thousand

LAUGHTER and the clinking of thin Venetian goblets drifted into the night that vaulted above the Piazza del Popolo with a purple dome. The Paradiso was in full swing. You went there almost instinctively after the theatre if you were anybody at all; if you were a little more than anybody at all the vulpine Lombard headwaiter greeted you by name in his gliding, lisping Milanese; but if you belonged to the chosen and exquisite few, you did not have to tip the carriage starter.
There was no special reason for the place’s feverish popularity. It was a fad. Rome knew seven cabarets where the food was better, nine where the wines were older, eleven where the decorations were in smarter taste. But here it was: the sensation of the year.
A Serene Highness had discovered it. Society had adopted it. The newly rich—the Levantine nabobs from Syria with their bold-eyed daughters—the swag-bellied colonials on home jaunt from their Algerian olive groves, larding their limpid Italian with guttural Arabic expletives—the wealthy foreign tourists—the yellow haired Sardinian barons with their queer Gothic profiles, out to spend five years’ rents in a month’s crimson spree—the squat Sicilians who, emigrated to South America in the steerage, had returned as cattle kings and were profaning the dim Renaissance palaces beyond the Ponte Sant’ Angelo with their gold, their garlic and their loutish garrulity—all that motley Roman world had followed society’s lead. So had the half-world, lending spice to the other half.
Tables were reserved two weeks in advance. Peaches cost thirty lires each; caviar seventy lires a portion; champagne two hundred lires a bottle, and two hundred and fifty if served à la Russe with a half square of sugar and seven drops of angostura.
A caprice. But a Success.
The Paradiso—with the old Adam and the new Eve!
The Paradiso where around three in the morning even the blasé headwaiter mistook the hardening of his arteries for the quickened pulse of pleasurable anticipation!
The Paradiso, tonight, with Laurette de Roza on the cabaret stage, singing a recent London hit:
“Katie thought she'd like to try
Something more ambitious!
Katie in the chorus made
The simplest wife suspicious!
Katie wore a scanty frock
And sang a saucy ditty!
Katie hocked the necklace
Sent by Cræsus in the City!
Katie! Ka-a-a-atie!"
Laughter. Staccato applause. “Ka-a-a-atie!” the refrain was taken up from table to table while Laurette danced whirlwind fashion across the boards, shaking her head till her mop of hair spread in a russet cloud around her roguish little face, swaying, bending, her small, heelless shoes flickering now high now low. Suddenly she vanished through the wings in a tumbled eddy of scarlet, diaphanous skirts.
“Da capo! Da capo!” exclaimed a dwarfish man whose yellow, monkeyish face flushed with paint belied his historic name, reminiscent of the days when princely Roman brawlers mocked alike the Pope’s excommunications and Hapsburg’s halberdiers.
“Jolly clever gal!” commented a sporting church warden from Upper Tooting who had dipped his hands into the offertory bag to defray the expenses of his continental trip.
“Encore!” cried Mrs. DePuyster Van Rensselaer, the famed expatriate who had solved the trick of speaking English with an Italian accent and Italian with a French accent.
“Hooray!” shouted Canfield Smith. But he cut off his boisterous acclaim as he noticed that the stranger with whom he shared the small table, instead of applauding, was sighing, then shielding an incipient yawn with his hand.
Canfield was in a quandary. As a rule he felt a pang of jealousy when he heard the storm of applause which greeted, wherever she played, this girl who was dearer to him than the dwelling of kings. On the other hand, here he was distinctly annoyed with the stranger’s behavior. Not to applaud Laurette—why—it was worse than applauding her. He looked at this man who was short, powerfully built, tersely masculine, the round head covered with thick, bluish curls, the complexion healthy and ruddy, the large nose strongly marked at the roots, the mustache aggressive with its turned up, waxed points. He was in conventional evening dress, and the only exotic note was struck by a square, crimson spot on the center of the forehead. It was neither scar nor blemish, but had evidently been painted on deliberately. He continued sighing and yawning until Canfield finally addressed him in English, with a sudden access of American directness:
“WHAT’S biting you? Don’t you like Miss de Roza?”
“Rather! Positively corkin’!” came an amazingly broad British drawl which was ludicrously out of focus with the speaker’s appearance and which for the time scotched Canfield’s original grievance and forced his surprised question:
“Are you English?”
“My word—no!”
“French?”
“I don’t even speak it.”
“Italian—Spanish—Balkanish?” went on the cross examination.
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’m sorry,” the voice was mild and apologetic, “but the distressing fact is that I’m a god.”
“Wh—what did you say?” stammered Canfield.
“I’m a god. At least my priests say so.”
“You aren’t by any chance orey-eyed?” countered Canfield.
“Pardon! I didn’t quite catch—”
“American for stewed to the gills.”
“Oh—you mean to ask if I’m snooted?”
“Right. Are you?”
“My dear old trout,” replied the other, “I’m both sober and serious. You see—I’m the Rajah of Oktamund.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m the Emperor of Idaho, and—”
“I mean it,” interrupted the stranger, smiling in such a disarming manner that Canfield stretched impulsive fingers across the table, finding the other’s as steely as his own.
“I don’t care if you’re liar or drunk or plain nut,” he laughed. “Anyway, I’m for you even if you didn’t give the kid a hand—” pointing at the now empty stage. “Which reminds me: why the devil didn’t you?”
“Because,” sighed the man, “I’ve the blues."
“Why?”
“Long story.”
“Maybe I can help. Explain, brother.”
The other did, in a burst of confiding sympathy. There was no doubt as to his being a Rajah. For just then some new arrivals entered, piloted by a Roman society matron in baby-blue velvet that was quite out of keeping with her adipose. When she saw the stranger she curtsied deeply with a creaking of protesting whalebones and breathed: “Ah—your Imperial Highness!” in a buzz of subdued and apologetic awe.
“All right,” granted Canfield. “You’re sure enough Rajah. But how come you’re a god?"
“I can’t help it,” replied the other. He told Jack that, as a younger son of the house of Oktamund, he had spent most of his thirty years in England where he had gone to Eton and Oxford and then: “just toddled about—with the gals, you know, and a polo mallet and a bridge score,” until a few months ago, through a series of deaths, the throne had become his. “Corkin’ revenues and all that,” he added, “but there are the silly old traditions and legends of Hindu religion—and there are those blighters of Brahman priests!” For it appeared, that the Oktamund Rajahs bear a unique relation to India, being the direct descendants of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, first born of the sons of Shiva the Creator and Doorgha the Destroyer.
“Say!” laughed Canfield. “You got our pioneer families in Spokane backed off the map when it comes to putting on social dog.”
“Rather swanky, I grant you. But such a bore.”
He continued that the reigning Oktamund Rajah is considered a god by all India, so sacred that the mere repetition of his name is in itself an act of merit. Compared to him the Hanovers are but parvenus, the Romanoffs nameless vagrants, the Bourbons recent adventurers.
“Well—what’s the kick?” asked Canfield. “Socially you’re it and didn’t you say the revenues are bully?”
“They are. But I don’t get them.”
“How’s that?”
“Being a god. I’m not supposed to live in Europe, among the Mlechhas, the foreign barbarians. I’m supposed to go home to India and behave—oh—like a god. So the priests wrote me. I refused. They insisted. I cabled them to go to the devil. Then a couple came over, and I met them here in Italy. I argued with them. I painted this asinine caste mark—the mark of Ganesha—on my forehead to pacify them, and, incidentally, the dashed thing won’t come off—the colors are fast. I offered to abdicate in favor of a young cousin. All of no avail. This morning those fat Brahman blighters returned to India. But before they left, being in hereditary control of Oktamund’s finances, they cut off my allowance, every penny, to force me to go home.”
"The dirty buzzards!”
"Aren’t they? So here I am, old fruit. A rajah—a god—and stony broke. And—” almost tearfully—“I’m perfectly happy in Europe. 1 don’t want to go home and be a god!”
“Say!” exclaimed Canfield with typically generous impulse. “If it’s just a question of a few thousand—”
“Pardon!” the other interrupted stiffly. “I cannot accept—”
“Didn’t mean to offend you, old man.”
“Jolly decent of you. But you understand, don’t you?”
“You bet. And I like you the better for it. You’re the first guy I met in Europe and offered money to who didn’t jump at it. But what are you going to do?”
“I fancy—” he returned rather hopelessly—I’ll have to earn my own living.”
“Has been done before,” smiled Canfield.
“I’m aware of it,” said the Rajah, adding with utter naïveté: “And you know—it has always been a complete mystery to me how people do it.”
“Hell—I’m in the same boat as you.”
“Impossible! Why—you offered me …”
“I’m not broke. Only—”
“Yes?”
“A confidence for a confidence. Listen.” And Canfield related how, formerly a cowboy, he had come into possession of the rich Dixie Glory mine with “Old Man” M’Gregor and Garrett Findlater as partners; how, having gone abroad to see the world, he had met Laurette de Roza, née Bridget O’Mahoney, the famous Californian vaudeville artiste in Paris, and fallen in love with her; how she had refused to marry him because he was too “flighty” and did not work; how she had warned him against his sponging European friends and had been right since, when through litigation over the title of the mine and subsequent injunction by the courts he had found himself suddenly penniless, all his supposed friends had turned against him; how, embittered by the experience, he had decided to avenge himself on the Europeans by hurting them in their most vulnerable spot—their pocketbooks; how he had sworn not to propose to Laurette again until he had earned a million dollars here in Europe; how he had made a bully start in Paris, winning a hundred thousand dollars at poker—draw, stud and fancy.
“Then Laurette came to Rome to fill an engagement,” he wound up, “and of course I trailed along.” He looked at his watch. “She ought to be dressed by this time. I’ll take you back stage and introduce you. Well—” as they rose—“I don’t want to be a doddering old man when I lead her to the altar. I got to shake a leg and corral a whole flock of dough, and some of it right here while she plays in Rome. So—you see—we two are in the same boat.”
THEY had left the cabaret and were turning into the alley that led to back stage when suddenly he exclaimed:
“I got a bird of an idea!”
“Yes?”
“Let’s be partners!”
“Partners?”
“Sure. An all wool Rajah-god and all wool ex-cowpuncher—can you beat it for a team? Between the two of us we ought to be able to turn a more or less honest penny.”
“I’m willing, old thing. But—how exactly?”
“We’ll dope it out later on. And say—” as they stopped in front of Laurette’s dressing room—“not a word to the kid, at least not until we’ve figured out how to do it. She’s from Missouri—”
“Didn’t you say she was from California?”
“I mean you got to show her. Don’t you get that either? She’s—oh—practical down to the ground. Facts for her, not fancies. She’s liable to throw cold water unless …”
“I understand.”
Laurette and the Rajah liked each other on sight, and when a week later the two partners had worked out a plan of campaign, the Rajah was for telling her. But Canfield vetoed it.
“Not on your life!” he said. “She’s one sweet kid. But—well—she’s a woman—liable to blab. And we got to keep mum, or we spill the beans.”
The idea for their business venture—for they called it by this dignified term—had come to them earlier in the week when the Rajah had introduced his new friend at a ball given by the Princess Malatesta.
The Malatesta palace was immense. But the widowed old princess, American by birth, had invited all Rome that was smart and some of Rome that was not so smart with the result that the majestic sweep of rooms on the lower floor was well filled. The hostess was a great lady who, as she expressed it once, could afford to entertain her own butler at dinner if she felt like it. Loyal, if rather sardonically so, to her own class, she also welcomed everybody who had something new to say or, at least, something old with a new twist.
Thus the sophisticated angels on the frescoed Tiepolo ceiling smiled down on a motley company; men of a dozen nationalities, old and young, radical and tory, Jew and Gentile, sporting and intellectual, socially arrived and socially aspiring, doers and dreamers, and a leavening of well-bred drones, and the women after their kind.
“Typical of our dear Rome, Mr. Smith,” said the old Princess Malatesta to Canfield to whom she had taken with intuitive sympathy. “A mixture of platinum and pinchbeck, steel and whalebone, essence of rose and essence of onion, vulgarity cloaked by purity and purity cloaked by vulgarity. How do you like it?” she finish, a smile on her lips.
“I feel like a mustang in a corral. Sort of scared—”
“I don’t believe you,” laughed the princess.
“Oh—guess I can handle the men all right. But what about the women?”
“Make love to them.”
“I can’t.”
“Tongue tied, Mr. Smith?”
“Next door to it. I’m in love with another girl.”
“Oh, yes. Oktamund told me. Engaged to that delicious Californian dancer, aren’t you? Well—I shall give you a tip or two. Tell the Russian women they look French, the Frenchwomen they look Italian, the Italian women they look Spanish—”
“And the English and American women—?”
“Tell them …” She interrupted herself, and turned to a tall, hook-nosed man: “How do you do? Did I not see you this morning driving down the Corso with that delightful little Countess Doria?”
“Not guilty. I was home—alone,” he said without so much as a quiver.
“My mistake. But—to err is human, no?”
“When you err, principessa mia, it is not human but divine!”
“Wow!” whispered Canfield in passing to the Rajah, “they sure can wag a wicked tongue!” and he went about the rooms in search of amusement, talking to few, listening to many, and presently walking up to his partner and drawing him into a corner behind a screen of potted palms on the other side of which several middle aged English and American women were conversing animatedly.
“I made a discovery,” he said, “and it’s the duck’s quack.”
“Spill it, old thing.”
“I found out what that sort of woman—" putting an irreverent thumb at the palm screen—“talks about when there are no men around.”
“I know,” laughed the Rajah. “The jolly old beans compare operations and sanitariums and facial surgeons and how many monkey glands to dissolve in their morning orgy of hot water and—”
“And then something! And if we use it right it’s going to help us sit pretty. Listen to them. They’re off!”
They were silent, listening intently to the conversation of the women stabbing between the pauses and pianissimos of the lascivious Argentine tango that brushed from the ballroom with tinkly violin pizzicatos, the cello’s honey smooth undertones and the slapstick stammerings of bassoon and clarinet. Staccato, the conversation; disconnected; stray odds and ends of sentences; but telling a logical tale to Canfield’s cool brain:
“—humdrum hats and uninspired frocks—I know, my dear—but then she’s one of the Berkshire Cave-Brown-Caves. …”
“—Lady Emily Greatorex—my mother’s cousin …”
“—a Serene Highness—married to …”
“—my grandfather, Prince of … ”
“—relation of the Dukes of Fitzbattleaxe—younger son—settled in Virginia …”
“—old New Jersey stock—direct grant from Queen Ann—gave up the title …”
“—descendants of Merovingian kings—that’s where we inherit the warts on our noses—quite proud of them …”
“—related to the Kentucky Breckinridges …”
”—morganatic marriage …”
“Get it?” whispered Canfield.
“What?” asked the Rajah.
“Good old Anglo-Saxon sport! Matching ancestors. And if they got none they invent them. One king beats three jokers who’re only measly counts, and if you can pull an emperor—well—read him and weep! Boy, I can hear a great many greenbacks rustling in the offing for you and me. If we play the game right …”
“What do you mean?” came the other’s puzzled question.
“For a god you’re dense! Listen, kid. Home in Spokane, when O’Toole and Einstein struck it rich in the Leroy mine, Mrs. O’Toole went to work and proved that the O’Tooles had come over in the Mayflower, direct from Cork to Salem, and old Lady Einstein raised the jackpot by proving that the Einsteins had been among the original cavalier settlers of Virginia. Then old man Hiram C. Hausenbenzer sells his quarter-section of land—same where his Pennsylvania grand-dad used to raise red Duroc porkers—to the water power company for a round sum, and his wife finds out through a guy in Chicago that the Hausenbenzers are really grandees of Spain, cousins to the dukes of something-or-other, and—mind you—this Chicago con artist who discovers it charges her a thousand bucks. Well—European titles are all very nice. But they’re getting to be as common as false teeth. Now you’re a god, aren’t you? You got a lot of pull with all the other Indian gods, you can trace your descent straight back to—”
“Old trout,” interrupted the Rajah of Oktamund, his voice throbbing with fervent admiration, “I—how do you say in America?—I ‘get’ you!”
“Good.” Canfield rose. “Business meeting tomorrow noon at my hotel. I’m going to locate a couple of likely prospects.”
During the next half hour, going from salon to salon, he talked to many women, finally—as he put it afterward to his partner—“cutting three shorthorns out of the herd.”
For he found a spellbound listener in Miss Ernestine Potts, daughter of Sir Jeremiah Potts, the recently knighted north of England cocoa king. She was a spinster of debatable age, faulty adenoids and romantic leanings who once had been heard to assert that she would “rather die than be of the unknown living.” She made a luncheon engagement with Canfield and murmured that she was terribly excited when he said: “Believe me—the Rajah was startled by the resemblance. What was his grandmother’s name? I forget. He’ll tell you himself—on Wednesday.”
A few minutes later he bowed before the parrot beak of Mrs. DePuyster Van Rensselaer,and, at the end of ten minutes’ tense conversation, had her on the point of denying her Knickerbocker ancestry and told her that Thursday afternoon would do splendidly for him and his friend. “Sure,” he added. “I’ll ask him to bring the sword.”
Lastly he whispered into the pretty ear of a newcomer from Australia who was endeavoring to achieve European fame with the help of a pink Rolls-Royce that matched her string of pink pearls, and agreed with her when she said that now she understood why all her life she had felt this mysterious sympathy with the Orient, and—you bet—tea on Friday at five—he and Oktamund would be there with bells on. Would they bring the holy fakir along? Well—fakirs were shy—but they’d try their best.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll talk to each other and give the bally show away?” asked the Rajah the next day.
“No. In fact they swore me to secrecy—all three.”
“But why?”
“Three reasons: western woman, western society, and western publicity. The first—and it’s the same in Europe as back home in Spokane—gets into the second through the third.”
“What is publicity?”
“Other word for impressing her neighbor. But if she wants to put it across she’s got to be careful. Can’t afford to make a slip, to give sister Brown or sister Magruder a chance to throw a monkey-wrench into her spokes. So she’s got to be sure of her facts: new country place ruined by some up-to-date interior decorator, lariat made of diamonds as big as hens’ eggs, or, best of all, some peachy ancestors. We’re in the business to supply a new line of the latter commodity, aren’t we? Well I planted a few seeds in each of these three feminine prospects. For instance, I told the Potts girl she looks a dead ringer to your late grandmother, and she comes back, quick and sure, with information that her grandfather had been a soldier in India—and wasn’t that a ‘positively thrilling’ coincidence? Which encourages me some, and so I allow as how your grandmother was swiped out of her father’s tent by a roughneck hill chief with a crimson beard, a stony eye, filed teeth, and no morals to speak of—”
“Oh—it is not true!” came the Rajah’s agonized interruption. “My grandmother was most conservative and respectable and—”
“Swiped out of her dad’s tent, she was!” insisted Canfield. “And after this here crimson bearded roughneck got her up to the hills she appealed to the gods, her ancestors, and if in answer to her prayers along came an English soldier and—well—right then the story got a little indelicate, and I shut up. You got to tell Ernestine the rest yourself—Wednesday—at lunch.”
“MY WORD!” groaned the Rajah. “What did you tell the other women?”
“Earlier in the evening I overheard the Van Rensselaer party boast about her collection of antique swords inherited from her family way back when the Dutch were sailing the seven seas. So, sort of casual, I drop a few words to her about the ancient prophecy of Oktamund …”
“What prophecy? We have no prophecy.”
“You bet you have. All about a sword that came out of the west and another that came out of the east, and when the two meet—says this here prophecy—then it’s proof that ’steen hundred years ago, when there was a marriage between the Dutch gink who had the one sword and some flapper daughter of the god-like Rajah of Oktamund … I forget all I said. But Thursday afternoon, at four sharp, you’re going to produce the sword and show it to her and—”
“But I haven’t a sword to my name.”
“I’ll buy you one.”
“Carry on,” sighed the Rajah. “What did you say to the Australian—to Mrs. Oppler?”
“I was getting into my stride then. I told her about that miracle-working Hindu fakir of yours …”
“You don’t mean Tompkins, my valet?”
“No. A Hindu fakir—I said.”
“I’m afraid you overplayed your hand,” rejoined the Rajah. “A sword you can buy— But a fakir …?”
“What about that guy over at Danielo’s restaurant who makes that punk Turkish coffee?”
“He’s neither a Hindu nor a fakir. He’s a Malay and a Mohammedan.”
“What’s the odds? He wears a turban, and his complexion is sort of Missouri mule. I’ll cross his palm with silver and dress him up fancy and, believe me, he’s going to be the finest fakir you ever saw. But, to resume, some time ago this fakir had a mysterious dream. And the other night when he was waiting for you in the cloak room he happened to look through the door and caught sight of Mrs. Oppler, and at once he let out one hell of a yell and foamed at the mouth and said that his dream had come true.”
“What dream?”
“Dog-gone if I know! You’ll tell the lady Friday at five, and you got to bring the fakir along and have him do a lot of hocus-pocus.” No use shaking your head. As I said, a few months from now, if we do it right we’re going to sit pretty—and by the time the ladies are ready to launch their brand new divine ancestry on the envious society of Rome, we ought to be in some other town, declaring a dividend.”
“May the blessed gods grant it!” exclaimed the Rajah with real religious fervor. “May Shiva the Creator and Doorgha the Destroyer protect me!”
“Against what?” laughed Canfield.
“Against woman! We have a Hindu proverb which says: ‘Rather the green snake’s sting and the rage of the male elephant in mating time, than the wrath of a woman who has been deceived!’”
“Who’s deceiving her? We’re only selling her what she wants. Demand and supply. We supply. Perfectly O.K.”
“I’m afraid just the same. Between mysterious prophecies about ancient swords, and grandmothers stolen by hill chiefs, and holy fakirs with preposterous dreams … my dear fool, I was never very good at improvising.”
“Yes—you have no Oriental imagination. All right. I’ll prompt you all I can.”
But if the Rajah lacked imagination he surprised his partner when it appeared that he had a natural genuis for extracting cash from their customers in a refined and gentlemanly manner.
“Boy,” laughed Canfield when they returned from their luncheon with Miss Potts, “your god-like breed must have intermarried with the Scots or the Jews. The way you allowed Ernestine to force a check on you to help you further your investigations as to the history of her family in India—well—my hat’s off to you! How much did she slip you?”
“Three thousand guineas—” the Rajah blushed slightly as he added: “for a starter.”
“Remember, we must play them inch by inch. We got to give them enough line to keep them interested, but not enough line for them to get too darned cock-sure and spring their swell new ancestry—before we’re ready to retire from this business venture of ours. Or our goose is cooked.”
“I know. You heard me tell Miss Potts I’m really not at all sure about her grandfather and my grandmother?”
“I was proud of you. You’ve the right dope. The less sure you seem to be, the more anxious she’ll be to persuade you—and herself. To-morrow we’ll go after the Van Rensselaer party. Which reminds me—I must buy a sword.”
“An Indian one?”
“No. A Dutch one.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
They found an old Dutch blade in a shop near the Piazza Colonna where again the Rajah showed his financial acumen by bargaining the despairing Italian second-hand dealer from a hundred liras down to seventy-three and a half.
“Charmed!” rumbled Mrs. Van Rensselaer the next afternoon as, with all the ponderous majesty of a square-rigged Dutch frigate, she moved toward her visitors through the dancing sun rays that fretted her gorgeous suite in the Barberini palace with orange high-lights and delicate, elfin shadows.
She came straight to the point.
“Your Imperial Highness,” she said to the Rajah, rolling the words under her tongue with almost sensuous pleasure, “Mr. Smith told me something about a prophecy and two swords. It interested me greatly, and he promised me that—”
“Here’s the Rajah’s sword,” interrupted Canfield. unwrapping the recently purchased article. She examined it; then gave a startled exclamation!
“Why—it’s Dutch! And look! Am I right? What are those initials?”
“‘D. P, V. R.,’ ” Canfield read slowly, bending over.
“THE initials of my family! Extraordinary coincidence!” But not so extraordinary could she have seen Canfield an hour earlier scratching them on the steel, afterward antiquing them with dirt and oil. “And what about the prophecy?” she continued with rising excitement.
“Y—yes—the—the prophecy …” the Rajah stammered, slurred, stopped. Then, under the painful persuasion of his friend’s heel grinding into his instep, he remembered the fantastic tale which he had memorized and which had been composed by dovetailing his own knowledge of India with Canfield’s riotous imagining. In spite of his European veneer he was a typical Oriental. He learned slowly, but tenaciously. so once he was started on his recital, he went to the end without further faltering and with a considerable degree of native eloquence.
And a picturesque romance it was! He described how the Oktamunds, descendants of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, had once ruled all of northwest India, fighting hard to hold their princely inheritance; and how amongst the European adventurers who came to India in search of strife and treasure had been a young Dutch sea captain who, risen to high rank in the Oktamund army, had fallen in love with the Rajah’s daughter. There had been a duel, Dutch against Hindu blade, until the Rajah, vanquished, had agreed to the marriage. But since the girl had been won in battle, instead of an exchange of rings there had been an exchange of swords. The princess had died in giving birth to a soil, and the Dutchman had taken the child and returned to his native land.
“But before he left,” the Rajah continued, “he swore a solemn oath that whenever a prince of Oktamund needed the help of his Dutch kinsmen, the latter must come to the rescue. And—says the prophecy—in sign of proof the two blades will meet in a foreign land and will be exchanged. Ah—” he gave a sigh which was a pure product of art—“how I wish it were not only a legend, a superstition—but a fact!”
“You are in trouble?” asked the woman. “You need help?”
“I do not wish to worry you.”
“Please tell me—” And when the Rajah was silent, she turned to the American: “What is it, Mr. Smith.”
“My friend is being hounded by the British government.”
“Perfidious Albion!” exclaimed Mrs. Van Rensselaer.
“Indeed!” echoed the Rajah who, deep in his heart, was more loyal to England than the Tower of London.
“I wish I could help—” She interrupted herself—“I wonder—the prophecy—can it be true …?” She rose. “Wait. I have an Indian sword which has been in my family for generations.”
She left, while the partners fell into tense whispers.
“You’re messing it up,” said the Rajah. “I’ve no quarrel with the British—and don’t want any.”
“I had to say something, didn’t I? By the way—how are we going to make it pay?”
“Don’t know yet. Hush!” as Mrs. Van Rensselaer returned with a beautiful weapon, explaining it was the one which her ancestor had brought from Asia. He took it, looked at it, and almost immediately, startling not only his hostess but also his partner, broke into rolling Indian words: “Bazhava sar! Ki che gondatha! An mazcnthapen thegh …” It sounded like an incantation. He kissed the blade.
“Is it your people’s sword?” the woman asked excitedly.
“I don’t know. I must send to India and find out.” He clasped the weapon to his breast.
“Suppose it is—and the prophecy is true?” she went on. “I’ll help you.”
“How?”
“My sister married a high British official. I shall write to him and ask him to put in a word with his government—”
“No!” cut in the Rajah, glancing furiously at Canfield who had got him into this predicament. He invented rapidly: “Suppose it is not the right blade?” He kept on hugging it, as if loath to let it go. “No! Not a word to your brother-in-law—not a word to a soul until …”
“Until you have made sure about the sword—I understand. But in the meantime let us exchange weapons,” said Mrs. Van Rensselaer. “If the prophecy is true and these are the swords, it will help. If it is only a legend, it can’t hurt.”
“Gladly,” replied the Rajah. “Perhaps,” he smiled, “you and I are indeed …”
“Cousins?” she whispered. “Both descendants of …”
“GANESHA, the elephant-headed god!” he completed her awed sentence, and he implanted a chaste, cousinly salute on her forehead, shortly afterward leaving with Canfield.
Outside, the latter turned to him.
“What’s the big idea? You didn’t get a nickel.”
“But I have the sword.”
“A fat lot of good it’ll do you.”
“Did you look at it?”
“No.”
“I did. My dear old fruit, I know a lot about precious stones, and the hilt is a mass of uncut emeralds that are worth a pretty penny.”
“Right after dinner,” said Canfield, “I’m going to kiss you. You’re some partner. By the way, tomorrow we’re due at Mrs. Oppler’s. I dropped in on Princess Malatesta this morning and sounded her discreetly about the lady. Seems Mrs. Oppler is nuts about—what you call Hindu blah—having lived before—hundreds of times …?”
“Incarnation of souls?”
“Yes.”
“Corkin’! That’ll help. Did you talk to Ali, the chap who makes Turkish coffee?”
“Yes. He’s willing and seems shrewd. Only, he learned English in London and talks with one tough cockney accent—which won’t do for a sacred Hindu fakir.”
“We’ll give him a bit of rehearsing to-night.”
The next afternoon Ali had turned at least in externals into a perfect likeness of a wild-eyed, ash-smeared Indian holy man. But he nearly ruined everything when Mrs. Oppler asked her visitors if they cared for tea. For while Canfield and the Rajah accepted politely, Ali shook his head and said:
“None o’ that ’og-wash for me, lydy! I’ll take a spot o’ Scotch and a bit o’ cold mutton and—” disregarding the Rajah’s murderous glances—“tell the wyter not to forget the pickles—I love pickles, don’t you, lydy?”
“Isn’t he great?” exclaimed Canfield, coming to the rescue. “So simple—and he a holy man!”
“Rather!” echoed Australia and turned to the waiter who had come in, while Canfield whispered in Ali’s ear that he would cut out his liver if he spoke one single further English word during the rest of the afternoon.
Afterward the interview progressed smoothly. Ali acquitted himself well. Asked by the rajah to relate his dream, he broke into explosive, dramatic Malay.
“How fascinating,” commented Mrs. Oppler. “How gorgeously mysterious! How absolutely, perfectly, divinely, utterly thrilling!” It was lucky that she spoke only English since Ali, a ribald and lawless soul, had used the opportunity to recite a Malay love ballad which made up in picturesque realism what it lacked in decency. She turned to the Rajah; “What does it mean?”
THE latter, as prearranged, succeeded in looking embarassed.
“I’d rather not say,” he replied.
“It isn’t—naughty?” There was a faint suggestion of hope in her accents.
“Oh, no,” replied the Rajah while Ali quickly changed a laugh into a cough. “But it deals with something in which we Hindus believe. You—well—you might ridicule it.”
“What is it?” she insisted.
“Memories of former lives—incarnation of souls …”
“Why—I believe in it!” she exclaimed. “I really do! Tell me what he said! Please!”
“Very well.” The Rajah bowed. “This saintly man, through abstinence and self chastisement—” and the atmosphere was so tense that he got away with it in spite of the fact that just then Ali was biting a perfect half moon out of the mutton sandwich—“has risen to the spiritual eminence when, in his dreams, he is alive to remember former lives.”
“Oh!” breathed Mrs. Oppler.
“Thousand of years ago my people, descendants of Ganesha, first born of Shiva the Creator and Doorgha the Destroyer, were at war with the Rathors of Kanauj, descendants of Shiva by an earlier marriage. For, before marrying Doorgha, my ancestress, Shiva was the husband of Kalavatri, goddess of night, and from this union sprang the Rathors of Kanauj. There was a great battle between the latter and the Oktamunds. We beat them. And this saintly fakir saw the battle in his vision, saw the captives being brought in, and amongst them the daughter of the Rathors, called Utpalavarna, ‘Blue as the Lotus,’ because of the color of her eyes. She came as befitted a slave captured in war, with her henna stained feet bound together by a thin, gold chain, her narrow hands tied behind her back with ropes of pearls, her slim young body covered with a silken robe of the sad hue of the champaka flower in mourning for her father, the king of Kanauj, who had died in battle beneath the steel tusks of the war elephants.” The Rajah paused impressively, then went on: “Three times this saintly fakir dreamt the vision. Then, the other night at the Malatestas, he saw you and—”
“You—you mean that I—”
“He recognized in you the Princess Utpalavama …”
“Descendant of Shiva,” whispered Mrs. Oppler with very much the same awed thrill which Mrs. Van Rensselaer had shown.
“Descendant of Shiva,” added the Rajah in a magnificent flight of fancy, “by an earlier, greater union than I. Why—compared to his marriage with Kalavatri, the ancestress of the Rathors, Shiva’s marriage to Doorgha, my own ancestress, was almost morganatic!”
“How utterly heavenly!” exclaimed Mrs. Oppler. She rushed to the telephone. “I must call up Mrs. Van Rensselaer,” remembering how, often in the past, this resolute Knickerbocker lady had snubbed her.
“No, no!” interposed the Rajah. “You mustn’t!”
“But—”
“At least not yet! Not—” mysteriously “until everything has been made ready. Otherwise you will offend the blessed gods. Just listen to him!”—when, again as prearranged, Ali broke out into another guttural Malay chant.
“What does he say?”
“The gods demand absolute secrecy,” translated the Rajah, “secrecy for many weeks in sign of humility and restraint. And, too, the gods demand a sacrifice—a sacrifice of blood and gold.”
“Blood …?” stammered Mrs. Oppler, paling.
“It’s the man’s duty,” the Rajah reassured her chivalrously, “to supply the blood.”
Thus, very evidently and logically, it remained the woman’s duty to supply the gold. Mrs. Oppler did—with such generosity that a week or two later Canfield surprised Laurette de Roza with a handsome canary diamond in an antique setting.
“Of course I’m glad you bought it for me instead of for some other dame,” said Laurette, slipping the ring on her finger. “But considering your silly oath not to marry me until you’ve earned a million fish—considering that, me being a born fool, I wouldn’t marry anybody except you—considering furthermore that I don’t want to die an old maid—what’s the idea of wasting the kale you made in Paris?”
“I made the money for this ring right here in Rome.”
“You did?”
“You bet I did. I’m in business.”
“What sort of business?”
“I’m what you might call a private investigator—looking up people’s relations.”
“À la Pinkerton?”
“Yes—but only more high-toned—real classy stuff.”
“Well—I’m glad your business is honest.”
“So am I!” said Canfield. And for a fact neither he nor his partner were ever troubled by the slightest qualm of conscience.
“Conscience,” he once said to the other, “is a still small voice which has a tendency to become stiller and smaller. Sure. But in our case first of all we’re making these women happy, at least for a while, till they find out. Well—happiness isn’t supposed to last forever, is it? And then—I know how the Van Rensselaer made their pile—by buying a large slice of unimproved Manhattan real estate from the guileless Red Men for a bottle of hooch and by sticking the guileless White Man with high rents for this same improved real estate ever since. And old Sir Jeremiah Potts, Ernestine’s father—a fellow over at the British embassy told me how he became cocoa king: by treating the poor smokes on his African plantations like slaves and by doing all his competitors, even the Stotchmen, in the eye. And as for Mrs. Oppler, before she became a widow—and I understand her husband was one happy guy when he knew death was near—she divorced two other men, both of them escaping with paying that alimony and begging the judge with tears in their eyes to allow them to pay more—they wanted to cinch it! The woman always pays? I never believed in that blah. If she does, why is the man always the party who’s broke? You and me aren’t broke? We’re the exceptions!”
Shortly afterwards Canfield caught a bad cold which developed into influenza. But the Rajah, visiting the sick room, told him not to worry.
“Business is booming, old dear.”
“I wish I could help you.”
“I had a talk some time ago with Clara Bethune-Hunter, the Canadian soprano. I am nearly duplicating the Oppler case. Only, given her profession, I am proving that she is descended from Krishna, the god of music—ah—” lyrically—“the delightful god of ruddy color who thrilled the hearts of all the world as upon his sacred, golden flute, he sounded divine melodies—who charmed the trees and the odorous flowers—”
“Cut it out!” interrupted Canfield with a laugh. “You aren’t selling me any ancestry!”
A week later, having fully recuperated, Canfield asked the Rajah to come to see him.
“Anything new?” he asked when his partner made his appearance.
“Yes. An excellent prospect turned up last night at the Paradiso. She gave me five thousand dollars for a starter—to defray the expenses of my investigation. Jolly interesting story concocted: about the kings of Ulster—from whom the lady, being Irish, is descended—being connected with the Phoenicians and the latter having come originally from India and …”
“Did you say she’s Irish?” interrupted Canfield with sudden suspicion.
“Irish-American. In fact a friend of yours.”
“You—you don’t mean Laurette—Laurette de Roza—?”
“Right-oh, old dear!”
“Give me her check!” thundered Canfield.
“But …”
“Get a move on! Give it to me!”
HE GRABBED the slip of paper, went out of the room, down the stairs, jumped into a taxicab, and ten minutes later surprised Laurette with his first words:
“For a bright kid, you’re one fine little sucker.”
Laurette was busy packing her trunk. Her engagement was over. Tomorrow she was leaving Rome. She turned around; looked up. “What’s biting you?” she asked.
“Here!”—he tossed her check on the table—“throwing away money! Handing it over to dirty crooks!”
“The Rajah a crook? Why—you introduced me!”
“Well—perhaps he isn’t exactly a crook.” Canfield blushed. “But still—all this bunk—descendant of Irish kings—Phoenicians—Indian emperors! You—” he tore up the check—“you ought to be spanked!”
“You—you’re jealous …!” stammered Laurette— “just because you yourself are only a western roughneck, descended from—from—oh—nothing!” she wound up ineffectually. Tears blurred her eyes. “And you—you haven’t the right to talk to me like that—you aren’t married to me …”
“Not yet! But I’m going to be!”
A sudden smile broke through her tears.
“When?” she asked.
“As soon as I have my million, and—” kissing her— “I only need another eight hundred thousand. A little more—” he added with a grin—“you see, I sort of threw away one half of five thousand bucks a while back!”