text: Talk:The Smart Set/Volume 11/Issue 2/We of Adam's Clay

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The Light Came In

By Cosmo Hamilton

HEY were all-square at the seventeenth, and as Bill Churchill stumped along with Mrs. Douglas Adam, followed closely by Adam and Mrs. Churchill, there was a pleasant touch of excitement about them all which went to prove that to them the royal and ancient game of golf was still full of delightful uncertainties.

“It's your drive, Emmy,” said Churchill, turning his good-looking, sun-tanned, honest face to his partner. “Don't be too anxious. Send it nice and straight and I'll drop the ball on the green with a baffie. Gad! It'll be good fun to beat 'em! You remember how they bucked last week when they whacked us on the last green?”

Mrs. Adam shot out a little excited laugh.

“It's all very well for you to talk!” said she. “You're a hardened player. I can't help it, but at this stage of the game I can always feel my heart beating in my neck and I seem to see twenty balls instead of one. However, it's a lovely day and one's getting health and strength out here, and after all, that's the main thing, isn't it? Just look at the babies over there!”

Bill shot an affectionate glance over his shoulder. Among the sand dunes were his own children and those of his old and dear pal whose cheery voice could be heard a little way behind. The sturdy babes were scampering about like a family of rabbits, with shouts of joy. Two nurses sat near by, and one of them was working on a piece of bright-red material which made a particularly nice touch of color among the yellow of the sand. Away in the distance the sea sparkled in the afternoon sun. The air had in it the tang of early spring.

Bill Churchill, who looked as though he had been born in golf clothes, made a careful tee for the charming woman who stood ready to do him justice with her last drive. Her pretty face was all fresh and healthy with exercise. It was good to see the contentment and happiness which was stamped upon every soft line of her figure and which shone in her blue eyes.

Douglas Adam and Enid Churchill took up their positions on the other side of the sand box and waited, and when Douglas shot a friendly and encouraging wink at Enid she nodded back at him, and a little smile played round the corners of her lips.

No wonder the members of that golf club out there on the south coast of England were always glad to see the Adam-Churchill foursome and felt that something was entirely wrong with the world if they missed a week-end. Their keenness set an example, and their steady friendship, which covered as many years, made it possible even for misogynists and skeptics to believe in human nature.

With grim determination Mrs. Adam settled to business, swung her club, got the ball clean, and sent it well up the straight.

“Topping,” said Adam.

“A perfect corker!” said Bill. “Now, Enid, your smack.”

Enid Churchill took a long breath.

“If I go half as far,” she said, “I shall be pleased.” She went farther, and threw her driver into the air with a most infectious cry of joy. Her husband caught it and before putting it into her bag bent forward and gave her an unashamed kiss.

“My dear,” he said, “you really do play a dash good game!”

Her face flushed with pride and pleasure.

All talking at once, these four essentially English people, who had married for love and remained devoted, who did not shy at their responsibilities, and who faced the ups and downs of life with courage and sanity, marched off together. Like Bill Churchill, Adam was a well set-up, good-looking fellow who seemed to have been poured into his clothes. Like Mrs. Adam, Enid Churchill had taken pains, without any of the all-too-obvious aids of art, to retain all the girlishness which Anno Domini permitted. It would have been difficult to find anywhere two mothers of four strapping children apiece who looked so attractive in their short Irish homespun skirts and smart sweaters and businesslike shoes, patterned with nails.

Churchill got off his baffie, took his line, pressed for all he was worth, and got an absolute peach onto the left edge of the sloping green.

“Beat that, Duggie,” he said with an air of very natural triumph.

“I will,” said Adam, and he did. He was a man who could be relied upon in a crisis.

Then came the putting, that most solemn and religious portion of all golf matches. Mrs. Adam miscalculated the bias of the ground. Her ball left the hole half a foot to the right and continued merrily on its way down to the flat.

“Well, that's done it,” she said.

“Oh, bless yer, no,” said Bill. “I've seen Enid miss tons of times.”

“Yes, but you won't see her miss this,” said Adam.

With uncanny certainty Mrs. Churchill's ball made straight for the hole and dropped in with that satisfactory plop which is so dear to the hearts of all true golfers.

Mrs. Churchill bowed profoundly and looked almost as young as that eldest daughter of hers who had her eyes and nose.

Although he was beaten, Bill Churchill was delighted.

“Dear old thing,” he said, “that was really an epoch-making putt. Don't get too good at this game or I shall have you becoming a lady champion, and then God knows what'll become of me and the babes!”

“And now for tea,” said Mrs. Adam. “I'm just a wee bit tired.”

As they were all going into the club-house a letter was handed to Bill Churchill by the steward. Although he was unaware of the fact at the moment, this harmless-looking envelope contained a microbe which was calculated to smash up the excellent friendship of these four admirable people and in a few hours so to undermine and alter the natural characteristics of them all as to make them strangers to each other and to themselves.

“Oh, by the way,” said Douglas Adam, when, the week-end over, the two families were returning to London on the train, “you never told us what was in that letter.”

“An immense amount of piffle!” said Bill. “You know that rich feller, Antrobus, who dabbles in art and is always getting up elaborate fancy-dress balls?”

Mrs. Adam's back stiffened a little.

“I should think I do!” she said. “He's the man who is responsible for all the laxness in society, for all this undressing, and this competition in Orientalism that has grown up in London during the last few years. What in the world is he writing to you for?”

“Well,” said Bill, “he's giving another of his precious fancy-dress affairs in the middle of the week, and two men and two women for whom he has designed what he calls 'exquisitely atmospheric' clothes have fallen out of his party. He is frightfully sick about this, and writes me to ask whether Enid and I and you two will take their places.”

“Good Lord!” said Douglas Adam. “What does he take us for? I'd see myself shot before I play-acted about in fool things of that sort. Think of me in anything but trousers!” he roared with laughter. In his mind's eye he cut a figure which was too foolish for words.

Mrs. Adam said: “Of course, it's quite out of the question,” and Mrs. Churchill settled the matter by adding the word “Quite!”

Bill Churchill pulled out the letter from a pocket which contained a huge tobacco pouch, several new black dots, and a lot of loose cigarettes, wholly unsmokable.

“Pretty calm cheek of that man Antrobus!” he said. “What do you think he's done? He's sent two costumes to my place and two to yours, Emmy. He takes it for granted that we shall go, and says he is perfectly certain that we shall all four of us make a sensation.”

The two women were amazed at the impertinence of this dilettante artist to whom they were both at home as infrequently as possible. They said so. Their words were not to be mistaken. And when Douglas Adam, knocking out his pipe on his heel, remarked that he should chuck. the two boxes that had been left at his house into the bin, they nodded in complete agreement. Whereafter the whole question was dismissed and eight babies, two nurses, and Heaven knows how many bags—to say nothing of their respective owners—were loaded into two motor cars which were waiting at the station,

The next evening after dinner, Bill Churchill, with a queer look of excitement in his eyes, walked round to see his friend, Douglas Adam. It was not a long stretch, because the two friends lived hardly a stone's throw apart. He found Adam reading the paper in his den, surrounded by the usual collection of undergraduate photographs, sporting prints and well-bound  books which gave a note of color to the walls, Churchill's own chair was waiting for him on the other side of the fireplace, just as Adam's chair was waiting for him on the other side of Churchill's fireplace. They were institutions,

He said, obviously marking time: “Weather is getting good, old boy; we shall be thinking about summer holidays soon. I don't like the way our wretched politicians are conducting things. And how about that drop in Great Easterns?”

Adam looked over the top of his paper. It was very plain to him that Bill had something on his mind.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes to everything. I vote we cut England for a bit and take a villa on the French coast—Wimereux, for choice, because they've got some very excellent golf links there. It'll do the children good to get a change of scene, and you and I can air our French. Don't yer think so? Talking of Great Easterns, I am thankful to say I sold out of those last week.”

Curiously enough it seemed to Churchill that there was something on Adam's mind, also, but they both went on talking for about an hour in the desultory manner of two men whose friendship is as solid as the earth. It was not until Churchill got up to go that he came to the point.

“Oh, I say,” he said, “about that feller Antrobus. Do you know I am rather thinking it would be awfully hard luck to let him down. I think we'd better just swallow our prejudice for once and get into those clothes. What do you think?”

A curious expression of eagerness flashed over Adam's healthy, open face.

“That's what I've been thinking,” he said. “After all, Antrobus is a very decent chap, and one may as well do a kindness if one can. But how about Enid and Emmy?”

At that moment Emmy, who had just returned to the drawing-room from having kissed the babies good night, was speaking to Enid on the telephone. “About Mr. Antrobus, dear,” she was saying, “you see, he was at Oxford with Bill and Duggie, and although he isn't a very great friend of ours or yours, at the same time I do think we might all stretch a point and fall in with his earnest request—just for this once. We can go late and leave early, and we shan't feel that we are putting him into a hole—I do hate doing that. What do you say?”

A sudden smile broke out on Mrs. Adam's face when she heard the answer. It was “yes.”

What sudden, astounding thing had happened to these four people to bring about this complete revulsion of feeling? In what way had the microbe, the bug, of Fancy Dress eaten its insidious way into composition so sane and so responsible? The Churchills and the Adams, of all people in the world, in any clothes but their own—it was unthinkable, unbelievable!

But this is the truth: Those four boxes, containing the costumes which had been designed by the artist, Antrobus, and made for his friends by a costumier in Bond Street, had been delivered, duly labeled, at the houses of the Churchills and the Adams while they were on their way to London. They had been carried up to the dressing rooms of the men and the bedrooms of the women.

Mrs. Churchill glanced contemptuously at the box addressed to her, made a mental note of the fact that she must have it sent away in the morning, changed, and left her room. Mrs. Adam looked at her box with annoyance and irritation, dressed quickly, as she was going out to dinner, and forgot the thing. Churchill scoffed at the sight of his box and pushed it into a corner, and Adam, reluctantly obliged to shave again in a limited amount of time, did no more than merely notice the unnecessary existence of the strange box and fall to work.

But, curiosity being one of the strongest ingredients in the nature of human beings, the boxes were opened before those four delightful people went to bed that night, and the costumes contained therein were not only examined—which could have wrought no harm—but they were tried on. That settled it.

“My heavens!” gasped Bill. “What couldn't one do in things like these?”

“Gad!” said Douglas Adam. “I could put in a great evening in these clothes!”

Mrs. Churchill gazed at her reflection in the mirror almost open-mouthed.

“How deliciously daring!” she murmured.

Locking her bedroom door for the first time in her married life, Mrs. Adam returned for the tenth time to her pier glass.

“I wonder—I wonder if I dare!” she said.

The microbes had begun to do their deadly work.

On the night of the ball Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Adam dined with the Churchills.

Was it any wonder that Bill's admirable and conventional ancestors gazed down from the gold frames with raised eyebrows and horrified eyes?

Douglas Adam was utterly unrecognizable as an Aubrey Beardsley Pierrot. His clothes were elaborately degenerate and full of strange, suggestive colors, with lace ruffs and anklets. His well-groomed head was hidden beneath a mauve silk skullcap, tied in a tremendous bow at the back. His sun-tanned, healthy face was entirely hidden beneath a layer of thick, white substance, and his good, honest mouth was covered with bright-red lip rouge. His brows had been whitened over and his eyes made up to represent those of a man who had devoted all his life to orgies of unthinkable things. It was amazing.

Enid Churchill, at the end of the table, notorious for her rigid views on women's bathing clothes and the sort of costumes which are now worn by stage favorites, was actually undressed as a Columbine. Her charming and discreet limbs were encased in white silk tights. From her small waist outward there emerged a stiff frill of white tulle. Her neck and arms and shoulders were bare, and the rest of her was just—and only just—covered with white satin. The servants turned away their heads when they saw her,

Even his mother would not have known Bill Churchill. He was consistently and wonderfully Indian, and his chocolate face shone beneath a glistening turban. His forty-two-inch chest was covered with a tight-fitting coat, a very mosaic of Byzantine upholstery. His legs were thrust into a pair of amazingly loose blue-satin trousers and his feet into jeweled slippers which turned up at the toes. He wore rings on every finger, while a big, yellow stone made a sort of bilious eye on his forehead.

As for Emmy Adam, the daughter of a bishop and the niece of a minor canon, the butler blushed to see her. She was not merely Oriental, but Oriental according to Dulac. She wore shimmering, diaphanous clothes which acted as a very BaedeckerBaedeker [sic] to the imagination. Her fair hair was all loose beneath a silver veil. Jewels gleamed upon her forehead and hung from her ears and neck. Her long fingers were all beringed, and round her slim right ankle a golden snake with two green eyes was twisted. Her charming young, motherly face was thickly painted, and her long eyelashes stood out stiffly, each one as black as jet.

The conversation of these four once-deserving people, whose friendship had been so fine and clean and healthy, was not as usual, of golf, weather, the rise and fall of stock, or politics. Never once were the wonderful sayings of the children reported with bursts of affectionate and sympathetic laughter, or the reduction in the price of women's clothes in the Oxford Street shops referred to.

The microbes were working busily.

Douglas turned his blasé eyes on Mrs. Churchill and said with the ineffable air of the master of affectation:

“How strangely you recall to my tired mind that spring night after a silver shower when, in all the beauty of my luscious youth, I discovered the secret of wickedness.”

“Oh, la!” simpered Enid, with an early Victorian gesture. “You naughty man!”

“I pray you be serious,” pleaded Douglas, lifting a daffodil from a bowl and placing its innocent stem into his champagne. “I am too frail for harsh outbursts of ridicule. That was the night when I discovered that my soul had come down to me through the vista of dead years from the body of a Greek satyr. All the blossoms of the earth stirred in their beauty sleep, and the waters of the lake heaved a sigh. It is the coolness of your round arms, the white petals of your ballet skirt, the almost dazzling alertness of your clear, moon eyes that take me back to that crashing moment.”

And then his vice-stained mind lost its way and his eyes fell upon the startled daffodil.

“Look!” he added. “See how this virgin flower, fresh from the company of earth's angels, has satiated itself with wine. She is foolishly drunk. Were I to take her back and lay her down among her family, the sky would be rent with an outburst of tribulation and all daffodils would put on mourning for their lost daughter.”

The Columbine threw back her head.

“You dear, sweet fool!” she said.

The butler nearly spilled the soup.

Bill also showed the effects of this new malady. His eyes were hot and passionate. Utterly neglecting his dinner, he gazed at Emmy and murmured strange Sumurunian things to her.

“Princess,” he said, “temptation of my heart, surely I am come to save thee, but if the Sultan learns who I am, we are dead, thou and I, because his jealousy is great!”

And Emmy, upon whom the spell had laid its hand, replied saying:

“Oh, thou who bring'st me life, tell me what I shall do!”

And Bill replied:

“When I depart hence let it appear that thou are unrestored to the possession of thy faculties. Howbeit, the full cure is to come after. Therefore when the Sultan comes to thee, be sad and meek and continue to repulse him as thou hast done aforetime, yet having no fear but that I will keep thee safe from him to the last. Later I will return to Codabad and fall upon him with my sword.”

The eyes of the Princess gleamed through her veil.

“But, brave Prince,” she said, “out of pity we must get rid of him, for I would not afflict him needlessly with the sight of my happiness. Nevertheless, let his death be lingering and terrible so that the name of the Sultan of Codabad shall live in story.”

No wonder the butler turned as white as a sheet.

And so it went on until it was time to go. Douglas Adam toyed with his food and continued to utter Wildeisms; Mrs. Churchill, who, according to a flippant servant, must have found her chair very cold, went on giggling in the early Victorian manner and saying pert and foolish things; Bill plunged headlong into the language of the Arabian Nights, which all came back to him, and Mrs. Adam, completely under the spell, looked languorously at him through her veil.

Williams, the butler, who had been with the family almost as long as the family had been at all, waited for their return until four o'clock the following morning, yawning his head off. It was the first time he had ever been kept up later than midnight. He sat for hours eying a silver tray on which he had arranged a decanter of whisky, a siphon of lithia water, four tumblers, and a plate of chicken sandwiches, asking himself what in the name of all that was horrible and tragic had got into his master and mistress and their two good friends,

And when at last, just after the little ormolu clock in the drawing room had struck four, he heard a motor car draw up outside the house, he didn't know whether to be relieved or not, because there came to him on the still air of the morning a burst of wild laughter. With a strange hesitancy he went down to open the door. What might not yet happen to these four well-bred, well-born, deserving people who were obviously still suffering from the strange and insidious effects of fancy dress!

The last thing that Williams saw before he went to bed almost undermined the whole of his respect for his master and Mrs. Douglas Adam. “The Prince of Harran,” as Emmy called Bill, bent down with an Oriental murmur, lifted the “Princess of Deryabar” into his arms, and carried her upstairs. This was the name he had given to his friend's wife.

Was there a look on Mrs. Churchill's face, however slight, of annoyance or surprise or jealousy? Not one. She had thrown off her cloak and was standing against the arch in the hall with her long, bare arms artificially arranged behind her head, her tulle skirt stiffly out all around her, with an expression of early Victorianism so simpering and so silly that she might have been one of the many unnecessary pictures of that period come to life. She actually took no notice of Bill's behavior with the wife of his friend; nor, for the matter of that, did Adams himself. Looking more blasé and degenerate than ever, with his red lips standing out against his dead-white face like a bloodstain on the snow, he remained in front of the Columbine like a man reluctantly fascinated with something for which he had a complete contempt. In a voice which was not his own—high-pitched and finicky—he gave forth an Oscar Wildeism as though to the manner born. It is absolutely true to say that Williams ran downstairs.

Arriving at the drawing-room, the Prince of Harran carried the Princess of Deryabar to a sofa, laid her down upon it, and bent over her. The odd part about it was that dear old, commonplace Bill did not look in any way ridiculous in that absurd attitude. He had, in a strange way, become the man he was representing. The insidious influence of fancy dress had done its work.

“Give me thy hand,” he said, “oh, lady of my dreams! Let me speak frankly to one whose beauty hath conquered my heart!”

If only the matrons of that London square could have heard Emmy's reply.

“Nay,” she answered; “let my lord go hence and break this spell, else will my husband put him to death.”

It was appalling.

Even when his wife and his best friend came in with the preliminary announcement of a titter, the Prince made no attempt to change his attitude or cut short his Sumurunian outburst. On the contrary, he went, down on his knees at the side of the sofa and placed one of Mrs. Adam's hands against his lips.

This seemed to give Douglas his cue, He mixed a strong whisky and soda, sipped it, shuddered, and handed it to Mrs. Churchill. Now, Mrs. Churchill had been brought up to believe that whisky was, in great moderation, a man's drink, and that, once tasted by a woman, her feet must necessarily be on the downward path. Nevertheless, she emptied the glass. The microbe had completed its work.

The very room, though filled with solid English furniture of unashamed modernity, with the usual English pictures of cornfields and rosy-cheeked children swinging on gates, had become as artificial as the occupants. The blinds were drawn, although the day was well awake and milkboys were going their rounds and cats were returning home after midnight operatic performances, and the electric light was all going.

For at least an hour these four well-born, blameless, happy, and responsible people who were a credit to their country and to their cast, continued to behave in a manner diametrically opposite to their characters and upbringing.

Outside in the street life had begun again. Errand boys were whistling, maidservants were cleaning steps, taxi-cabs bowled by, and the distant rumble of traffic could be heard. A faint gleam of sun glorified the roofs of the houses and made the sparrows twitter; but in this charming drawing-room, where nothing more exciting had hitherto taken place than bridge parties for moderate stakes, the blinds were still drawn, the electric light was still ablaze, and a thin cloud of Egyptian cigarette smoke hung in the air.

Suddenly Adam let out a cry of anger, broke through his too-well-assumed veneer of Beardleyism, and sprang at his friend like a prize fighter.

“What the devil do you mean by kissing my wife?” he cried. “Are you off your head?”

Bill rose from his knees and turned hotly.

“Your wife? Dost thou not know, dog, that the 'Princess of Deryabar' loves me?”

“You infernal fool!” shouted Adam.

He let out his left, caught his foot in a rug, stumbled against the window, and, in trying to save himself, clutched at the curtain and brought it down, rod and all.

The light came in, and in the white, fresh flood of it there stood both women on their feet, scared, ashamed, and horrified.

“But, my dear old chap,” said Bill, stammering. “I—I—I'm most frightfully sorry. What on earth have we all been playing at?” He put up his hand, pushed off his turban, and stood there, short-haired, a comic and rather idiotic figure.

Rather sheepishly Adam let go the curtain to which he was still clinging. “Good heavens!” he said, as though waking from a dream. “Good heavens!”

Mrs. Churchill, with one swift motion, plucked at a lace tablecloth and wrapped it round her charming limbs. As for Mrs. Adam, in her diaphanous clothes which left so little to the imagination, she stood up timid and scared and shamefaced, like a schoolgirl discovered bathing by a hilarious party of holiday makers.

Bill went round the room quietly and turned off the electric lights. He then went to the window and opened it. A rush of cool air came in, stirring the cloud of cigarette smoke. Then he stood looking from one face to the other.

“Do you know that it's nearly six o'clock? What the deuce will Williams think of us all?” And he laughed shortly and without merriment. “Darling,” he added to his wife, “for Heaven's sake, go and get something on!”

Adam had removed his mauve silk skullcap. Above his white face his reddish, kinky hair seemed to be very properly out of place. He looked at himself in a mirror that hung on the wall and gave a gasp of dismay.

“Have I been playing the idiot in this get-up?” he asked. He turned to his friend's wife. “Oh, look here! Do forgive me for what I have said. I—I've made a perfect ass of myself.”

Mrs. Churchill gave a little cry.

“Listen!” and over her face a little smile stole, and something that was exquisitely maternal came into her made-up eyes. “It's baby crying,” she said, and ran away.

“Well, so long, old man,” said Adam, laying his hand on Bill's square shoulder. “Er—I think we'd better go together and tell Antrobus what we think of him. In any case, we catch the usual train on Friday afternoon, eh? The links will be in fine condition this week-end. Come along, Emmy, get into your cloak, dear. You must be awfully cold. I'm spoiling for eggs and bacon and a cup of hot coffee.”

Bill went upstairs two steps at a time.

“Wash all this beastly stuff off,” he said to himself. “Get clean. That's the thing—clean!”

And when his wife heard him singing through the noise of both taps, she smiled and was grateful.

title: The Light Came In


text: Talk:The Light Came In

title: Talk:The Light Came In


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Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/405

741-745] spread among the latter. And as the Arabs had now lost their readiness for battle by reason of their tribal feuds, the Berbers ventured, under the Caliph Hishām, openly to secede. After local revolts, which were quickly suppressed, a serious rebellion began in the extreme west. The whole territory of what is now called Morocco within a short period shook off the domination of the Arabs (741). Hishām hereupon sent a powerful army, composed of the best Syrian troops, to Africa, and it was intended that this force should co-operate with the garrisons already there. But the feuds amongst the Arabs themselves more than counterbalanced their better equipment, and in consequence the Berbers won a mighty victory (741) at the river Sebu, or, as the best Latin authority gives it, "super fluvium Nauam," and thus put in doubt the supremacy of the Arabs. Later on numerous fugitives crossed over into Spain and brought new confusion into the confusion there prevailing. But here as there for a short period the authority of Damascus was once more restored. Ḥanẓala ibn Ṣafwān, the new governor, managed by time-honoured methods to prevent common action on the part of the Berbers, and then later vanquished the main body of the Berber troops (742) at Aṣnām, not far from Ḳairawān. His representative, 'Abu-l-Khaṭṭar, then enforced order in Spain. The Berber revolt was thus broken, but it was the Berbers notwithstanding, and not the Arabs, who decided the destinies of the countries. Though the majority returned to Muslim orthodoxy, remnants of the Khārijites have maintained their position in Northern Africa even to the present day, under the name of Ibāḍites.

This peace lasted scarcely three years. Spain arose out of the new tumults as an independent State, for which a period of high prosperity was in prospect. In North Africa too a series of independent States was gradually formed. After the residence of the Caliph had been removed nearer to Central Asia it was probably natural that the Mediterranean territories, inhabited by a vigorous population, should begin a separate existence as States. After the fall of the Umayyads the countries to the east of Baṛka, permeated by the Saracen expansion, only occasionally and then only nominally held common cause with the Eastern Empire. The first usurper preserved at least the appearance of dependence. In the year 745 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān ibn Ḥabīb, of the tribe of Fihr, declared himself in Tunis independent of the governor Ḥanẓala, who had conducted the affairs of the Maghrib since the revolt of Ḳairawān. Belonging to a race long tried and approved on African soil, 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān could count on followers by reason of the universal discontent. By a brutal intrigue he compelled Ḥanẓala to leave Africa without drawing the sword. The last of the Umayyads, Marwan, subsequently legalised the de facto authority of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān. For this 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān paid a small tribute and named the Caliph in his pulpit prayers, but he was otherwise his own master; and his position was not influenced by the change in the dynasty in the East. When the rule of


text:
The Smart Set/Volume 19/Issue 4/A Conspiracy Inhibited

E came swinging out of the Flatiron Building into a piercing hurly-burly of sound and color and movement. He paused a moment to breathe the whipping briskness of the air, his alert, wide-open blue eyes surveying the scene with every appearance of appreciative enjoyment. He dropped into the current presently, and, at a leisurely gait, permitted it to bear him downtown.

Suddenly he started, clapped his hand, as if in tardy remembrance, to an inner pocket and drew out a letter. It was big and square, superscribed in a hand so dashing and large-lettered that it had the effect of pushing the special-delivery stamp quite off the surface. He had just inserted a vandal finger under the flap when his glance, playing casually ahead, caught on that, in the crowd, which impelled him to put the note back, unopened, into his pocket.

She was strolling uptown. There was the same appearance of uncertainty in her graceful, unhurrying gait that marked his own. In the vari-colored human surge, her mouse-like appearance made a detail of contrasting and delicate charm.

She was dressed all in gray—gray broadcloth suit, gray shoes, a chinchilla turban with a saucy gray plume, a chinchilla scarf, crossed on her shoulders and falling to her waist, a huge heart-shaped wad of chinchilla, that was a muff, suspended from her neck by a silver chain.

Her expression was unworldly, almost spiritual. It contrasted piquantly with the chic smartness of her clothes. Drifting nonchalantly from person to person, her look was arrested at his face. There, as if a little puzzled, it paused an instant.

A curious impulse caught him. It ran riot in his brain for a white-hot instant. It crystallized into a definite intention. He stopped at her side.

“I beg your pardon.” His tone was pleasant and filled with an easy deference. “I'm sure that I've met you somewhere, haven't I? Will you let me walk up the Avenue with you?”

The girl stared at him aghast.

He was a tall fellow, his clean-shaven, fair skin browned and reddened by an unseasonable burn. He had a stalwart, well-shaped figure, running a good deal to shoulder. His short crop of hair fitted his head like a cup of gold.

Her stare lasted an instant. Then a haughty color flared into her face. It wiped out the look of aloofness in its expression and brought out the pride in it. “Certainly mot!” she flung freezingly to him.

He resumed his hat equably. Her shocked profile darted past him. It paused halfway.

“Yes,” she suddenly conceded, turning impetuously to him, “you may walk a little way with me. I would like to have a few minutes' conversation with you.”

He placed himself at her side. She walked a few moments in silence. He waited.

The early November twilight was trembling in solution in the air. A heavy gray sky sagged low over the cañon-like sides of the streets and held down their roar. Here and there, a roof prematurely lighted, embroidered it with the glittering letters of an electric sign. An inextricable tangle of cars, carriages and automobiles strained Broadway and Fifth avenue to the spilling-over point. The sidewalks bordered them with parallel human currents. All these streams met at Twenty-third street, eddied there into a whirlpool, in which pedestrian appeared to wrestle with vehicle, then bisected each other and continued smoothly onward.

“I'll cross here, I think,” she commanded curtly. “You understand you are to leave me the moment I desire it. Thank you, I can take care of myself,” as he made a movement, involuntary on his part and purely benevolent, destined merely, as he explained with humility, to prevent her from being “chewed” by the two automobiles that had, simultaneously, marked her for their prey.

She received this elucidation in oppressive silence. She threaded for herself a composed and skilful way until they reached the sidewalk.

He observed that her hair was soft and dusky. It broke primly from each side of the milky part, that protruded in front of her hat, fell to her ears, broke there into an incipient riot of curls, subsided into waves and retreated, entirely quelled, into a decorous plaited mass in her neck.

“Now,” she began imperiously, turning on him with a suggestion of menace in her air, “will you kindly tell me why, out of all the women on Broadway, you selected me to approach in that insufferable way?”

He looked embarrassed.

“Well—I—the fact is—I—I”

“The fact is,” she took it up heatedly, “that after looking me all over, you concluded that I was the kind of girl who would respond to such an overture.”

Her face flashed indignantly up in his direction and then away. He saw that the light glinted through the transparent bridge of her disdainful little nose.

“I thought nothing of the kind,” he asserted with equal spirit.

“Oh, then you did do me the honor to decide that I looked respectable?”

“Of course, I did. There was no question in my mind about your respectability.”

“You did it to annoy me, to frighten me, then?”

“Oh, I say, I'm not that particular kind of a blackguard.”

“But you deliberately chose to insult me. I think I'll deliver you into the hands of the first policeman we come to.”

Her tone was vicious with steady intention.

“You may—if you want to,” he conceded grovelingly. “You'll have to appear in the Jefferson Market Court against me, and I'm afraid they will put you in the newspapers. But don't mind me, if that's the only thing that will satisfy you. Do you object if I resist arrest, though? I've always thought I would like to lick one New York policeman before I die. I suppose my mother'll feel pretty bad, especially as I've just come back from a trip round the world and haven't seen her for nine months. But I'd like to have you meet her. You'd like each other—I can see that. She's the Spartan kind; she'll agree with you. She'll say I got only my just deserts. But I shall maintain to my dying day that I never meant to insult you.”

All the way, he had been taking stealthy peeps at her profile. Now he looked straight ahead. His manner was absolutely serious, ponderously penitent.

“But if you could only tell me why you did it,” she persisted. “You don't look like a mere vulgar villain. That's why, in a way, I condescended to let you right yourself in my eyes.”

“Heaven knows, I'm trying hard enough to do that. But I can't seem to say the right thing. This is the first time in my life that I ever spoke to a girl that I wasn't sure about. Now, doesn't that mitigate some?”

“But why weren't you sure you couldn't speak to me?” she demanded with ruthless feminine logic. “Why—why, that's the most insulting thing you've said yet! Why should you choose me to be the first to be uncertain about?” She paused. “Was it my manner?' she demanded icily.

“Your manner is perfect.”

“Was it the way I carried myself?”

“Certainly not. You carried yourself as every well-bred girl does.”

“Then it was my clothes.” Under her passionate arraignment of him, her voice had a sub-current of conviction. For an instant she stopped short. Her look was a dagger of interrogation thrust sideways at him.

Her skin was amber with an infusion of cream. He made the charming discovery that it was embroidered delicately with freckles. A row of them filed across her haughty nose and nestled in tiny colonies on her smooth cheeks.

“Listen,” she pushed on rapidly, “when we get level with the mounted policeman at the corner you must leave me. But before you go, I would like to say—this is the real reason why I wished to speak with you. I've come on to New York to be maid-of-honor at the wedding of a friend of mine. I live in a little town in—a long distance from here. I have been very busy doing some charitable work for a year, and I was in mourning anyway, so that when my friend's invitation came, I had no pretty clothes to wear—not a thing. Grandma told me to wait and buy my clothes in New York, and I came on a week ahead, just for that purpose. But, if you can understand it, I'm the kind of girl who hates to shop”

“I never heard of such a thing in my life,” he commented meekly.

“You see, I never know what to buy. Oh, no more than a baby! I never have known. Yesterday I went about from store to store until I was ready to drop. I could not find anything I liked; New York is so different from Boston, and then, everything looked so ultra. The girls who waited on me would tell me that perfectly dreadful things were becoming to me when I knew they couldn't be. Oh, I got so discouraged!”

“You poor thing—you ought to have had me along. I've just been on a shopping spree with my cousin in Paris. I'm an authority on Winter fashions. I could answer any number of those letters you read on the woman's page—'Wild Rose: Take out the sleeves of your last year's waists and turn them upside down.' But go on.”

“In despair, I went to the matinee. It was 'Rose Leaves.' In the second act, in the afternoon-tea scene, there was the dearest little girl I ever saw in a suit all of gray. Oh, she was such a pretty, dimply little thing! And she looked charming—I was simply crazy about her. Now, if somebody will only give me an idea about clothes, I can carry it out as well as anybody. I got it into my head that I wanted a gray suit just like hers. Yesterday I went out and bought recklessly all the things that I wanted, as much like hers as I could. They came home this afternoon. I put them right on and then, as I had plenty of time, I started out for a walk. But, do you know, simply everybody stared at me. Oh, it was so embarrassing! I began to wonder if it was my clothes—people don't look at you like that in Boston. I don't know what grandma would say if she knew I copied an actress. And then—and then—I saw you coming. I thought you looked so jolly and nice—as if really nice girls knew you”

“They do,” he assured her promptly. “You never met a man who's known so many nice girls.”

“When you spoke to me, it nearly broke my heart, because I knew then that there was something wrong. And, although you're afraid to tell me, I understood at once. I know that you don't think I look quite like a nice girl.”

The words had poured out, molten with appeal and staccato with notes of high emphasis. She looked entreatingly at him.

“I'll tell you exactly why I spoke to you,” he said simply. “I did not tell you when you first asked me because what happened to be the truth, in my case, is what men always say under these circumstances. I was afraid you would not believe it. You caught my eye at once, because you seemed such a mouse of a creature—that gray is so soft. Then—I have always liked women to part their hair in the middle. As you came nearer, I had—I honestly had—a sudden conviction that I'd met you somewhere, though I couldn't, of course, think where. I spoke to you on impulse. It was a queer business. I don't understand now why I did it. The moment the words were out of my mouth, I knew, definitely, that I'd never seen you before. I was sorry—on my honor. But I was first attracted to you, believe me, because you looked so girlish—so different. I think your new clothes are all right.”

“Oh, I'm so glad. I should have felt uncomfortable all this evening if you hadn't said that. You see, my friend is the best-dressed girl I know. You're sure that you're telling me the truth?”

“Quite sure.” His sidewise glance surveyed her swiftly. “That coat's a corker! In Paris the girls are wearing rigs that look just like it. The sleeves are all right—and I understand that's a life and death matter. You see, my cousin and I looked at two hundred and eighty-nine thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one coats. I know what I'm talking about.”

“They said the suit came from Paris, but, of course, one never knows. I never spent so much money in my life before—at least never just for clothes. But grandma said I was to have everything I wanted this time, no matter what it cost. You know Massachusetts girls don't think so much about clothes—grandma thinks it's vulgar. I do, too.” Her look grew brooding. “And when,” she sighed, “you think of all the poor there are in the world— But I'm very much obliged to you. I'm not nearly so angry as I was at first. And you see, we've reached the policeman who was to mark the limit of our acquaintance.”

“I'm entitled to about a rod more of acquaintance,” he maintained frowningly. “Your own words were, 'When we get level with that mounted policeman,' and we're not level with him yet.”

“Very well.” She shut her lips with what was, palpably, a malicious intent of silence. Involuntarily they both fixed their eyes on the policeman, as rigid as a uniformed dummy, upright in his saddle. Suddenly he came to life, wheeled about and galloped up the Avenue.

“Aha!” he said exultantly, “if you're a gentleman, you've got to wait until we catch up with you.”

She smiled in spite of herself. But she stopped. “Good-bye,” she said inflexibly.

“Oh, I say”

“You'll not compel me to take the stage.”

He lifted his hat resignedly. She nodded and walked on.

In an instant quick footsteps overtook her. “I'm very sorry to trouble you again,” he began, a statement that his dancing eyes made no effort to reinforce. “You dropped this handkerchief out of your muff.”

She was shocked. “Did I? What a goose!” She flamed. “Of course you know I didn't do it on purpose.”

“Of course. Do you mind if I follow you a little way, just for protection? You might lose your muff—or—or”

“I might cast a shoe,” she flashed.

“Surely, you won't send me away again when the fates”

She looked ahead with a little maddening judicial air. The street lights, in globes of blue radiance, looped together by the silver fringes that the thick dusk made of their rays, ran up past the Park and into the very sky. Between them the teeming street glittered like an open kaleidoscope.

“Do you see that branch projecting over the path in the Park—the one with the ring of people about it?”

“Yes.”

“You may walk with me until we stand directly under it—not an inch farther.”

He studied the inexorable distance. “Do you mind my walking very slowly, as I have a weak heart?”

“Do you mind if I don't talk any?” she returned craftily, “I'm very tired.”

“I'll talk to you,' he offered with alacrity. “Do you know that I think Boston is an awfully nice old town. I've often thought I'd like to explore it. Only I could never get around alone. It's so much like walking in a maze—I wonder they don't charge an admission. No matter what direction you take you always come back to the place that you started from. If I only had someone to show me about, I'd make a study of the historical places in Boston—the Old North Church and Bunker Hill and—and—the Liberty Bell.”

“Philadelphia.”

“Well—the Old Manse.”

“Concord.”

“The House of Seven Gables, then.”

“Salem.”

He made a despairing gesture. “There, you see now how much I need instruction. I know I don't half appreciate Boston. But, honest, I love that air of quiet and calm that hangs over it. It's like a mammoth sanatorium. Pompeii, this Summer, seemed so rapid and hectic beside it. I never found anything that you could really compare to Boston, except some places in Egypt. They have that same intellectual chill. But then they ought to have it; they've been in ruins three thousand years.”

Her lips twitched. She quickened her pace.

“You ought not to walk so fast as you do,” he remonstrated. “You'll have walker's cramp some day—you mark my words.”

“We are approaching the selected branch,” was her reply. “Remember, the moment we get under it—” She glued her gaze to it.

He too fixed a pessimistic eye ahead. “Curses!” he began with melodramatic fervor and, “Good work!” he ended with a grin.

This, because the branch, as if blasted by his malediction, fell with a sudden crash to the ground. The man with a saw who, sitting close to the trunk, came into their range of vision with their next step, began his preparations to climb down.

“You said I didn't have to go until we stood directly under it. Now how can I?”

“Well, I—I—” She gave her comment up. “Anyway,” her desperation was evident, “you'll have to leave me soon for I'm almost there. It's somewhere in the Sixties, I think. You're not going to insist on going to dinner with me, are you?”

“I'm not sure yet.”

She had been fumbling in her muff. She brought out a note, a crumpled creamy sheet. She began, with much turning of leaves, to search for an evasive, mysterious something from among the interlacings, interlinings and underscorings of a big-lettered, dashing hand.

He watched her curiously at first, then with a start.

“By every sign and token of long-distance signaling—that's Bettina Thorpe's handwriting,” he commented casually.

She stared.

“Oh, I've got my credentials with me, too. There's no reason why this Peace Conference shouldn't get busy.” He drew an unopened letter from his pocket and thrust it under her bewildered eyes.

“By Jove! I guess I'd better read that,” he exclaimed.

“How perfectly ridiculous!” Her breath came in gasps. “Why, I can't believe it—it's too silly!”

“Bettina ought to serve a can-opener with her stationery,” he complained, tearing at the flap, “or a little dynamite. Ah!” He ran hungrily through the note and then burst into a roar. “I know who you are,” he informed his companion, his face brightening with mischief. “You're Patricia Otis. Listen to this:

He jammed the letter back into the envelope. “You see, I've simply got to go to dinner with you.”

“Are you Duke Grayson?”

“I am.”

“Betty never told me you were coming tonight. But then, of course, she knew I wouldn't be there. I have always refused to meet you.”

“Same here!” he agreed brazenly. “She's determined to marry us, you know. That's why you looked so familiar. It's the pictures she showed me. I would never have suspected that you were good-looking from those things.”

“Thank you. I'm not. It's these stage clothes I'm wearing. When you come to that—Betty had any number of pictures of you in her room at Bertram Hall. See here—I don't want to meet you. Oh, Betty's a schemer. You wait until I get alone with her! If I don't—I simply decline to meet you. She'll throw me at you in the most disgusting way—leaving us to tête-à-têtes, and everything like that. She hates my settlement work, you know. Her heart is set on marrying me off. She says that if I married a man like you, I'd be a different woman. Isn't it disgusting?”

“Nauseating,” he agreed.

“Why, I wouldn't marry the kind of man you are for anything in the world—you're too frivolous. I have an object in life.”

He applauded her. “That's right. You stick to that—no matter how many times I ask you.”

She turned back and her little teeth gnawed at her underlip. “Oh, sugar!” she burst out vexedly. She made an indeterminate movement forward and stopped. “I won't go to their dinner,” she said with decision.

He had the look of one inspired. “I'll tell you what we'll do. You see how it is: here are two people conspiring against us—against your happiness and my liberty. Let's evade them by going off to dinner together. I'll call a hansom and we'll go down to the Waldorf. You can telephone Betty, so that she won't worry. There'll be nobody there to foist unwelcome gratuitous tête-à-têtes on us. That's the only way we can beat their game.”

She looked at him, dumfounded. But somewhere in her expression surprise gave way to a kind of perplexed thoughtfulness that betokened that his scheme was being considered. This was broken and vanquished by a smile, mischievous, appreciative. The latter was reinforced by determination.

“I don't know what grandma would say,' she said defiantly, “but, anyway, I'm going to do it. I'll tell Bettina that I've met you by accident, that we understand each other and her, and that we see right through all her plans. And if she has any idea of poking us off into corners to fall in love with each other, she can just give it up, because we absolutely refuse to do it.”

“That's the stuff.” He raised an alert finger to the hansom that had assiduously trailed them up the Avenue.

But six months later, when Bettina Bosworth received a certain inevitable announcement, she only smiled placidly.

“I'd give a good deal to know whether she dropped that handkerchief on purpose,” she said to Bob.


text: Talk:The Smart Set/Volume 19/Issue 4/A Conspiracy Inhibited


text: Talk:The Smart Set/Volume 22/Issue 3/In the Dark


text:
The Smart Set/Volume 22/Issue 4/The Amateur House-Party

HEN I read Cousin Elizabeth's letter I nearly died of shock. Here's the letter—I always keep it as one of the documents in the case. It's absolutely perfect as a thumb-nail sketch of Cousin Elizabeth herself who, since she married Oswald Ordway and walked into the Ordway millions, takes herself pretty seriously as a society personage. Mind you, I hadn't heard a word from Cousin Elizabeth since I married Mike and she sent me a repoussé silver game set for a wedding present. Game! All the game we saw for two years was hanging in the dining-rooms of Mike's Weehawken relatives. The set is even now still in the safety-vault the color of Britannia—thank you—where we dumped it the day we got home from our wedding trip.

Well, I never said a word about this to Mike, but I waited until the gang came, and then I read the letter aloud to them. And before they got their breath back I invited them down in a bunch for a week at Finvarra. Well, we are bohemians, you know. Of course I know there are bohemians and bohemians, but I want you to understand that our gang wasn't of the tin-plate order at all—they were the real thing. They were all geniuses—and young, poor, unappreciated, unsuccessful, sulphitic—I don't know what more you want of a bohemian. Then they loved art for art's sake. They had a soul above gain—and all lived on and off one another in the most deliciously haphazard, fraternal way. They read one another's poetry and criticized one another's pictures. They fell in and out of love with a rapidity that made Mike and me fairly breathless, and we'd seen every one of them through I don't know how many cases of bona fide, hopeless broken heart. But what's the use of generalizing? The best way to tell you about them is to describe the people themselves.

First, there were Mike and me. Mike is a rising young physician, and I am the envied mother of Jane Elizabeth. Then there was Meta Mallory.

Now, Meta was the daughter of an artist, and—I wonder if it was prenatal influences—the most artistic-looking thing you ever saw—just like a Burne-Jones or a Rossetti or a Watts or any one of those artists whose people, Lady Blessington said, looked as if they were going to be hanged, or had just been hanged, or ought to be hanged. Her hair never looked as if it had been combed and it was just full of queer little glinty lights and soft, mysterious shadows, and her complexion actually had a perspective to it. She was all blue shadows and long sinuous lines and curves—you'd know she'd studied Delsarte just to see her put a collar-button into a shirt-waist. She had a kind of wistful, soul-saturated expression, too. Mike said she looked hungry to him, and considering she was brought up in a studio-life that was subject to all kinds of ups and downs, she had the most gorgeous profile. That artist colony at Merrivale said it was the most beautiful profile that ever came into the place, and I guess it was, for it certainly made a Greek coin look like a Grand Army button. In fact, Meta's profile was an awful handicap, for she was always vaguely conscious of it, and, instinctively, living up to it. She always met people sort of sideways when she was introduced, and at functions she always sat with the best half of her face—Yeats-Allingham said that that right side was so perfect that it made him ache—turned toward the people whom she wanted to impress.

I said we were all poor, but that wasn't quite true. Meta had just had a fortune left to her. But she kept right on being a bohemian just the same, which I think was pretty handsome of her.

Then there was Lotte McGaw. Lotte was the editor of a young and thrashingly enterprising magazine. She was the youngest editor in New York. My, but that girl had a head for business! Smart as a whip and bright as a dollar doesn't do her justice. She was good-looking, too, but very different from Meta. Artists never raved about Lotte, but if you got a crowd of college men in the same room with her for an evening, unless the hostess intervened, Lotte never emerged from the heap until the dawn began to come in the windows. She had the jolliest, velvety high-colored skin—Mike said that he was sure Lotte would taste like a Baldwin apple—and the prettiest little red-and-white smile and two hide-and-seek dimples that were just Scylla and Charybdis, Mike said, when he didn't call them hell and damnation.

Then there was Percival Hereford—wouldn't you know that he was a highbrow with that name?—who wrote plays. Nobody produced them, of course. Some day, before I die, I hope I may get as far as knowing somebody who knew somebody who heard distantly of somebody who got a play produced. Still, Percival's plays were pretty good, we all thought; at least we listened to them as fast as Percy—we had to call him Percy because he was a great, hulking whale of a man with a chin so strong that it looked as if it could cut through adamant—wrote them, which was once a week, with unfailing regularity. I say we all liked them—all except Walter Mann, who was an actor and the other member of the gang, and so beautiful that it was enough to make the tears come to a woman's eyes to see so much ammunition wasted on a man—yes, hair, eyes, complexion—he had the whole superwomaning outfit. And Walter was always telling Percy—a statement that was followed by an argument good for at least a dozen pipefuls—that he couldn't write a play any more than a cow could.

Well, when I read that letter to the gang they burst into a shout of laughter. That waked the baby up, who made a try for the welkin and got away with it. For a moment it was pandemonium—plus Coney Island on a busy Sunday—in our little nest. Then to my horror and with elaborate formality they all accepted my invitation. What's more, we began to talk the proposition over—coolly, calmly and in sober earnest. Everybody was for it—even Mike. First we discussed the Alfords.

Of course, everybody knows who the Alfords are—so disgustingly rich that old man Alford is always handing out great bunches of money to this college or that and getting it back checked “tainted.” He never had a decent dollar in his jeans, so far as I can make out. If that wasn't enough, there's the daughter Shirley, who's a socialist and lives half the time down on the East Side over a little shop with a window filled with a ton of fly-specked kosher bread in one corner and a barrel of diseased kosher pickles in the other. They're so everlastingly afraid that she'll go in for anarchy and blow up the President that they can't sleep nights. But she's nothing to the two boys, Tom and Jerry.

Tom has tried to marry nearly every chorus-girl on the American stage and succeeded twice, but fortunately one of them proved to have another husband in Syracuse and the other divorced him in two months to marry his chauffeur. They're always getting a wire from Jerry that, now at last, he's met the only girl who will ever make him happy, and poor old Pa Alford has to go down in his stocking to endow another chorus-girl. (This money has never come back tagged “tainted.”) But Tom, bad as he is, is nothing to Jerry, his twin. Jerry is always coming down with virulent attacks of altruism and announcing that he's going into the ministry. They're always surrounding him with the flesh-pots to get his mind off his soul, but I think they'd do wiser to let him sow his wild oats and be done with it.

Well, the gang said if we were going to do a house-party, we were going to do it the way it ought to be done—in swell British style—and the best way to find out what the latest and most swagger British style is was simply to read “Dodo” Benson, Robert Hichens and Elinor Glyn and all the rest of the house-party school of novelists, and just take notes.

Well, there's no use in going into it all, but the result, in a nutshell, was that first, right there in the aiding and abetting presence of the gang, I accepted Cousin Elizabeth's offer, and then we began picking out our parts and hunting round to collect the clothes that would suit them.

Meta said she was going as a smart society woman. She had worn artistic colors and floating draperies all her life to suit her friends and her environment and the exigencies of her profile. Now she was going to take a vacation and dress like any other normal, decent woman to suit herself. In the week that followed she went through the shopping district like a ferret, and if anything in the way of dress-goods got by her it was only because the clerk was temporarily deranged.

Lotte decided to go as the frilly girl who stays in bed until afternoon and then gets up for tea, about five, in a smashing tea-gown, who lies in the hammock and reads “Gyp” in the original with one hand, languidly smoking a cigarette or eating marrons glacés with the other.

She took two days off and rounded up all her rich relatives in Brooklyn. Lotte is awfully well-connected, you know—although their branch of the family is poor enough—and came back with a trunkful of gowns and pettiskirts that made a buyer fresh from Paris look like a marked-down sale, a collection of silk stockings that temporarily put the aurora borealis out of commission and a cigarette-case that she borrowed from her cousin, Lila McGaw—yes, the one that married that bankrupt French count—with her initials L. M. on it in diamonds.

Walter Mann said he'd go simply as a gentleman. There was nothing else for him to do and, fortunately, he'd always acted in those high-class English plays that make you sick and cynical for a week, and he had the most startling array of English clothes I ever saw. Loud? Well, I should say so! He couldn't come into the same room with our sleeping babe in any one of them.

Percival Hereford said he couldn't go as a gentleman because his two suits were too much on the blink—at least he'd have to be an awfully high-class gentleman to carry such a thing off, and he didn't quite dare attempt it. He was afraid he couldn't be rude and eccentric enough. Walter Mann said quite enviously that it was the “fat” part and he wished he could see him (Walter) in it. For a while we were quite in despair about poor Percy. Then a wonderful idea came to him—to go as Walter's valet. He was writing a play, it appears, in which there was a servants' ball, and he wanted to know what butlers and footmen and stable-boys talked about.

I was going, of course, as a fashionable young mother—it made me sick, though, to think of neglecting the baby—but I knew that I owed it to her—she'd never get such another chance and I'd do it if it killed me.

Well, we all arrived at Finvarra Heights at Brierly-on-the-Hudson promptly, as per schedule, on Monday morning, the second of August, with so much baggage—I mean luggage; with so many trunks—I mean boxes; guns, fishing-rods, tennis-racquets, golf-sticks, that I was ashamed to look the stationmaster in the face. In fact, I guess we overdid it, for I heard one of the servants say to another: “Say, they forgot to bring the tent.”

The house was simply magnificent. It made the Waldorf-Astoria look like a beer-garden—it was simply encrusted with turrets, towers, balconies, piazzas, cupolas, rotundas, minarets, bay-windows, bow-windows, sun-parlors and every other architectural excrescence that an idle woman just breaking into society could think of. Inside there were elevators—I mean lifts—drawing-rooms and libraries, full of lovely clean, uncut books galore, each furnished in a different period, a dance-hall, billiard-room, a gun-room and a swimming-tank. There were suites of rooms for us to inhabit such time as we desired privacy. Privacy! You'd have had to chain any one of us down in the next week. Outside, the gardens and lawns just covered the whole visible face of nature. And there were stables full of motors and blooded horses, hothouses, golf courses, tennis courts and yachts and motor-boats in the boathouse.

It was pretty awkward at first living up to the servants, but we were all quick-witted and guessed in an instant what they expected of us, and did it with neatness and despatch. Walter, for instance, drank Scotch all the time we were there, though he loathes it, and Mike was always calling for a “peg.”

Lotte, according to the demands of her part, went right to bed the moment we arrived, although I knew she was simply dying of curiosity to see how the rest of us would play up. Meta put herself into the hands of a delicious little French maid who made such ducks and drakes of the English language that Meta kept asking for things she didn't want in order to keep her going. Percival disappeared in the direction of the servants' quarters, and Walter calmly got into immaculate riding togs and went off on the best horse in the stable. While they were away the Alfords came.

Mrs. Alford and Shirley were correct and distinguished in their nice, simple traveling-clothes. Mr. Alford, fat-faced and beery, with the most innocent, confiding, good-natured blue eyes I ever saw, looked as if he would take Chinese money as fast as you handed it out to him. They came just as tea was being served, and Mrs. Alford sank into a chair and drank three cups without winking.

In the midst of this Meta, very lovely in a blue radium silk, came down the stairs, followed, a little later, by Lotte in a frilly, fluffy, frivolous, oyster-white. chiffony thing with a long tail to it. Close upon her Mike sauntered in, very immaculate in his afternoon things, and Walter at his heels. Walter was my pride and joy. He just waited for introductions and then, laughingly insisting that he must get out of his riding togs, he vanished, to reappear in a little while, the glass of fashion and the mold of form. It was almost too perfect.

Well, maybe that wasn't a week. Our gang played the game to perfection. Cousin Elizabeth was not in the habit of serving a buffet breakfast, but I made myself solid with the English butler by—with a perfectly scandalized face—insisting upon it. People would come straggling down from their bedrooms, anywhere about eleven, giving a fair imitation of a yawn, breakfast lightly, and then separate for the sports of the day. Luncheon would see perhaps more of them. But it was not until five, when Lotte appeared to ornament a hammock in still another ravishing confection, that the clans really gathered. Lotte was a dream—French novel, jeweled cigarette-case, marrons glacés—they were always there. Of course by this time Jerry Alford—that's the high-minded, noble twin—was her slave, but she was perfect in her oh-you-nice-boy attitude toward him. Meta, of course, was overrun with Tom —that's the chorus-girl twin.

You should have seen Meta! An artist would have thrown a dozen fits at the sight of her. She looked like the heroine of a Maeterlinck drama turned —hair marceled in undeviating rows that you couldn't have broken with an eighteen-inch shell—manicured, massaged, osteopathed, corseted actually, perfumed and very delicately and unnecessarily made-up —and in clothes that would have made her father turn in his grave—untoned pinks and blues that would carry a mile through a fog, tailor suits, sequined evening gowns, smart suits for sailing, immaculate shirt-waist suits for golf—oh, you'd have died. There was nothing left of her but her profile, and she even forgot that for long stretches at a time.

But the Alfords—they were the fly in my amber. In the first place, Mr. Alford walked, ate and slept, I'm sure, in an old shiny frock-coat of which it is a charitable euphemism to say merely that it was spotted like a pard; and an old bunged-up straw hat that looked as if it might have been bought from the gipsies and actually had been run over by an automobile. The papers say that he is worth fifty millions, but I knew it was a hundred the moment I saw his clothes.

Mrs. Alford, a soft, fat thing, architectured in terraces, wore a series of white nighties, cut low in the neck to avoid the erosion of her combination of double chins. Beautiful materials they were and hand-embroidered and all that, but—honest—I used to feel queer about the boys seeing her about, all the time, in those glorified Mother Hubbards. She always wore a string of pearls as big as marbles—the kind that you don't believe. And her fingers were so crowded with diamonds that she never could do anything with her hands at all—Mike said he was sure she wrote letters with her feet. But she was a lovely, motherly old soul who gave me a lot of good advice and stole my baby every moment she was awake. And, my eye! how Jane Elizabeth would jump up and down on my lap when she'd see her coming.

Shirley Alford appeared now and then out from town, always in a plain but perfectly stunning tailor-suit. Our men didn't pay much attention to her—they said she was too cold. But I could see that, under that cold, unresponsive exterior, she really was a beauty if she would only give the woman in her a chance. She got acquainted with all the servants immediately, and Percival, as an example of an aspiring and ambitious valet, attracted her attention at once. She was always whizzing in or whirling out from New York at unexpected times, and Percival, who was making the best valet of modern times and had grown to know how to work an automobile more easily than a rat-trap, always acted as her chauffeur.

Everything went all right and I knew that nobody in the house—not even the servants—suspected that we weren't the real thing, until Saturday came. And then something happened.

We were all sitting out in the Italian garden, and Horrocks was just about to serve tea when Mike came walking up a path with a strange woman on one side and a strange manon [sic] the other. I stared and then arose, wondering what had happened. It didn't seem to me that any unexpected guests of Cousin Elizabeth's could have arrived; I didn't know what to think.

“Eleanor,” Mike said directly, “let me introduce Miss MacGregor and Mr. Innes-Buxton to you. Their automobile has just broken down outside our gate, and I insisted that they come in and rest before they went on.”

Of course I welcomed them both. They threw back their goggles and—well, she was a wonder. They were both English—you would know that the moment they opened their mouths. They had that cool, clean-cut English accent, spread so thick over every word that you couldn't have dispersed it with an electric battery. He was a big, jolly, tubbed-looking florid Englishman, the kind that American women always like. But she—my word!—peaches and cream, milk and roses, moonshine and honey! She looked as if she'd walked out of an English beauty-book—a huge, statuesque golden-blond. You pitied her for being born in England, for you could see by her clothes that she was middle-class, whereas if she'd only been born in America she could have become an English duchess so easily. For that's what she ought to have been—you could just see how stately she'd be in the long train and the three feathers of a presentation-gown, and her brow seemed actually molded to fit a coronet.

I was proud enough of our crowd. Lotte, lolling lazily in the hammock, was just one billowy mass of sea-green chiffon and foaming white pettiskirts. Meta wore lavender, trimmed with Irish crochet, and foxy little motifs of Chinese embroidery at just the right spots—and little wassets and dingle-dangles of black velvet with brilliant buckles everywhere—so chic that it positively made you dizzy. Her hair looked as if it had been turned out of a mold—like jelly. Mike and Walter in their white flannels were the most languidly-lovely things ever.

Pretty soon in came Horrocks, wheeling the tea-table—just one winking mass of old silver, old glass and old Sheffield plate—and, as I poured, he served things in his inimitable, straight, face-like-a-ramrod way. The Alfords came in from driving and, for a wonder, both had clothes on that you could look at without a blush. Of course the twins were always very smart. Shirley Alford wasn't there, and I was glad for I was afraid she would be cold and supercilious.

Well, we all acted up to the Britishers—for weren't we doing an English house-party?—and you should have heard our conversation. Walter discoursed of plays and playwrights—Ibsen, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Rostand, Pinero, Jones, as if he'd seen them all produced in their native wilds. Meta contributed studio slang and personal-item talk of Rodin, Whistler and Sargent as if she'd sat for every one of them. Lotte piped up with references to all the latest English novelists and poets. Mike spoke casually of all the most recent surgical and medical experiments for tuberculosis—he even went a little way, far enough to lose me, at any rate—into fourth dimension. I repeated all Shirley Alford's socialist and sociological stuff. And the Alfords—when we let them interrupt—finding the strangers were globe-trotters, referred to every corner of the civilized and uncivilized globe into which their record-breaker yacht, the Wraith, had put in. They talked and talked and stayed and stayed—even I was surprised. And when finally they did go they had to pull themselves away—that was visible to the naked eye. We hated to see them go, of course, but we didn't urge them to stay. We knew that would be ill-bred. And of course nothing was said about our ever meeting again—that would have been fierce manners.

Well, they had hardly left when Shirley Alford came trailing in—all stringy and taggy and dusty from a record auto trip out from town.

“How'd Lady Penelope happen to call?” she asked at once.

“Lady Who?” we shouted.

“Why, Lady Penelope—I saw her and her brother Bertie turn out of the drive as we came along. We had a punctured tire and couldn't catch them.”

“Lady Penelope!” I gasped. “She said her name was MacGregor.”

“So it is—Lady Penelope MacGregor, and her brother's the Duke of Innes-Buxton. She's traveling incognita through the United States,” Shirley explained easily, “making sociological investigations, you know. I must find out where she is—she and I were great pals in London last season.”

Lady Penelope MacGregor! The Duke of Innes-Buxton! I did not dare to look up, for my cheeks were burning. My English house-party! She stayed so long, of course, because she was so amused. And how we must have entertained her! Late that night the gang met and went into executive session. The burden of our universal plaint was, “What do you suppose she really thought of us?”

But we heard what she thought of us curiously enough. Ten days later, after we were all back again in town comfortably being bohemians again, and luxuriating in our old clothes, a letter came from Shirley Alford announcing her engagement to Percival. In it she enclosed a letter from Lady Penelope that she said had been chasing her allover the country. The part that concerned us was this. I read it to the awe-stricken gang:


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 human action. The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the same desire. Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand with the new popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes: "I daresay the American Congress in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the English Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate the centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of Stuart." As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even violent; but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his hottest excess. What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in life; an open road to success and distinction for all classes of men. It was in the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in the parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent snatches against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were it alone, this verse:—


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The Smart Set/Volume 22/Issue 3/In the Dark

S he stood outside his apartment it seemed to him that he heard a door within open softly. The sound made him pause. He listened. It seemed to him that, with even greater softness, he heard it shut. Who could be in there? Vance was in the Adirondacks. Nobody else could have entered the apartment that Summer.

His key grated in the lock even as these thoughts passed through his mind. He stepped from the dark hall into the black living-room. He made three steps forward and then he stopped as if he had been struck. He became conscious, in the pause that followed, of three things—an odor first; then, after an appreciable interval, a presence; then, an instant later, a voice.

The odor, delicately, charily, suffused the big living-room that he had expected would greet his nostrils with the stale smell of furniture long unaired and an atmosphere long devitalized. It was a wonderful odor, faint but subtle, provocative, deliciously compelling. It was compounded, it was easy to guess, of the personal aroma of some finely-flavored feminine substance and an oriental perfume, pursuing but uncloying.

The presence—he could not of course see it—but its emanations floated in the room, more miraculously permeating than even the odor. It was like a wonderful tropical flower that blooms unseen in the heat and the night, betrayed to the passer-by only by its exquisite breath. He could not see an outline. Yet, to his aroused intuition, the presence was as indubitably there as if every bit of furniture in the room were shrieking the fact to him. The situation arrested his uneasy imagination. It thrilled it to a thousand conjectures, surmises, speculations. The explanation came to him in another instant. Vance! But hadn't he written Vance that he was coming to their rooms that afternoon? For the life of him he could not remember.

And then the voice.

The voice did not make him forget the odor—it did not make him forget the presence. Rather if was the odor and the presence become audible. It was an extraordinary voice, and how it stood the test of the dark! It was low, fragile, almost fluty. It seemed a little “world-tired” was the melodramatic word that he presently found for it. Had the Mona Lisa spoken, those, he decided, would be her tones. But under the world-tire in it fluttered—a mere nuance—but it shadowed something dreadful. Horror? No. Terror? Perhaps. And well she might fear—ah, Vance!

“Please don't light the gas,” the voice pleaded.

He found his own voice after a while. It seemed when it did come to be unduly dry.

“I'll not light up, of course. I'll do whatever you wish.”

A little rill of laughter thrilled through the room—laughter that, he could not have said why, terrified him. It was cool, fine, ironic, exquisitely measured, balanced, attuned.

“I believe you're a blessed ghost,” he accused her.

“On the contrary!”

There was a crisp, silky rustle in his direction. The odor swept in faint, oncoming waves all over him. It broke with a little tingle on the nerves that the silence and dark seemed, gradually, to be exposing. Then a hand rested, in the instant of a bird's stay and flight on a swinging bough, against his wrist. The touch was of ivory coolness. It left a glow in its wake, however, as if electric currents had coursed slowly to the surface of her flesh and burned against his.

“Now,” she questioned triumphantly, “am I real?”

“You're a woman,” he apprised her ruefully.

“And now you're wondering what kind.” There was the sweetest possible amusement in her silvery tones. “Allons! You shall find out. I've come a long way just to see you.”

“To see me!” He laughed in his turn. “Oh, you're a woman,” he conceded handsomely.

“Sit down,” she coaxed. “I'm going to give you ten minutes of my time now—and I assure you at this moment my time is worth the traditional king's ransom. You'll not believe it—men never know that women are most sincere when they are most extravagant. It is true that every moment that I spend with you now is worth sixty ruby drops of my heart's best blood.”

“I shall believe anything. I shall believe nothing. I shall believe everything. Now are you satisfied?”

“Of course, if you'll sit down and talk with me.”

“I have sat down. Now”

“Explanations! Goose! Oh, you're a man! Why not leave it all beautifully vague and misty—stardust, moonshine, spindrift and the stuff that dreams are made of? But no—you are a man. I pity your obviosities [sic] and inevitabilities, but I'll play up to them. Listen: I have always wanted to talk with you, but there are reasons why we should not know each other. I knew you were coming here today. And I came here to meet you. Could anything be simpler?” There were the traditional, feminine italics in her voice.

He roared. “But if nobody knew!” he interjected. “Not that I sha'n't hold you prisoner.”

“But there was one that knew.” She accused him. She coaxed. She wheedled.

“That's what I'm trying to remember,” he confessed ruefully. “Although, of course, from the very beginning, I knew that Vance came into it in some way.”

“Of course he does!” She brought it out triumphantly. “I had been waiting for months for just the right, perfect, inevitable moment. One word dropped and I managed to steal a key and here I am. But how did you connect me with Vance at first? Did you just guess?”

“Oh, your presence—your perfumes—your voice—everything about you shrieks of Vance.”

“I expect they do,” she said drily. “I expect they do.”

“* Now shall we have a light?”

“A light!” Her disgust was staccato. “Will you spoil all the wonder of it? Will you drag in the dregs of a hot, dull day? Why don't you send out for a newspaper? You'll be proposing picture post-cards or a can of beer from the corner before I know it.”

“I thought of nothing stronger than tea—upon my word.” He was contrite enough for her to become amiable.

“You're a humbug. You know it's gorgeous just as it is.”

“I know it's enough to make a man lose his head.”

“Lose it,” she insisted brightly. “I'm going to lose mine and tell you things presently. You can be gloriously frank—in the dark. As if you didn't know! I've read them all—you've written such delicious things—such perilously quotable things—oh, don't be afraid; I sha'n't quote them to you—of the romances and necromances of the first meeting. But confess you never had such a first meeting as this.”

“Oh, I'll admit that.”

“Would you tell me a great many things?”

“Yes.”

“Would you ask a great many things?”

“Yes.”

She clapped her hands. Her laughter tinkled into every corner of the room. “Then the meeting is justified, isn't it?”

“I'll prove your willingness to answer the great many things,” he said leisurely. “Did you perhaps do me the honor of exploring my rooms?”

There was a silence, out of which, in much apparent embarrassment, she presently groped. “Of course I did.” Her tone quite took the bull by the horns. “Didn't you yourself say I was a woman? But I assure you I found nothing compromising,” she ended with an archness.

There came a pause and, into it—the drip—drip—drip, irritatingly practical—of the faucet in the bathroom.

He spoke hastily. “You are dark,” he said, “slender, tall.”

“I am little, dumpy, blonde.”

“You are full of temperament, personality, charm,” he said. “You are 'instinct with,' 'alive with'—oh, you know—all those things—you know what people say—to your finger-tips.”

“I am intellectual, cold, almost sterilized of emotion, atmosphere, aura.”

“You are young, eager, enthusiastic,” he said.

“I am old, stale and uninspired. But there was a time when I would have been all the things you so gallantly accord me—when I could have responded with every note in the scale, every color in the spectrum, if you had asked for it. But that was before a great many things.”

“I suppose you mean a man?” he hazarded.

“I suppose I do.”

“Is it one of the things you are going to tell me? Remember, this is a first meeting.”

“Not today—although, curiously, it burns on my lips to tell you now. Oh, I'm suddenly full of my wrongs and hatreds and revenges.”

“Tell me now.”

“Oh, I'll tell you—I will. When he came I was—can you imagine a slim alabaster vase, full of a fiery, rose-colored liquor, so brilliant that it shone through?—I was a woman like that. And then, he just drank me down and left me denuded, empty, vacant, pale—a forgotten, old bit of bric-à-brac that people put away in the garret. Now tell me, what do you think he deserved?”

“Death!” It came deliberately after an interval of thought. The word fell from his lips, hollow, dreadful. It seemed to echo and reëcho in the hushed stillness that followed. “The people who give such wounds—” He did not finish.

“I agree,” she said after awhile. “Death!” She dropped the word like a bullet. It seemed to go down, down, down with a perpetual reverberation among his thoughts. “Now you'll say I'm hard.”

“I'll say you're wonderful.”

“Once I had a dream of him.” Her voice seemed tired. “It was after a long time when I had not slept. You know how you don't sleep when all the couleur-de-rose has gone out of life?”

He felt that the small hands were making an appealing gesture to him in the dark. He replied at once, and his voice vibrated. “Oh,I know—I know.”

“Do women ever make men suffer like that?” she asked in a kind of awe.

“They are singularly clever at it.”

“My dream was—I saw him in an old garden. There were a great many vases there—rose-colored from what glowed from within through their alabaster sides. And I saw him go from one to another around the entire garden and drink them all up.”

He made no comment.

“And now I must go. My ten minutes are more than up.”

“But where and when shall we meet again?”

“Ah, we'll have to leave that to chance.”

“But the chances are so few in this crowded world. It's only when you meet your brother-in-law's cousin in Tangier that the world seems small as an orange. You know how big it grows when you're hunting for somebody.”

“I think you'll find me sometime. But then you'll not care. That will be a meeting, if you like.”

“I—” But, finally, he only laughed.

“Will you give me a half-hour before you move out of this room?” Her voice was liquid with entreaty.

“Yes.”

“And will you stay just where you are—in the dark?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, then.” A touch like a feather fell on his hand. It left a delicate moisture there—he knew it was from her lips. Then the door shut gently.

The odor still lingered. But the presence and the voice were gone.

In the interval he thought hard, hand on brow. The clamor of his sense died down after a while. Even his nerves stilled. Presently he grew dull,

And then the drip—drip—drip from the bathroom had full possession of a room, faery a moment ago with mystery, with beauty. He began to hate the thud of its soft clamor.

The half-hour struck and passed.

He arose slowly and groped into his bedroom. He switched on the light there.

And then he turned.

A man, naked to the waist, was lying over the edge of the bed. He was on his back, but the head was doubled under the neck. Just above his heart was a splotchy, dripping red spot. A limp hand trailed in a pool of blood on the floor.

He turned the man's face up.

It came to him in the instant that he bent over and listened at his heart that it must have been only a few moments since Vance died.


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378 the Abbasids had become consolidated and it was proposed to make an energetic attack on him from Bagdad, he renounced his obedience to the Abbasids and received fugitive Umayyads as honoured guests in Ḳairawān (754-755). These Umayyad princes however brought discord into 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān's family, in connexion with which he himself and two of the princes met their deaths. A third prince, 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān ibn Mu'āwiya, forced his way through to Spain and became the founder of the western Caliphate. In Africa the murder of Ibn Ḥabīb led to a general disorganisation and set free all the tendencies towards decentralisation. Independent Berber dynasties arose in the extreme West, as for instance the Banū Midrār in Sijilmāsa (757) and Banū Rustam in Tahert (761), the latter under the banner of the Khārijites; in the nearer West the Arabs on the one hand and the Berbers, who had also separated into parties, on the other, fought for the possession of Ḳairawān, which did not again acknowledge the authority of the Abbasids until 761, and then only for a short time; the province of Africa, as far as to the border of Algeria, was once more restored, though with disturbances and interruptions, but the whole of the far West remained irretrievably lost.

Here in the far West a third State was soon founded. A descendant of Ali named Idrīs, who had fled from the Abbasids, created for himself, in the year 788, an independent kingdom, which soon extended eastward to beyond the town of Tlemcen. Here again a clever leader managed to unite the Berbers by a religious party-cry. The kingdom of the Idrīsids was the first Shī'ite State founded in the West.

The remainder of the province of Maghrib once so extensive was moreover destined to make itself independent in the last decade of the eighth century. The constant dissensions between the Arab leaders and tribes could no longer be permanently controlled by the governors sent from Bagdad. The Amīr of Mzab (in the back-country of Algeria) Ibrāhīm ibn Aghlab, who had grown up in Africa, and whose father had been the means of reconquering the Mzab, was on the other hand the right man in the right place to restore state authority (800). When he had succeeded in this however he demanded from the Caliph the hereditary investiture in return for payment of a tribute and the customary naming of the Caliph in the pulpit prayers and on the coinage. This amounted to complete independence. Thus arose the dynasty of the Aghlabids of Ḳairawān, which gave to Africa a series of clever, but also often worthless, rulers. In proportion to the smallness of their kingdom they had a considerable naval force, and thus they became the leaders of the expansion of Islām into Mid-Europe. It was under them that Sicily was conquered.

Before turning however to Sicily, we must still sketch the further destinies of Northern Africa, in as far as it is connected with the history of Islām in Southern Europe. In spite of their brilliant performances


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909-1171] the authority of the Aghlabids was in a tottering state. The diversion to Sicily of the generals and troops, always inclining towards insubordination, gave them a respite for a considerable time; after lasting for a century their kingdom was destroyed by the political lack of discipline of the Berber tribes and by bloody quarrels within the dynasty itself.

These conditions were cleverly utilised by the Shī'ite opposition, which just at that time, after many ill-successes in Asia, had pushed forward into Africa, where the propaganda of the Idrīsids had paved the way for them. The leader of the movement was named 'Ubaidallāh, whose descent from Ali is by no means established beyond doubt; the race itself however was called, after Fāṭima, the daughter of the Prophet, the Fāṭimites. When 'Ubaidallāh had become master of the situation in the year 909, through the fortunate trend of circumstances and his skill in recruiting, he assumed the cognomen Mahdī, i.e. the directed one, a title in which the old claims of Ali's kinsmen to the Caliphate found expression. Mahdī founded a new capital, Mahdīya, and established a State which for centuries held the supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. For this end of course the possession of Egypt was needed, but the acquisition of this was first effected by Mu'izz (969), Mahdī's third successor, who was the founder of Cairo. The centre of gravity of the Fāṭimite kingdom was now transferred eastward, especially when Syria also was conquered. Africa soon attained independence again as a State under Yūsuf Bulukkin, a Berber of the Ṣanhāja, the governor appointed by the Fāṭimites; Yūsuf founded the dynasty of the Zīrids (972-1148), alongside of whom the Ḥammādids held their ground in the West, and specially in Algeria, from 1107 till 1152. The kingdom of the Idrīsids in Morocco had in the meantime been split up into a number of petty principalities. The Fāṭimites however remained the rulers of the eastern territory, and under them Egypt experienced its most brilliant times, but suffered also its worst defeat. In 1171 the heir to the Fāṭimite kingdom was Saladin.

We were compelled to give an anticipatory sketch of the history of North Africa until the commencement of the times of the Crusades, in order to understand the second great advance of the Saracens against Sicily and Southern Italy as one connected whole. Incidents from the standpoint of individual countries, these regular attacks of the Muslims on Mid-Europe are presented, in the light of universal history, as a connected movement, which naturally closes with the occupation of Sicily and also of parts of the Continent. As in Spain, the reaction of the Christian world follows upon the action of Islām. Just as they came, so the Muslims are gradually forced back. Here we have to do with the forward action alone, and though from chance reasons this took place much later in Sicily and Italy than in Spain or Asia Minor, yet its description comes notwithstanding within the scope of a general


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Author:Frances Marion Parkinson Gostling

Works

 * Rambles Around French Châteaux


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380 history of the expansion of the Saracens, for the conquest of Sicily is connected in the most intimate way with the occupation of Northern Africa, and could only succeed after the conditions in the latter territory had somewhat improved. It is the same movement which took the Saracens across the Straits of Gibraltar. The subsequent advance of the world of Islām against Eastern Europe and the occupation of Constantinople by the Turks are in no way connected with the original movement as described here; the events now related below are the last ramification of the Arabian exodus.

As Michele Amari says in his classical work on the Muslims in Sicily, only a glance at the map is needed to shew that Sicily must be involved in continuous war with the Saracens after their occupation of Africa. And yet this same great historian represents the first naval expedition against Sicily not as starting from Africa but from Syria, and that too at a time when the subsequent Caliph Mu'āwiya was still governor of Syria. The strongly contradictory reports about this event may most easily be reconciled by regarding the first appearance of an Arabian fleet in Sicily as taking place under the Caliphate of Mu'āwiya, and connecting it with the expedition of his African governor, Mu'āwiya ibn Ḥudaij, against the Byzantines (664). Arabian tradition also accepts this Ibn Ḥudaij as the leader. It is quite probable that he himself never saw Sicily, but that the raid was made under his orders by his representative, 'Abdallāh ibn Ḳais. It is however quite certain that this naval expedition did not start from Syria but from the Pentapolis (Baṛka); the Syrian fleet had opportunities of booty nearer home; of the Pentapolis however we learn from the papyri that it was an important naval base in the seventh century, and here the fleet operating in the west received recruits from the fleets coming from Egypt. This opportunity serves to point out once again that, with the exception of special occasions, the regular war of the Arabs against the Byzantines consisted of individual summer campaigns, which bore the name and took place by water or on land. From this old custom piracy, that terrible scourge of the western Mediterranean, was developed in course of time as the great kingdoms became split up into small states, and the name Corsair is also etymologically related to the word. The despatch of the fleet by Ibn Ḥudaij was such a. The booty consisted of captive women and church treasures, images, which according to the Arabian historians Mu'āwiya endeavoured to sell for gold as quickly as possible among the idol-worshipping Indians.

Just as this first expedition against Sicily was connected with the occupation of Northern Africa, so we must not disconnect the occasional raids of the following decades from the ever-increasing use of the fleet in the western seat of war. It can therefore cause no surprise that during the régime of the great pacificators of the Berbers, i.e. under Ḥassan and Mūsā, war was waged on Sicily more frequently.


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Page:On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.pdf/22

Rh considered does not alter its albedo as a consequence of the altered temperature. In that case entirely different circumstances enter. If, for instance, an element of the surface which is not now snow-covered, in consequence of falling temperature becomes clothed with snow, we must in the last formula not only alter $$\beta$$ but also $\nu$. In this case we must remember that $$\alpha$$ is very small compared to $\beta$. For $$\alpha$$ we will choose the value $$0.40$$ in accordance with Langley's estimate. Certainly a great part of this value depends upon the diffusely reflected part of the sun's heat, which is absorbed by the earth's atmosphere, and therefore should not be included in $\alpha$, as we have defined it above. On the other hand, the sun may in general stand a little lower than in Langley's measurements, which were executed with a relatively high sun, and in consequence of this $$\alpha$$ may be a little greater, so that these circumstances may compensate each other. For $$\beta$$ we will choose the value $0.70$, which corresponds when $$\text{K}=1$$ and $$\text{W}=0.3$$ (a little below the freezing-point) with the factor $$1.66$$ (see p. ). In this case we find the relation between $$\text{T}$$ (uncovered) and $$\text{T}_1$$ (snow-covered surface) to be if $\text{M}=\phi\text{A}$. We have to bear in mind that the mean $$\text{M}$$ for the whole earth is zero, for the equatorial regions negative and for the polar regions positive. For a mean latitude $$\text{M}=0$$, and in this case $$\text{T}_1$$ becomes $$267.3$$ if $\text{T}=273$, that is the temperature decreases in consequence of the snow-covering by 5°.7 C. The decrease of temperature from this cause will be valid until $$\phi=1$$, i. e. till the heat delivered by convection to the air exceeds the whole radiation of the sun. This can only occur in the winter and in polar regions.

But this is a secondary phenomenon. The chief effect that we examine is the direct influence of an alteration of $$\beta$$ upon the temperature $$\text{T}$$ of the earth's surface. If we start from a value $$\text{T}=273$$ and $$\beta=0.70$$, we find the alteration ($t$) in the