CHAPTER I. What's In a Name? To possess two distinctly alien red corpuscles in one's blood, metaphor ically if not in fact, two characters or Individualities under one epidermis, Is, In moat cases, a peculiar disadvan tage. One hears of scoundrels and ealnts striving to consume one an other in one body, angels and har pies; but ofttimes, quite the contrary to being a curse, these two warring temperaments become a maflb ulti mate blessing: as in the case of George P. A. Jones, of Mortimer & Jones, the great metropolitan Oriental rug and carpet company, all of which has a dignified, sonorous sound. George was divided within himself. This he would not have confessed even into the trusted if battered ear of the Egyptian Sphynx. There was, however, no demon-angel sparring for points in George's soul. The difficulty might be set forth In this manner: On one side stood inherent common sense; on the other, a boundless, ro seate imagination which was like wise inherent —a kind of quixote imag ination of suitable modern pattern. This alter ego terrified him whenever it raised its beautiful head and shouldered aside his guardian angel (for that's what common sense is, argue to what end you will) and pleaded in that luminous rhetoric un der the spell of which our old friend Sancho often fell asleep. P. A., as they called him behind the counters, was but twenty-eight., and if he was vice-president in his late fa ther's shoes he didn't wabble round in them to any great extent. In a orowd he was not noticeable; he didn't stand head and shoulders above his fellow-men, nor would he have been mistaken by near-sighted per sons, the myopes, for the Vatican's Apollo In the flesh. He was of me dium height, beardless, slender, but tough and wiry and enduring. You may see his prototype on the streets a dozen times a day, and you may also pass him without turning round for a second view. Young men like P. A. must be Intimately known to be admired; you did not throw your arm across his neck, first-off. His hair was brown and closely clipped about a head that would have gained the attention of the phrenologist, if not that of the casual passer-by. His bumps, in the phraseology of that science, were good ones. For the rest. ,^i|s He Haunted the Romantic Quarters of the Globe; He Wat Romantic. fie observed the world through a pair of kindly, shy, blue eyes. Young girls, myopic through Igno rance or silliness, s«elng nothing be yond what the eyes see, seldom gave him a second inspection; for he did not know how to make himself at tractive, and was mortally afraid of the opposite, or opposing sex. He could bullyrag a sheik out of his cam els' saddle-bags, but petticoats and laoe parasols and small Oxfords had the same effect upon him that the prodding stick of a small boy has upon a retiring turtle. But many a worldly-wise woman, drawing out with tact and kindness tbs truly beautiful thoughts of this young man's soul, sadly demanded of fa'e why a sweet. clean boy like this one had not been sent to her In her youth. You see, the worldly-wise woman knows that It Is Invariably the lay-figure and not Prince Charming that a woman mar ries, and that matrimony is blind man's buff in growr-ups. Many of us lay the blame upon our parents. We shift the burden of won dering why we have this fault and lack that grace to the shoulders of our immediate forbears. We goto the office each morning denying that we have any responsibility; we let the boss do the worrying. But George never went prospecting in his soul for any such droBS philosophy. He was grateful for having had so beautiful a mother; proud of having had so honest a sire; and If either of them had endued him with false weights he did his best to even up the balance. The mother had been as romantic as any heroine out of Mrs. Radcliff's novels, while the father had owned to as much romance as one generally finds in a thorough business man, which is practically none at all. The very name itself is a bulwark against the intrusions of romance. One can not lift the imagination to the pros pect of picturing a Jones in ruffles and highboots, pinking a varlet in the midriff. It smells of sugar-barrels and cotton-bales, of steamships and rail roads, of stolid routine in the office and of placid concern over the daily news under the evening lamp. Mrs. Jones, lovely, lettered yet not worldly, had dreamed of her boy, bayed and decorated, marrying the most distinguished woman in all Eu rope, whoever she might be. Mr. Jones had had no dreams at all, and had put the boy to work in the ship ping department a little while after the college threshold had been crossed, outward bound. The mother, while sweet and gentle, had a will, iron un der velvet, and when she held out for Percival Algernon and a decent knowl edge of modern languages, the old man agreed if, on the other hand, the boy's first name should be George and that he should learn the business from the cellar up. There were sev eral tilts over the matter, but at length a truce was declared. It was agreed that the boy himself ought to have a word to say upon a subject concerned him more vitally than any one else. So, at the age of fifteen, when he was starting off for preparatory school, he was advised to choose for himself. He was an obe dient son, adoring his mother and idol- ising his father. He wrote himself down as George Percival Algernon Jones, promised to become a linguist and to learn the rug business from the cellar up. On the face of it, it looked like a big Job; It all depended upon the boy. The first day at school his misery began. He had signed himself as George P. A. Jones, no small diplo macy for a lad; but the two initials, standing up like dismantled pines i.i the midßt of uninteresting landscape, roused the curiosity of his school mates. Boyg are boys the world over, and possess a finest*' in cruelty that only Indians can match; and It did not take them long to unearth the fa tal secret. For three years he was M AvrfW of HEARTS AND DAe AIAN ON THE BOX ♦ Ilkistraliorvs by M.Q.Kettajesr- ♦ • ♦ COPYRIGHT 1911 bjr BOBBfI - /MERRILL COMPANY • Percy Algy, and not only the boys laughed, but the pretty girls snig gered. Many a time he had returned to his dormitory decorated (not in acoord with the fond hopes of his mother) with a swollen ear, or a ruddy proboscis, or a green-brown eye. There was a limit, and when they stepped over that, why, he pro ceeded to the best of his ability to solve the difficulty with his fiats. George was no milksop; but Percival Algernon would have been the Old Man of the Sea on broader shoulders than his. He dimly realized that had he been named George Henry William Jones would have been many diameters larger. There was a splen did quality of pluck under his appar ent timidity, and he stuck doggedly to it. He never wrote home and com plained. What was good enough for his mother was good enough for him. It seemed just an ordinary matter of routine for him to pick up French and German verbs. He was far from being brilliant, but he was sensitive and his memory was sound. Since his mother's ambition was to see him an accomplished linguist, he applied himself to the task as if everything in the world depended upon it, just as he knew that when the time came he would apply himself as thoroughly to the question of rugs and carpets. TTnder all this filial loyalty ran the pure strain of golden romance, side by side with the lesser metal of prac ticality. When he began to read the masters he preferred their romances to their novels. He even wrote poetry in secret, and when his mother discov ered the fact she cried over the senti mental verses. The father had to be told. He laughed and declared that the boy would some day develop into a good writer of advertisements. This quiet laughter, unburdened aB it was with ridicule, was enough to set George's muse a-winging, and she never came back. After leaving college he was given I a modest letter of credit and told to go where he pleased for a whole year. George started out at once lfi quest "of the Holy Grail, and there are more roads to that than there are to Rome. One may be reasonably sure of get ting into Rome, whereas the Holy Grail (diversified, variable, innumer able) Is always the exact sum of a bunch of hay hanging before old Dob bin's nose. Nevertheless, George gal loped his fancies with loose rein. He haunted romance, burrowed and plowed for it; and never his spade clanged musically against the hidden treasure, never a forlorn beauty in distress, not so much as chapter one of the Golden Book offered its <laz zling first page. George lost some con fidence. Two or three times a woman looked Into the young man's mind, and in his guilelessness they effected sundry holes in his letter of credit, but left his soul singularly untouched. The red corpuscle, his father's gift, though it lay dormant, subconsciously erected barriers. He was innocent, but he was no fool. That one year taught liftn the lesson, rather cheaply, too. If there was any romance in life, it came uninvited, and if courted and sought was as quick on the wing as that erst while poesy must. The year passed, and while he had not wholly given up the quest, the practical George agreed with the ro mantic Percival to shelve It indefi nitely. He returned to New York with thirty-two pounds sterling out of the original thousand, a fact that reju venated his paternal parent by some ten years. "Jane, that boy is all right. Perci val Algernon could not kill a boy like that." "Do you mean to infer that it ever could?" Sometimes a qualin wrinkled her conscience. Her mother's heart told her that her son ought not to be shy and bashful, that It was not in the nature of his blood to suspect ridicule where there was none. Per haps she had handicapped him with those nunves; but it was too late now to admit of this, and useless, since it would not have remedied the evil. Jones hemmed and hawed for a space. "No," he answered; "but I was afraid he might , try to live up to it; and no Percival Algernon who lived up to it could put his nose down 10 a Shah Abbas" and tell how many knots it had to the square Inch. I'll start him in on the job tomorrow." Whereupon the mother sat back dreamily. Now, where was the girl worthy of her boy? Monumental ques tion, besetting every mother, from Eve down. Eve, whose trials in this direc tion must have been hearirending! George left the cellar Indue time, and after that he went up the ladder in bounds, on his own merit, mind you. for his father never stirred a hand to boost him. He took the In terest in rugs that turns a buyer into a collector; It became a fascinating pleasure rather than a business. He became Invaluable to the house, and acquired some fame as a judge and an appraiser. When the chief-buyer retired George was given the position, with an Itinerary that carried him half way round the planet once a year, to Greece, Turkey, Persia, Arabia, and India, the lands of the genii and the bottles, of arabesques, of temples and tombs, of many-colored turbans and flowing robes and distracting tongues. He walked and always In a kind of mental enchantment. The suave and elusive Oriental, with his sharp practices, found his match In this pleasant young man, who knew the history of the very wools and cottons and silks woven in a rug or carpet. So George pros pered, became known in strange places, by strange peoples; and saw romance, light of foot and eager of eye, pass and repass; learned that romance did not essentially mean fall ing in love or rescuing maidens from burning houses and wrecks; that., on the contrary, true romance was kalei doscopic, having more brilliant facets than a diamond; and that the man who begins with nothing and ends with something is more wonderful than any excursion recounted by Sin bad or any tale by Scheherazade. But he sttM hoped that the iridescent god dess would some day touch his shoul der and lead him into that maze of romance so peculiar to his own fancy. And then into this little world of business and pleasure came death and death again, leaving him alone and with a twisted heart. Riches mattered little, and the sounding title of vice-president still less. It was with a distinct shock that he realized the mother and the father had been with him so long that he had forgot ten to make other friends. From one thing to another he turned in hope to soothe the smart, to heal the wound; and after a time he drifted, as all shy, intelligent and imaginative men drift who are friendless, into the silent and intimate comradeship of in animate things, such as jewels, ivories, old metals, rare woods and ancient embroideries, and perhaps more com forting than all these, good books. The proper tale of how the afore said Iridescent goddess jostled (for It scarce may be said that she led) him into a romance lacking neither com edy nor tragedy, now begins with a trifling bit of retrospection. One of those women who were not good and who looked into the clear pool of the boy's mind saw the harmless longing there, and made note, hoping to find profit by her knowledge when the per tinent day arrived. She was a woman so pleasing, so handsome, so adroit, that many a man. older and wiser than George, found her mesh too strong for him. Her plan matured, suddenly and brilliantly, as projects of men and women of her class and caliber without variation do. Late one December afternoon (to be precise, 1909), George sat on the tea-veranda of the Hotel Semiramls in Cairo. A book lay idly upon his knees. It was one of those yarns in which something was happening every other minute. As adventures go, George had never had a real one in all his twenty-eight years, and he believed that fate had treated him rather shabbily. He dtdn't quite ap preciate her reserve. No matter how late he wandered through the mysteri ous bazaars, either here in Egypt or over yonder in India, nothing ever be fell more exciting than an argument with a carriage-driver. He never car ried small-arms, for he would not have known how to use them. The only deadly things In his hands were bass-rods and tennis-racquets. No, nothing ever happened to him; yet he never met a man in a ship's smoke room who hadn't run the gamut of thrilling experiences. As George wasn't a liar himself, he believed all he saw and most of what he heard. Well, here he was, elght-and-twenty, a pocket full of money, a heart full of life, and as hopeless an outlook, so far as romance and adventure were concerned, as an old maid in a New England village. "George, you old fool, what's the use?" he thought. "What's the use of a desire that never goes In a straight line, but always round and round in a circle?" He thrust aside his grievance and surrendered to the never-ending won der of the Egyptian sunset; the Nile feluccas, riding upon perfect reflec tions; the date-palms, blask and mo tionless against the translucent blue of the sky; the amethystine prisms of the Pyramids, and the deepening gold of the desert's brim. He loved the Orient, always so new, always so strange, yet ever BO old and familiar. A carriage stopped in front, and his gaze naturally shifted. There la cease less attraction in speculating about new-comers In a hotel, what they are, what they do, where they come from, and where they are going. A fine elderly man of fifty got out. In the square set of hla shoulders, the flow- ing white mustache and imperial, there -was a suggestion of militarism. Ho was Immediately followed by a young woman of twenty, certainly not over that age. George sighed wist fully. He envied those polo-playera and gentleman-riders and bridge-ex perts who were stopping at the hotel. It wouldn't be an hour after dinner before some one of them found out who she was and spoke to her In that easy style which he concluded must be a gift rather than an accomplishment. You mustn't suppose for a minute that George wasn't well-born and well-bred, simply because his name was Jones. Many a Fitz-Hugh Maurice or Hugh Fitz-Maurice might have been — But, no matter. He knew instinctively, then, what elegance was when he saw it, and this girl was elegant, In dress, in movement. He rather liked the pallor of her skin, which hinted that she wasn't one of those athletic girls who bounced In and out of the din ing-room, talking loudly and smoking cigarettes and playing bridge for six penny points. She was tall. He was sure that her eyes were on the level with Ills own. The grey veil that drooped from the rim of her simple Leghorn hat to the tip of her nose ob scured her eyes, so he could not know that they were large and brown and Indefinably sad. They spoke not of a weariness of travel, but of a weari ness of the world, more precisely, of the people who Inhabited it. She and her companion passed on into the hotel, and if George's eyes veered again toward the desert over which the stealthy purples of night were creeping, the impulse was me chanical; he saw nothing. In truth, he was desperately lonesome, nud he knew, moreover, that he had no busi ness to be. He was young; he could at a pinch tell a joke as well as the next man; and if he had never had what he called an adventure, he had seen many strange and wonderful things and could describe them with that mental afterglow which still lin gers over the sunset of our first ex pressions in poetry. But there was always that hydra-headed monster, for ever getting about his feet, numbing his voice, paralyzing his hands, and never he lopped off a head that an -1 other did not instantly grow in its I This Girl Was Elegant, In Dress, In Movement. place. Even the sword of Perseus could not have saved him, since one has to get away from an object in order to cut it down. Had he really ever tried to over come this monster? Had he not wait ed for the propitious moment (which you and I know never comes) to throw off this species from Hades? It Is all very well, when you are old and dried up, to turn to Ivories and metals and precious stones; but when a fellow's young! You can't shake hands with an Ivory replica of the Taj Mahal, nor exchange pleasantries with a Mandarin's ring, nor yet confide Joys and 111b into a casket of rare emer alds; Indeed, they do but emphasize one's loneliness. If only lie had bad a dog; but one can not carry a dog half way round the world and back, at least not with comfort. What with all these new-fangled quarantine laws, duties, and fussy ships' officers who •wouldn't let you keep the animal in your state-room, traveling with a four footed friend was almost an impossi bility. To be sure, women with poodles. . . . And then, there was the bitter of acid in the knowledge that no one ever came up to and slapped him on the shoulder with a—- "Hel-10, Georgie, old sport; what's the good word?" for the simple fact that his shoulder was always bristling with spikes, born of the fear that some one was making fun of him. Perchance his mother's spirit, hov ering over him this evening, might have been inclined to tears. For they do say that the ghosts of the dear ones are thus employed when we are near to committing some folly, or to exploring some forgotten chamber of Pandora's box, or worse still, when that lady intends emptying the whole contents down upon our unfortunate heads. If so be, they were futile tears; Percival Algernon had accom plished its deadly purpose. Pandora? Well, then, for the bene fit of the children. She was a lady who was an intimate friend of the mythological gods. They liked her ap pearance so well that they one day gave her a box, casket, chest, or what ever it was, to guard. Hy some mar velous method, known only of gods, they had got together all the trials and tribulations of mankind (ai)d some of the joys) and locked them up in this casket. It was the Golden Age, aa you may surmise. You recall Eve and the apple? Well, Pandora was a forecast of Eve; she couldn't keep her eyes off the latch, and at length her hands —Fatal curiosity! Whirr! And everything has been at sixes and at sevens since that time. Pandora is eternally recurring, now here, now there; she Is a blonde sometimes, and again she is a brunette; and you may take It from George and me that there Is always something left in the casket. George closed the book and consult ed his sailing-list. In a short time he would leave for Port Said, thence to Naples, Christmas there, and home in January. Business had been ripping. He would be Jolly glad to get home again, to renew his comradeship with his treasures. And, by Jove! there was one man who slapped him on the shoulder, and he was no less a person than the genial president of the firm, fila father's partner, at present hi# own. If the old chap had had a daugh ter now. . . . And here one cornea at lasl to the bottom of the sack. He had only one definite longing, a healthy human longing, the only long ing worth while In all this deep, wide, round old top; to love ft woman and by her be loved. At exactly half after six the gentle man with the reversible cuffs arrived; and George missed his boat. (TO BE CONTINUMXJt «
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