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Page 49
VIII
On the following afternoon, among the Sunday throng in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, a slender young man of inconsiderable stature, alert as
to movement, but with an expression of absent dreaming, might have been
observed giving special attention to the articles in those rooms devoted
to ancient Egypt. Doubtless, however, no one did observe him more than
casually, for, though of singularly erect carriage, he was garbed
inconspicuously in neutral tints, and his behaviour was never such as to
divert attention from the surrounding spoils of the archaeologist.
Had his mind been as an open book, he would surely have become a figure
of interest. His mental attitude was that of a professional beau of
acknowledged preeminence; he was comparing the self at home in the mummy
case with the remnants of defunct Pharaohs here exposed under glass, and
he was sniffing, in spirit, at their lack of kingly dignity and their
inferior state of preservation. Their wooden cases were often marred,
faded, and broken. Their shrouding linen was frayed and stained. Their
features were unimpressive and, in too many instances, shockingly
incomplete. They looked very little like kings, and the laudatory
recitals of their one-time greatness, translated for the contemporary
eye, seemed to be only the vapourings of third-class pugilists.
Sneering openly at a damaged Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, he reflected
that some day he would confer upon that museum a relic transcending all
others. He saw it enshrined in a room by itself; it should never be
demeaned by association with those rusty cadavers he saw about him. This
would be when he had passed on to another body, in accordance with the
law of Karma. He would leave a sum to the museum authorities,
specifically to build this room, and to it would come thousands, for a
glimpse of the superior Ram-tah, last king of the pre-dynastic period,
surviving in a state calculated to impress every beholder with his
singular merits. Ram-tah, cheated of his place in history's pantheon,
should here at last come into his own; serene, beauteous, majestic,
looking every inch a king, where mere Pharaohs looked like--like the
coffee-stained, untidy fragments they were.
He left the place in a tolerant mood. He had weighed himself with the
other great dead of the world.
That night he sat again before this old king, staring until he lost
himself, staring as he had before stared into the depths of his shell.
The shell, when he had looked steadily at it for a long time, had always
seemed to put him in close touch with unknown forces. He had once tried
to explain this to his Aunt Clara, who understood nearly everything, but
his effort had been clumsy enough and had brought her no enlightenment.
"You look into it--and it makes you _feel_!" was all he had been able to
tell her.
But the shell was now discarded for the puissant person of Ram-tah. The
message was more pointed. He drew power from the old dead face that yet
seemed so living. He was himself a wise and good king. No longer could
he play the coward before trivial adversities. He would direct large
affairs; he would live big. Never again would he be afraid of death or
Breede or policemen or the mockery of his fellows--or women! He might
still avoid the latter, but not in terror; only in a dignified dread
lest they talk and spoil it all.
He would choose, in due time, a worthy consort, and a certain Crown
Prince would, in further due time, startle the world with his
left-handed pitching. It was a prospect all golden to dream upon. His
spirit grew tall and its fibre toughened.
To be sure, he did not achieve a kingly disregard for public opinion all
in one day. There was the matter of that scarlet cravat. Monday morning
he excavated it from the bottom of the trunk, where it lay beside
"Napoleon, Man and Lover." He even adjusted it, carelessly pretending
that it was just any cravat, the first that had come to hand. But its
colour was still too alarming. _It_--so he usually thought of the great
Ram-tah--would have worn the cravat without a tremor, but It had been
born a king. One glance at the thing about his neck had vividly recalled
the awkward circumstance that, to the world at large, he was still
Bunker Bean, a youth incapable of flaunt or flourish.
Let it not be thought, however, that his new growth showed no result
above ground. He purchased and wore that very morning a cravat not
entirely red, it is true, but one distinguished by a narrow red stripe
on a backing of bronze, which the clerk who manoeuvred the sale assured
him was "tasty." Also he commanded a suit of clothes of a certain light
check in which the Bean of uninspired days would never have braved
public scrutiny. Such were the immediate and actual fruits of Ram-tah's
influence.
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