CHAPTER XXIII
For minutes after the lights had flashed over The Devil’s Own, the two in the royal box sat gazing at the flat silver surface so recently deep with the shadows and high-lights of life as lived on Earth. Neither noticed that the dead sea of faces below was enlivened by recognition of the King’s favorite before it ebbed away beneath the balcony. Neither heard the swish of whispers that passed from wave to wave—gossip retailed from court, vilified innuendo, speculation over the Belialic intent in entertaining the lately arrived star of the piece with her death’s aftermath.
In truth, both host and guest were self-absorbed in emotion roused by the play, but emotion quite antipodal. His shaved face showed plainly his astonishment; worked with his darkling rage. Hers lifted roofward a glory that so outshone the super-lighted dome as to suggest the far-distant source of that radiance which no Avernian device might dim.
“It was not what I expected—the picture,” Satan remarked, with ominous restraint. “The titling was good, but the plot didn’t fit. The damned turn-turtle didn’t turn!”
Dolores was too charged with an inspired decision to realize his displeasure. She turned to him; stretched out her hand; touched his arm.
“You said you could put me in spiritual connection with the women of Earth,” she reminded him. “Could you also with men—with John?”
“And why, pray, with John?”
The cruelty of the smile which had been so charming awhile back should have warned her, but she must have been blinded by that light from within.
“Didn’t you see how he suffered from self-reproach? Don’t you realize that he still is suffering?” She sighed in her voice of sad winds. “Surely you gathered from the picture that all those age-long minutes of the time I died from doubt, he still loved me—that he loves me now? I want to implore his forgiveness.”
Her smile, timid from its rarity, strained to disappear, although she tried to hold it.
“I’ve done my best to please you,” she wheedled nervously. “Won’t you do this for me—just free my spirit for one short hour by the time of Earth?”
“So! You’d rather go back to that puny mortal than on and on—with me?”
“Oh, but I’ll come back, and go on and on so cheerfully! I give you my word,” she assured him. “I’ll do everything I can for you. Just grant me the hour. It’s not the fraction of a second to you. You say that you never have cared for anyone. Yet you boast of your imagination. Can’t you imagine what it is really to care? Won’t you even try?”
“I might do that.” He eyed her. “I might try.”
All the drive home his manner was detached. He did not repulse her gratitude for his grudging consideration of her request. Neither did he explain that he was trying to imagine what “caring” would be like—but trying through jealousy, its crudest mood.
“I will tell you—well, afterward,” he said, on bidding her “sleep light” within Apollyon Palace.
“After what?”—she.
“That I don’t know myself as yet,” he snapped.
Afterward—if only we could know the afterward before!
She slept light. And through the next day her regret increased that she had not dared his wrath and demanded a definite period to her suspense. Feelings unwontedly rebellious filled her that she must wait to know—rather, that John must wait.
Over the babe—their babe—she crooned her hope. To Adeline she whispered her apprehension. Something in the hard, planning look of the unfair fiend, in his superiority to any attempt at cleverness, in his abstraction even while listening to compliments over his driving——
When was afterward?
Satan, too, asked himself questions through that day.
A far busier leader than any king or president of Earth, since he had the evil of all nations to direct, he yet found time from his activities to remember the boomerang blow to himself of last night’s “show.”
His chamber of state glowed as with St. Elmo’s fire, while he lightning-flashed his orders through infinity, defying the “static” of Earth and Heaven and the void between. Piteously he drove his Minions of Malice toward the consummation of crimes unique or foul enough to merit his supervision. No measurement exists to compute the watts of energy required to transmit the royal will in this orgy of action. But what did he care that the Gehennan sun was dimmed by the draught until it looked a mere balloon?
As the artificial daylight went into eclipse, greener grew the color of the Satanic mood—a hard green, mixed from the yellow of chagrin and the blue-black of rage. He felt as mean as a son-in-law. It did not help in the slightest to have Old Original commiserate him on the projection of a picture which had shown his rival running true; no more did that unworthy’s impious request that he be appointed royal previewer of all future films. Even the minister’s report on the entire success of a particularly contemptible political coup which he had devised for the postponement of that good will toward men threatened in the “Little Book” did not long divert him.
At length, consigning the rest of the day’s deviltry to various fiend aides, the Author of Evil forced his mind to concentrate on the vital question evolved from last night. How best might mortal pusillanimity be revealed to the rose-goggled eyes of true love?
Through the mood which he had been suffering since the fiasco of his “evening out,” he recognized violent tendencies within himself which made him feel, more than ever before, his power to devise and inflict suffering. In this case, however, violence would not do; would destroy what he wished to create. With meticulous delicacy he must handle this mind feminine if he hoped to pluck therefrom its dearest idealization.
What can the heart of woman not forgive? He asked himself and considered, one by one, many answers.
“I never could forgive infidelity!”
At that loudest and oftenest cry of the wives of the world the malignant lips curled. “Never?” Yet most did forgive who found it advisable so to do.
“Liquor? I couldn’t endure that kind of a beast.”
But which martyr-wife exchanged her drunken lord except for a better fate?
“Dishonesty? I wouldn’t live with a man I didn’t respect.”
Wouldn’t she? Then why were the jail-gates draped with weeping faces and stretching arms—why the late-life efforts to “live it down” of the work-wasted woman and the husband who had served out his time?
Never? Couldn’t? Wouldn’t? What the heart of woman cannot forgive is what she has not been called upon to forgive. The libertine’s lady might just as well have learned to endure shame through ebriety, the drunkard’s dupe through lechery.
What type of man, then, does the mind of woman most despise? A villain? Scarcely, when the worst are loved the best. A traitor, a weakling, a failure? For the lowest of these, pardons are plead. Upon them, regenerating love is poured. What—what to her is the sin unpardonable?
With eyes closed against possible distractions, Satan rough-shadowed the suspects of his thoughts. And just when his mind seemed emptied of ideas, he had it.
Of course. Of course. A caught coward was what she could not forgive, woman. He would star one earthling for benefit of his spirit-mate in a play of cowardice. “Afterward”? After he was through, she scarcely would press her request.
From their Limbian “Information” he inquired the name of the personal devil of John Cabot. Upon learning that an imp named Okeh attended the banker, he demanded instant connection by wireless telephone. This he got with a promptness that might be commended to the attention of mortal systematizers.
“That you, Okeh?” he asked. “I hear that you’re responsible for the evil impulses of a Mr. John Calvin Cabot.... You speak as if you were proud of the fact. You needn’t be.... What say?... But I have a perfectly bad right to insult you.... A chance at me is just what I’m going to give you—a chance to prove your efficiency. I want the Cabot program for the immediate future. Quick, now. I am not used to waiting.”
Amid sulphuric anathemas at his informant, Satan noted the report. Sailing for Europe in half an hour on a trans-Atlantic air-liner, was he? And enemy wife, all unknowing as yet, was blimping it along? In the old nick of time, as usual, was he to wish the undevoted couple mal voyage. So the Marquis d’Elie, too, was to be on board? After all, the “Turn Turtle” must think more of the Trent girl’s battered reputation than of his own pleasure.
If the big blimp was to sail in a few minutes, what was Mr. Cabot doing in the morasses of Brooklyn, only half way to the flying field? The agate-eyed personal devil was ready with explanations. The gentleman’s wife was reopening a suit for divorce on the strength of an illegitimate child whom circumstantial evidence proved to be his. The air trip was to celebrate all but the actual verdict in her favor. Cabot had started late that he might board at the last moment, thereby giving her an unhappy surprise. His car unfortunately had run into a jam around an open-air evangelist—a sensational religionist who was enthralling crowds everywhere, the Rev. Dr. Alexander Willard by name.
Scarcely could Satan restrain his risibilities. What a contretemps! Here was the deposed divine, forced to the Free Church of Outdoors by the siren Grief, with his eloquence delaying her last victim’s flight from the scandal she had brought upon him. How delightfully diabolic!
For sake of his own recent experiment at popularizing the once tedious sermon, His Augustness had Okeh short-mouth for him certain of “Nimrod’s” shots.
“I used to hunt birds and beasts. Now I hunt the hearts of men. God is my guide, Hallelujah! So what care I that I am shut out from the temples of those who call themselves the righteous? The world is too small a church for me. Through the tall timbers of humanity I hunt immortal souls. Look out for me, you quaking quail of a woman! Look out for me, you running rabbit of a man! You can’t escape me through the underbrush of your hypocrisy. I don’t miss, once I take aim. Hallelujah, I am gunning for you!”
Lest the imp mistake his dishonest amusement, Satan cut off the report. “Enough of that irreverent stuff. Listen carefully now to instructions from the First and Last. That liner likely will wait for a man of Cabot’s importance. See that you get aboard with him. You’re to closer-than-a-brother him through an opportunity for inciting cowardice which will present itself. While he sleeps insinuate into his mind a terror of death by falling and by drowning. Strengthen his primal appetence of self-protection. This is the last chance you get with me. If you fail to make an arrant coward of this man you’ll find yourself out of a deviling job for death. I am busy now, as you’d better be. A bad afternoon to you!”
The Regent of Reversals was “on terms” with the elements, as with all forces for evil through good. On hearing that calm had been planned for the high-seas, he discarded the idea of a marine storm.
Always had his worst results been obtained through natural causes. Indeed, he had come to pride himself that no cause was too natural for him. Particularly did he dislike, for reasons of his own, to interfere with a rainbow, it being a symbol to him that the Earth would not be destroyed by water. Since he had only fire as a weapon he would be in a bad fix if the coup ultimate should be sprung upon him with water power. Of course, the coup wasn’t to be sprung, not if he could forestall it, but even yet he was wracked by unrighteous rage every time he recalled Noah’s Flood. That time, he had been about as powerful as a case of dynamite—soaked. One decent thing about the Great-I-Am was that He never forgot a promise. One could count upon a rainbow, once one saw it. And Satan was “counting.”
Upon the single great indestructible under his control he must depend to vary the monotony of a placid sea. Never had the three single-eyed Cyclopeans of mythology failed to serve his purposes. Lightning Flash, Thunderbolt and Rolling Thunder would advance his scheme.
Motivation and “natural causes” arranged, he sent a peremptory summons for the Prime Minister and to him detailed instructions in the duties of a proxy escort. An hour before dawn Sin was to awaken the Royal Entertainer and conduct her straightway to the stadium of the Ball of Life. That “best bubble” of infernal invention was to entertain her by picturing some interesting Earth events as they occurred.
“I shall not fail Your Damnity,” the old toady assured him.
“Better not,” was all Satan said as he finger-flashed his First Emissary of Evil out the royal suite.
His Master Crier was called; told to issue a general invitation to the forthcoming spectacle; warned that the stadium must be filled to its last seat, despite the unconventional hour. Not until this sop to his vanity had been applied, did His Lowness close the “office” and himself depart.
With the failure of his past-tense picture-play in mind, he betook himself to the stadium and preparations for this greatest and latest show under Earth. There must be no miscues about a performance upon which depended the success of that “experiment” inspired by Dolores’ earth-tales of joys, as well as griefs to men. He would make his own tests of the complicated apparatus, although the plant had not failed him since installation.
To establish that the Ball of Life functioned properly was his first concern. Giving it a turn, he watched the reflector pool for shadows. When the shimmering prisms of the mercury-like pond had been quieted, he was rewarded by an intimate look at a naval review somewhere on the China Sea, within focus of which the overhung ball had chanced to stop.
The finder he next put to test. This instrument, of graduated tubes like those of a monster telescope, controlled the lenses of the all-seeing ball. At will, he caused it to pick up this scene and that, finally locating the dirigible which was to be the central figure of the forthcoming event, as it tossed on waves of air above the Atlantic.
Closer attention did he give to the aurograph, a practicable device worked out to supplement the spectroscope, which combined on an enormous scale the principles of the radio-telephone and the phonograph. Back of the stadium, well out of way of the suspended ball, the antennæ—an elaborate network of wires—were suspended by metal-like balloons. These were insulated from Gehenna, except for the central converging wires, which led to multi-power generators. Upon a huge sounding board were the messages received, thence communicated to the stadium by annunciators. The tuning of this masterpiece of etheric control occasioned Satan some concern, but finally was accomplished to his satisfaction.
Back on the control platform, surrounded by his technical chiefs, His Highness watched the stadium fill. As the appointed hour approached, he ran up the green walls which surrounded the terraced seats and from the pool flashed an order that all spectators adjust the small dynamos of the eye-shades with which they were provided on entering. He wished none to fail to see to the end the abasement of John Cabot.
A moment he hesitated, then took up the telephone connected with the royal box. The lackadaisical voice of Old Original responded.
“Dame Dolores in her place?”
On being assured of that important fact, he turned to the Master Mechanic.
“Step on the music!”
Upon all ears burst an orchestration, The Song of the Sea. As surely did they hear it as though it had been carried hellward by the wind through shells, crevasses and metallic splinters. As by lutes and æeolean harps it was played, with crashes and staccato rumblings for bass.
The drama of mortal cowardice, destined to turn into contempt a too-long-lasting love, was on.