Peter, when I met him in Tehran, seemed by no means one of the truly good. I do not say it in disparagement; for I have noticed, in this ironic world, that the truly good seem as capable of making a botch of their own and other people’s lives as the rest of us, while the prodigal son appears to enjoy an undue share of immortality. Be that as it may, the sight of Peter across the table, chatting with the Honourable Miss Windham, brought it incongruously back to me that the first time I ever saw him was much later in the evening than this, between the shafts of a pre-historic victoria which he, together with a young Russian attaché and a couple of youths whom I took to be Telegraph, was trundling down the Lalazar, as it were the Pennsylvania Avenue of Tehran, with every sign of enjoyment. Who was in the victoria I don’t know. Certainly not Mrs. Maturin, then.
I afterward heard—in those places, you know, one hears everything about everybody—that although theoretically prospecting for oil among the mountains of Kurdistan, he was for the moment persona non grata in that temperamental land, where his investigations had included the wearers of veils. However, he was distinctly persona grata with M. Godet, the French hotel-keeper, who does so much for the local colour of Tehran. While there are a good many young men there, what with the Legations, the Bank, the Telegraph, and what not, and while between one estate and another are there great gulfs fixed, in the most approved metropolitan manner, the young men vastly outnumber the young women of their own sort or of any other sort, for that matter. And there are fewer things for them to do than in larger and less exotic capitals. They therefore give themselves with the more zest to such simple distractions as may be found in any mining-camp. And one of their favourite distractions is to sack M. Godet’s hotel. M. Godet takes these periodical devastations very philosophically. I suspect, in fact, that he rather counts on them—in a country where travellers are rare and of the less pecunious, if of the more adventurous, sort, such as military men, rug-buyers, missionaries, and music-hall artists. As for the young men, certain among them are mortgaged to M. Godet for life. It is quite a recognised institution of Tehran. The Legation, or the Bank, or the Telegraph, goes bond for its particular young man, and he goes without everything but pilau enough to keep him at his desk until he is square with M. Godet. Peter, being an outsider, might have fared more hardly if I had not been foolish enough, as a fellow-countryman, to sign my name to a certain scrap of paper drawn up between him and M. Godet. True, the wisdom of my folly had very soon been proved by the tearing up of that scrap of paper, not long after Peter’s departure, by M. Godet himself. But the transaction enlightened me not a little on such topics as the budget of the Hôtel de Paris, the price of glass in Persia, etc. For Peter, they said, when he became a little exalted, cried out for air, and he never could wait to open the windows. He preferred to pitch the furniture at them. He never killed any body who happened to be passing below.
So you see there were reasons for my liking Peter. There was something honest and human about him. We all have impulses to throw furniture, but not many of us have the courage of our convictions. Still, I had never dreamed that Peter would turn out so much the hero of a fairy-tale as to marry the miraculous Miss Sanderson. She turned up in Tehran, too, a year or two after the war broke out, with a French maid and a mongrel Caucasian courier. The war had caught her in Vladikavkaz, Kisliavodsk, one of those watering-places in the Caucasus. She had stayed on in Russia, waiting for the war to stop, till she made up her mind that the longest way around was the shortest way home. And she sailed into the Legation one day, with a letter from the Embassy at Petrograd, desiring to be presented at court and to be shown the Peacock Throne.
It is hard to deny the requests of beautiful ladies. The requests of Miss Sanderson were peculiarly impossible, because, in the first place, ladies are not presented at court in Persia, as they are in more modern monarchies, and because, in the second place, there happens to be no Peacock Throne. There was one once, with a history as wonderful as its canopy of jewelled peacocks, of which there remains nothing but a doubtful modern fragment. And there is now another, whose name refers not to its decoration, but to a certain Madam Peacock who adorned the harem of Fat’h Ali Shah. These facts were set forth at considerable length, many years ago, in his important work on Persia, by Lord Curzon of Kedleston. But if every other traveller always demanded a sight of the Peacock Throne, and always went away doubting our account of the matter, how could eyes so romantic as those of Miss Sanderson be expected to waste themselves on the closely printed and none too thrilling pages of an ex-Viceroy of India? So I contented myself by pointing out to Miss Sanderson that the Peacock Throne had not been visible since the coronation of young Ahmed Shah, and that Tehran was full of dark rumours as to its having been sold, together with many other magnificent things belonging to the Persian crown. In the third place, however, the requests of the lovely Esmeralda were in particular impossible because of the moment which she chose for making them. It was the moment when the rivers of German gold poured out in Persia had begun to produce their effect. The Holy War had been preached, the banks in the south had been looted, the gendarmes had gone over to the enemy after their Swedish officers, the battle of Kengaver had been fought, and Kermanshah and Hamadan had been taken by the Turks. Even in Tehran things were beginning to look very funny. I therefore urged Miss Sanderson to return to Russia while she could and get home via Sweden or Siberia. As for going to India by way of the Gulf, it was out of the question.
All the same, she did it! Impossible, I suppose, is a word not to be found in the dictionaries of lovely ladies who all their lives have seen the most obdurate doors fly open before them. And this lovely lady evidently had her share of the resolution, or of a certain indifference to the realities of life, for which her sex is noted. Not that she took anybody into her confidence—except Peter. Him she also took with her, to the vast amusement of Tehran, for whom the fantasies of the American virgin upon her travels are still more or less a novelty. The gossip was that she had discharged her courier and taken Peter on instead. Everybody knew that poor Peter was hard up. At any rate, I happened to know that he and Miss Sanderson had never heard of each other until I introduced them, shortly before they disappeared. And that introduction was merely an accident. On such careless threads do hang the destinies of men!
As I considered it, eyeing the correct and opulent Peter, who now looked secure against the accidents of life, I had to scratch my head to recall just how we had turned so successful a trick, Providence and I. Oh, yes: an emerald, of course. Miss Sanderson had not taken me very seriously at first, and had gone over my head to the Chief and then to the Russians. She had letters to them, too. But a few days later, when I ran across her at the French Legation, she said she had about made up her mind to take my advice. Persia was too disappointing, what with the dirt and the ugliness and the discomfort and the obstacles everybody put in the way of her seeing the sights, if there really were any. She had even been unable to find anything in the Bazaar.
I explained to her that in Persia nobody goes shopping in bazaars, if antiques were what she was after. The only thing was to get hold of a go-between, a sort of broker who has ways of getting into Persian houses and of getting out the treasures some of them contain.
“Then find me one,” she promptly recommended.
It appeared that she didn’t want rugs or tiles or miniatures or any of the other things that most people take from Persia. She wanted an emerald, and a much better one than she had seen in the shops. It was then that I first heard of her fancy for emeralds. She had one that belonged to Marie Antoinette. She had another that came from the magnificent collection of Abd-ül-Hamid. Why shouldn’t she have a third out of the treasury in Tehran—if the Shah’s jewels were really being sold? If I wouldn’t show her the Peacock Throne, I might at least get her a go-between. The notion seemed to tickle her enormously, and she refused to be frightened by my warnings that she would have to keep her eyes very wide open and pay any number of commissions without knowing it, including a good fat one for me.
So it was that I handed her over to Peter. Not that Peter was the go-between. The go-between was a picturesque character known in Tehran as the Adorner of the Monarchy. The Adorner of the Monarchy, otherwise one Yeprem Khan, is really an Armenian, I believe. Just how he came to merit his flowery Persian title I cannot say—unless by virtue of his decorative beard, which he dyes purple with henna. Or perhaps it is because out of his back shop in Tiflis, which is his true headquarters, come most of the Rhages jars which adorn the collections of Europe and America. At any rate, the Adorner of the Monarchy is one of the greatest artists and most unmitigated rascals in Asia. There is very little in the way of Saracenic antiquities which the old scarecrow cannot turn out of that mysterious back shop of his in Tiflis, though he specialises in pre-Sefevian pottery. The only trouble with it is that some of it is genuine. For in that sort of thing the Adorner of the Monarchy has the scent of a bloodhound. And he sticks that sanguine beard of his into every corner of western Asia where there may be battle, revolution, or sudden death, seeking what he may devour. Wherefore, I suppose, did he happen to be there in Tehran when we wanted him.