The Kingdom of Slender Swords

  CHAPTER VII

  DOCTOR BERSONIN

  The Ambassador received his caller in his study. From across the hall,Barbara, through the half-open door, could see the expert's huge formfilling an arm-chair, where the limpid light of the desk-lamp fell onhis heavy, colorless face. The walls were lined with bookshelves andcurtains of low tone, and against this formless background his bigprofile stood out pallid and hawk-like. She could hear his voicedistinctly. Its even, dead flatness affected her curiously; it was notharsh, but absolutely without tone-quality or sympathy.

  For some time the talk was on casual topics and she occupied herselflistlessly with a tray of photographs on the table. She read theirtitles, smiling at the extraordinary intricacies of "English as she isJapped" by the complaisant oriental photographer: _The Picking Sea-Earat Enoshima_; _East-looking Panorama of Fuji Mount_; _Geisha in theFamous Dance of Maple-Leaf_.

  The smile left her face. Something had been said in the farther roomwhich caught her attention and in a moment she found herself listeningintently.

  "I understand the trials of the new powder have been very successful,"the Ambassador was saying. "Is it destined to revolutionize warfare, doyou think?"

  "It is too soon to tell yet," was the reply, "just what the result willbe. It will enormously increase the range of projectiles, as YourExcellency may guess, and its area of destruction will nearly doublethat of lyddite."

  Barbara felt, rather than saw, that the Ambassador gave a littleshudder. "I can imagine what that means," he said. "I saw Port Arthurafter the siege. So war is to grow more dreadful still! When will itcease, I wonder."

  "Never," Bersonin answered, with a cold smile. "It is the love of powerthat makes war, and that, in man, is inherent and ineradicable. A nationis only the individual in the aggregate, and selfishness is the guidinggospel of both."

  To Barbara the words seemed coldly, cruelly repellant. She felt a suddenquiver of dislike run over her.

  "You paint a sorry picture," said the Ambassador. "Can human ingenuitygo much further, then? What, in your opinion, will be the fightingengine of the future?"

  "The engine of the future"--Bersonin spoke deliberately--"will be alongother lines. It will be an atomic one. It will employ no projectile andno armor plate will resist it. The discoverer will have harnessed thelaw of molecular vibration. As there is a positive force that bindsatoms together, so there must be a negative force that, under certainconditions, can drive them apart!"

  He spoke with what seemed an extraordinary conviction. His manner hadsubtly changed. For the first time his tone had gathered something likefeeling, and the dry, metallic voice seemed to Barbara to vibrate with acurious, gloating triumph.

  "Granted such a force," he went on, "and a machine to generate anddirect it, and of what value is the most powerful battle-ship, the moststupendous fort? Mere silly shreds of steel and stone! Why, such anengine might be carried in a single hand, and yet the nation thatpossessed it could be master of the world!"

  A dark flush had risen to his pallid cheek, and on the arm of his chairBarbara saw the massive fingers of one huge hand clench and unclenchwith a furtive, nervous gesture. The sight gave her a sharp sense ofrecoil as if from the touch of something sinister and evilly suggestive.

  "No!" said the Ambassador vehemently. "Humanity would revolt. Such adiscovery would be worth less than nothing! Its use by any warringnation would call down the execration of civilization, and the man whoknew the secret would be too dangerous to be at large!"

  There was dead silence for a moment. Bersonin sat motionless, staringstraight before him. Very slowly the color seemed to fade from hischeek. When he spoke again his voice had regained its dead level oftonelessness.

  "That has occurred to me," he said. "I think Your Excellency is right.Invention may do its work too well. However--no doubt we speak ofscientific impossibilities; let us hope so, at any rate."

  Barbara pushed the photographs aside and slipped into the next room,closing the door and drawing the heavy portieres that hung over it. Shehad had for a moment a vague, almost childish, sense of shrinking as iffrom something monstrous and uncanny--such a sensation as the nakeddiver may have, when, peering through his water-glass, he sees a dimgrisly shape glide, stealthy and cold, through the opaque depths. Shewas growing absurdly fanciful, she thought. She did not turn on theelectric light, but threw open one of the long, French windows. Therewas a new moon and a pale radiance flooded the room, with a sudden odorof wistaria and plum-blossoms. The window gave on to a porch running thelength of the house, and this made her think suddenly of home. Yet theair was too humid for California, too moist and rich even for Florida.And suddenly she found herself pitying the people there to whom the Eastwould always be a closed book. Yet how dim and vague Japan had been toher a month before!

  A grand piano stood open by the window and in the dim light she sat downand let her fingers wander idly in long arpeggios. She could see oneside of the Japanese garden, with a glimpse of a tiny dry lake and apebbled rivulet spanned by an arching bridge of red lacquer. It ended ina sharp, sloping hill covered with shrubbery. On the ridge far above shedistinguished the outlines of native houses and flanking them thecurved, Tartar-like gables of a gray old temple. Somewhere, beyond thatlittle hill, perhaps, stood the Chapel erected to her father's memory,which she had yet to see. As her fingers strayed over the ivory keys,she thought of him, of his vivid, aberrant career and untimely end.

  There are nights in the Japanese spring when the landscape, in itswondrous delicacy of tones, seems only an envelope of something subtlerand unseen, the filmy covering of a beauty that is wholly spiritual.To-night it seemed so to Barbara. The close was very still, wrapped in adreamy haze as soft as sleep, the mountains on the horizon wan shapes ofsilver mist, semi-diaphanous. It seemed to her that in this living,sentient breath of Japan, her father was nearer to her than he had everbeen before.

  The thought brought to her vague memories of her mother and of herchildhood. Old airs began to mingle with the chords, and on the shrillfairy sound-carpet woven by the myriad insect-looms of the garden, thebits of melody went treading softly out across the perfume of thewistaria.