Double Trouble; Or, Every Hero His Own Villain. Quick Herbert

IV

       Table of Contents

AN ADVENTURE IN BENARES

       Table of Contents

      The silly world shrieks madly after Fact,

       Thinking, forsooth, to find therein the Truth;

       But we, my love, will leave our brains unracked,

       And glean our learning from these dreams of youth:

       Should any charge us with a childish act

       And bid us track out knowledge like a sleuth,

       We'll lightly laugh to scorn the wraiths of History,

       And, hand in hand, seek certitude in Mystery.

       —When the Halcyon Broods.

      The house of the occultist was one of a long row, all alike, which reminds the observer of an exercise in perspective, as one glances down the stretch of balustraded piazzas. Amidon walked straight across the street from the hotel, and counted the flights of stairs up to the fourth floor. There was no elevator. The denizens of the place gave him a vague impression of being engaged in the fine arts. A glimpse of an interior hung with Navajo blankets, Pueblo pottery, Dakota beadwork, and barbaric arms; the sound of a soprano practising Marchesi exercises; an easel seen through an open door and flanked by a Grand Rapids folding-bed with a plaster bust atop; and a pervasive scent of cigarettes, accounted for, and may or may not have justified, the impression. On the fourth floor the scent shaded off toward sandalwood, the sounds toward silence, Bohemia toward Benares. He walked in twilight, on inch-deep nap, to a door on which glowed in soft, purple, self-emitted radiance, the words: