On the other side of the wall the bather finished his ablutions. His
body was graceful, vigorous, and youthful, tinted a golden bronze. His
nose was hawky; his eyes a Latin brown, alert and roving, though there
was a hint of weariness in them, the pressure of long, racking hours of
ceaseless vigilance. His top hair was a glossy black inclined to curl;
but the four days' growth of beard was as blond as a ripe chestnut burr.
In spite of this mark of vagabondage there were elements of beauty
in the face. The expanse of the brow and the shape of the head were
intellectual. The mouth was pleasure-loving, but the nose and the jaw
neutralized this.
After he had towelled himself he reached down for a brown leather pouch
which lay on the three-legged bathroom stool. It was patently a tobacco
pouch, but there was evidently something inside more precious than
Saloniki. He held the pouch on his palm and stared at it as if it
contained some jinn clamouring to be let out. Presently he broke away
from this fascination and rocked his body, eyes closed--like a man
suffering unremitting pain.
"God's curse on them!" he whispered, opening his eyes. He raised the
pouch swiftly, as though he intended dashing it to the tiled floor; but
his arm sank gently. After all, he would be a fool to destroy them. They
were future bread and butter.
He would soon have their equivalent in money--money that would bring
back no terrible recollections.
Strange that every so often, despite the horror, he had to take them out
and gaze at them. He sat down upon the stool, spread a towel across his
knees, and opened the pouch. He drew out a roll of cotton wool, which he
unrolled across the towel. Flames! Blue flames, red, yellow, violet, and
green--precious stones, many of them with histories that reached back
into the dim centuries, histories of murder and loot and envy. The
young man had imagination--perhaps too much of it. He saw the stones
palpitating upon lovely white and brown bosoms; he saw bloody and greedy
hands, the red sack of towns; he heard the screams of women and the
raucous laughter of drunken men. Murder and loot.
At the end of the cotton wool lay two emeralds about the size of half
dollars and half an inch in thickness, polished, and as vividly green
as a dragonfly in the sun, fit for the turban of Schariar, spouse of
Scheherazade.
Rodin would have seized upon the young man's attitude--the limp body,
the haggard face--hewn it out of marble and called it Conscience. The
possessor of the stones held this attitude for three or four minutes.
Then he rolled up the cotton wool, jammed it into the pouch, which he
hung to his neck by a thong, and sprang to his feet. No more of this
brooding; it was sapping his vitality; and he was not yet at his
journey's end.