“Nothing does,” I said as much to myself as to her. “Life is like that. It is the pursuit we value, not the acquisition.”
“What I mean,” she explained, “is that it doesn’t show for what it really is. Those uncut stones never do, you know. And they don’t go with modern clothes. So I want to have it cut. It’s the only thing on which we differ, Peter and I. You would never guess how sentimental he is.”
I somewhat perfunctorily began to assure her that sentiment is coming into fashion again when our hostess at last gave her signal, and we all stood up.
In the moment of confusion that followed I saw Peter join his wife. I also saw, as I pulled away the chair of the lady from Pittsburgh, that she, she of the wattles and the diamonds, and not the lovely Esmeralda, had been the one to save Peter this time. In fact, I saw that you never can tell when life will turn dramatic in your hands, even at so polite a dinner-party as ours. I saw it the more distinctly because it was so invisible. The thing was “a drama of small, smothered, intensely private things,” as Henry James says. Nevertheless it made me impatient of the play for which we were already late. Mr. Belasco, of course, would arrange everything very much better, with tears and smiles in their proper order. Here everything had been too long drawn out in the beginning and too much jammed at the end. The end, indeed, was just what was lacking, now that Mrs. Maturin had given it so disquieting a twist—and what I stood small chance of getting hold of in that confounded box at the Belasco.
So I followed the others out of the dining-room, much less concerned about my hat than about the whimsicalities of playing Harun-ar-Rashid. Not that I minded my own fix, now that I took in what it might mean to have a beautiful lady beholden to one for an emerald of Tamerlane. The worst was that they might think I really had taken a commission from that old terror in Tehran. Nor could I feel too sorry for Mrs. Maturin. I had done my best for her, and I had given her due warning. If she had been taken in, if she had paid a Shah’s ransom for a bit of green paste out of the back shop of the Adorner of the Monarchy, it was her own fault. What a magnificent hoax, though, pulled off in how artistic a manner! Mr. Belasco himself couldn’t have staged it better, or have left her so unaware of having been taken in. And, after all, she could afford her little caprices. Besides which, she had Peter to show for it. He was more of a jewel than perhaps she knew. If she didn’t, she still had her famous eyes and her famous hair. Those were genuine enough and rare enough, in all conscience, and nothing could rob her of them—except time.
But Peter, poor old Peter, who could always play a game, but who could never carry off the stakes: what would time do for him? Peter disturbed me more than anything. Had he been taken in, too? Or—I must confess I was black enough to put that question to myself—had he helped to take Esmeralda in? He would almost have been justified in doing it, hard up as he was at the time. In any case, he must have come in for a very tidy little commission. Otherwise how could he possibly have squared M. Godet so soon? And I wondered if he was capable of the sentiment with which his wife credited him when she confided to me that he didn’t want the emerald cut. But if it was cut—there could be no doubt it would be if Mrs. Maturin had so made up her mind—and if the historic jewel did turn out to be a sham, what then? Of course I did not know for sure; I generally do jump at wrong conclusions. Still, it was a very pretty little predicament even if the stone was genuine. For—
At the cloak-room door I suddenly felt a hand in my arm. It was Peter’s. He showed no trace of my self-consciousness.
“Let’s walk around to the theatre,” he proposed. “A breath of air will be nice after all that cackle. I have told Esmeralda. She’s going to take the General in our car. Do you mind?”
I didn’t. As for Peter, he at once began to talk quite naturally about Tehran. It amused me, on H Street, to go back to the Lalazar. My news was a little later than Peter’s, and I was able to tell him details of the Turco-German invasion, the recapture of Hamadan, the adventures of several of our friends. Half a dozen of the young men he had known in the Hôtel de Paris had already met their fates in France, in Macedonia, in Mesopotamia, in Poland. They had, at any rate—one or two of them—been released in the most unexpected of ways from their obligations to M. Godet. M. Godet himself, for that matter, had not let his collection of I. O. U.’s stand in the way of going home and taking his own part in Armageddon.
These matters kept us from turning down to the Belasco when we reached the corner of Lafayette Square. We compromised by striking into it. And presently Peter announced: