TARTAR
It was only when Professor Barker Harrison was in his private study, on the top floor of the little house which overlooked a corner of the University Campus, that faculties in his soul, hitherto silent because none had known how to sound them, rose, singing and dancing, to the surface.
These faculties bred thoughts and dreams, and he did not speak of them to anybody; not even to his wife, whom he loved. They were free, unfettered thoughts, and since they were imaginary and quite unrelated to exact, academic science, he was slightly ashamed of them.
They seemed a direct throwback to the earliest germs of his racial development and consciousness, dealing as they did with clanking, half-forgotten centuries of savage memory : the days of stone pillars bearing the rudimentary likeness of an idol; the days when man killed man glorying in the deed of it, and drank fermented mare's-milk from the blanched skull of his enemy; the days when Rome, jeering and rude, stole an alien civilization without understanding it, and when Gaul was the home of inarticulate barbarians.
Professor Barker Harrison was sane, academic and Anglo-Saxon. For he did not believe in mesmerism, table-moving, and other forms of occult acrobatics; he judged—and dismissed—poetry with a Spencerian smile of amused sympathy; and his family had lived in the same small Vermont town for more than three hundred years, after having thrived for the preceding seven centuries in the English Midlands.
Yet in his study, when his primitive Self disentangled itself from the pack-threads of his everyday life and surroundings, when his mind returned to the youth of his race and the beginnings of his Ego, he seemed to see himself a short, bow-legged, yellow man, with a square chin, heavy snub nose, angular jaws nearly piercing the hairless, cracked skin, slanting eyes, and pointed, wolfish teeth. He seemed to see himself a man on horseback, whose horizon was bounded by the endless plains of Central Asia, whose only reason for life was eating and drinking and rapine, whose highest aim in life was to kill single-handed a Mongolian tiger or a Siberian bear.
And when, directly on the heel of such imaginative half -hours, he went for a stroll through the eastern part of the town, which housed many for eign factory workers, he felt a queer straining of sympathy and racial communion with the Finns and Letts who were returning from their work, and also with the red-faced, smiling Cantonese coolie who was smoking his long, purple-tasseled pipe in the doorway of his little laundry shop.
But—and this was most strange of all, since an old-fashioned Knownothingism was his political credo and since he was heartily in favor of a strict literacy test for European immigrants—he felt the greatest sympathy and, in a way, kinship at those moments for one Ivan Sborr, a man of unclassified Eastern European race who eked out a meager living by cobbling and who went on wicked, weekly drunks.
Ivan Sborr was a mild-eyed, timid man of huge physique who had once owed allegiance to the Tsar of all the Russias. Now he owed allegiance to anybody who looked in the least like an official. But during his periodic drunks he had been known to give a bad half-hour even to Patrick O'Mahoney, the new Irish sergeant of police, who was kept in continuous training by encounters with victory-flushed members of the University football team.
Professor Barker Harrison became so used to his fantastic thoughts that finally they seemed more to him than mere projections of his racial conscious ness run amuck. They whirled about his mind with a magnificent thunder of action, filling him, somehow, with deep, primitive longings which were oddly at variance with his chosen work and his day-by-day life.
Not that he disliked his life work. He took a massive pride in it; and in the small New England university, famed for its exact, scholastic accomplishments and its minute research work, his name was not the least known. He was an authority in Slavonic languages and literature.
But there came moments, after he had explained for the thousandth time the baroque mazes of the Cyrillic alphabet, after he had explained for the thousandth time that the Russian guttural K has the spirantal value of the German word Dach, when a certain impatience took him by the forelock and shook him … quite gently.
He would hurry through dinner, giving short replies to his young wife (they had no children), and walk up to his study. He would then close the door, light his pipe, and surrender himself to the backward sweep of his thoughts. And at those moments an age-old, unborn life seemed to come up from the pile of books and reviews which littered his desk, working subtly to bring about a transformation of himself.
He pondered with an ever-growing measure of bitterness over the fact that his wife, college-bred and, like himself, the descendant of three academic, well-laundried generations, did not understand these moods. She loved him with a fine, precise love; and he loved her. There was no doubt of it. For she was an honest, upstanding woman.
But in the depths of his soul he resented the fact that with the unconscious selfishness of the good woman she had folded him in completely, that day after day she tried to reach more deeply into the core of himself, without ever guessing or feeling that her mate had an imaginative quality and an imaginative double life which was as literally real to him as a house, a tree, or a flower.
Thus he blamed her because she did not comprehend the richness which ran in his blood undiluted.
Also he blamed her because he knew that, even given her understanding of his unspoken thoughts, she would discourage their trend and analyze them quite impersonally.
She on her side felt the blame without formulating to herself either the reason of or the possibility for its existence. And the unformed blame, trickling down into her heart, charged her manner with impatience and her lips with drooping bitterness.
So she nagged him.
This nagging was at first unconscious, unpointed; a simple and logical reflex action of her hurt femininity. But when she saw that her husband was perfectly indifferent to the change in the atmosphere about him her nagging became invested with driving, acrid purpose.
Yet never did the Professor by word or by deed lay himself open to the domestic challenge:
"Why did you do this? Why did you say that?"
It was true that he hurried through his dinner, that he took the cup of coffee which she handed him with an impatient gesture, that he lit his cigarette with fingers that trembled absurdly, and smoked as hard and rapidly as though his life depended on his finishing it in a prescribed time. It was true that he left the dining-room as soon as he had finished his smoke, that he ran up the stairs to his study with a youthful rush of speed, and that on two occasions she had heard drifting down from there savage shouts and strange, barbarous chants which had made her blood run cold.
One day she forgot her pride and asked him point-blank:
"Are you doing any special work up there?"
He replied in the negative. Then he added, quite unconscious of what he was saying, but with a queer, thin whisper that conveyed the gravity of his conviction with a greater impressiveness than a loud-spoken word would have done:
"You would not understand, my dear. Nobody would. I—oh, well—"
"What?" she cut in acidulously.
"I—I—" He stopped, blushed painfully, guiltily; then continued with a rush: "I am living the days when my race was young and was about to conquer the world. I am living the days when my forefathers ate and slept and fought and loved on horseback, when they worshiped the god who was a naked sword, when they slaughtered a thousand white stallions on the graves of their dead war-chiefs. Ho!" The last he pronounced with a high-pitched, throaty yell.
His wife paled.
"Good Heavens, Barker," she said tremulously, "don t give such yells. Your undergraduate days are over."
But he continued as if he had not noticed her interruption.
"I am living the days when a strong man killed and took to himself the cattle and the wives of his slain enemy."
This time his wife turned red.
"Cattle! Wives! Barker Harrison!" she cried sharply. "What do you mean? You speak as if you were a Tartar! And your name is good, sound Anglo-Saxon, thank Heaven!"
But she spoke the last words to the empty air. For already her husband had rushed up the stairs two steps at a time.
Upstairs in his study he sat down at his desk and lit his pipe.
It had been several months since first the idea that the understanding, the very reliving, of former phases of civilization and racial development, of former individual lives, was a definitely knowable power, accessible to the trained mind of the pandit, had commenced to haunt him. As time went on the idea had grown on him until it was only thinly separated from actual belief, until finally it was accepted as true—not by his whole consciousness, but by some outlying tract of it which was inactive as long as he was in the company of others.
When he lectured at the University and when he was alone with his wife he suffered from spiritual nostalgia. Only here in his study he was at home, and he wandered deeper and ever deeper into himself, into some state of tremendous freedom, simplicity and brutality, toward a zone where he lost touch with all that had hitherto constituted Life to him—including his wife.
And to-day the belief was there, alive, palpable. Unconsciously his wife had touched the releasing spring when she had spoken of Tartars.
He trembled with a fearful joy.
For he was suddenly positive that the power which had haunted him was his, that it was flashing across his brain with a dazzling sheen that brought him to the threshold of ecstasy.
The past enveloped him. It possessed him completely.
He saw himself in the remote, untamed youth of his race. The past came to him, a record of the measure of his vision. A portion of his brain—very sane, very active—caused him to perceive himself as he had been before the Migration of Peoples, the earth-wide wanderings of Celt, Tartar, Visigoth and Scythian, and the subsequent crossing and mingling of races had tempered and changed the original germ which was his Ego into Professor Barker Harrison, Christian, Aryan, Anglo-Saxon, American.
He beheld himself on the banks of the Volga. He saw himself a warrior among warriors, fighting, riding, looting, burning; then, in the scanty shelter of a black felt tent, which was surmounted by a standard of buffalo hide bearing the rough cognizance of his chief, he saw himself at meal, tearing like a mastiff at raw lumps of horseflesh and quaffing down curdled milk poured into human skulls.
Shadowy figures were about him. Some of them reminded him of the high-cheeked foreigners, Finns and Letts, who worked in the factories of the town. One, for all the blue tattoo marks on his forehead and on the roots of his flat nose, for all the loose tunic of Mongolian tiger which covered his massive body, was an exact double of the peaceful, red-faced Cantonese coolie who kept the little laundry shop. And another, famed for his great strength, his massive thirst, and his loud, hoarse, reedy war yells, was to him an incarnation of Ivan Sborr, the cobbler of Russian nationality and unclassified race.
Factory-workers? Laundry coolie? Cobbler? What did those terms signify?
To-night they were his equals, his friends, his tribemates, his brothers-in-arms!
He saw them in the twilight which grew from pink to green and from green to black. They were lifting their crude weapons to the naked sword which was their god, and shouting a barbarous song of triumph.
He joined in it, and his voice rose clear above the voices of the others.
"I have ridden through the desert which dried up my skin and burnt the feet of my horses.
I have made crimson war in the North where rivers roll waters that are solid and white.A pyramid built of ten thousand heads.
No more will the North make war.
I have drunk from a thousand skulls set in gold.
I have slain the men and the women and the little children of the many lands.
The cowardly Emperor of the East has paid me ransom.
But I took his wives for slaves.
The Emperor of the South opposed me with his hordes clad in silver and in iron.
I smashed them as the whirling millstones smash the dry grains of the field.
Beyond the flat lands of the West I have ridden, a Conqueror, and the shivering men called me the Scourge of God.
For I am Attila, the Hun!"Three times he repeated the last line, winding up each time with a blood-curdling war-whoop. Then his imagination took another magnificent bound into the past centuries.
Attila? Only Attila? Of course he was Attila.
But he was also Attila s descendant. He was Genghis Khan himself, and, by a second magnificent, imaginative flight, he was also the Tartar Khan s great-grandson, Tamerlane, he whose mausoleum still stands in the ancient city of Samarkand.
"Ho!"
He gave another war-whoop, and turned to his friends, his tribemates, whose shadowy figures were crowding the narrow room. There was chiefly the red-faced warrior.
What was his name?
Oh, yes, he remembered—that was Jemchug the Tchuktche Chief to whom he had given as fief the Empire of Khorassan; and the other, he of the great thirst—why, it was Kublai Khan, his own brother—soon he would send him to the farthest East to conquer China and Japan—so, before the parting, once more a chant of triumph, brothers!
"From all the world men came and acknowledged me Master.
They came from the broad plains of the Danube and from China.
From golden Byzanze they came, and from the eternal city whose founders were suckled by a she-wolf.
Bringing presents they came, the many envoys.
But I spat my contempt into their faces.
For I am Genghis Khan!"Then he yelled as an afterthought:
"I am Tamerlane!
Also am I Attila, the Scourge of God!"
"Barker!" a sharp voice came from the open door. "Barker Harrison!" His wife came into the room. "For goodness sake, what are you shouting about? What is the matter?"
The Professor turned on her with a savage roar.
The impudent slave woman, he said to himself—for weeks she had been behaving as no woman should behave to her master—and now she had entered, unbidden, the tent of warriors!
He raised his right arm, about to strike her, Then he reconsidered. No, he would not sully his hand.
He turned to one of the many slaves whom he imagined about him.
"Urbeck!" he said majestically. "Have this impudent slave woman well beaten with knotted ropes!"
Mrs. Barker Harrison swooned dead away. The Professor looked at her huddled figure unmoved. Again he commenced his barbarous chant.
But suddenly it seemed to him that all the others had disappeared. Where were they, those yellow-skinned, high-cheeked men? And chiefly the two—his brother Kublai Khan, the great drinker whom he would send to conquer the farthest East, and also Jemchug, the red-faced warrior whose massive body was covered with a loose tunic of Mongolian tiger?
Was there treachery in his army?
"Ho!" he shouted. "My trusty sword!"
And with a splendid gesture he picked up a light rattan cane which was leaning peacefully in a corner of his room.
Professor Barker Harrison, wild-eyed, bare-headed, his right hand tightly clutching the cane, rushed down the stairs and out of the house. He cleared the front step in one bound. It was late at night; it was lucky for him that the neighborhood was asleep and that nobody saw his martial exit.
On Cedar Street he had his first encounter with the enemy. He was swinging his cane in the air, chanting at the same time another song of triumph:
"I am the Chief of the Far Tribes!
Raw horse-flesh is my food!
Curdled milk is my drink!
I bathe my mighty limbs in the blood of my enemies!"He made a stabbing motion with his rattan cane, and something soft and human squirmed rapidly to one side, giving a loud howl of pain and passionate entreaty.
Professor Barker Harrison s blood was up,
"Ho!" he shouted. "Dog! Swine! Traitor!" He made another stab with his rattan, connected again, and caused another, louder howl of pain and entreaty. "To-night I shall drink from thy blanched skull!"
The man whom he had poked fell on his knees and held up both his hands. He was a peaceful, elderly negro by the name of George Washington Jefferson Ransome, and he was not, as a rule, afraid of undergraduates, drunk or sober.
But this one was dangerous, he thought. He was singing of eating raw flesh and of bathing his mighty limbs in the blood of his enemies.
"Lawdamessy!" he bawled. "I ain't done yoh no ha'm, suh. Fo' de Lawd's sake, doan' yoh do dis 'yeah thing to me. I ain t yoh enemy! No, suh. Please … doan' yoh go an' bathe yoh mighty limbs in dis po' niggah's blood!"
The Professor did not reply. He stabbed again with his rattan cane.
But the old negro did not wait. He jumped backward and ran away as fast as his elderly legs would let him.
Barker Harrison smiled. He turned to an imaginary chief.
"Catch me this black man!" he commanded curtly. "To-morrow morning we shall crucify him to a wooden cross!"
Then he thought again of Jemchug, the red-faced one. Where was he? Had he really turned traitor? He passed his hand across his face. Why … he knew … the red-faced one was down there … in his shop, on the corner of Main Street.
Shop? Main Street? What was a shop? What was Main Street? What, in the name of the many gods, was a street? There was only the Volga, the plains, the tents and the skies!
Still … he must find him … his brother-in-arms, … so that together they could find his brother Ktiblai Khan, the mighty drinker. … Professor Barker Harrison ran up Main Street and straight into the shop of Wu Kee, laundryman. When the latter saw the strange, wild-eyed figure bounce in, cane in hand, his instinct advised him to beat a hasty retreat
Although he had lived in America for over thirty years, he still considered the foreigners a mad race, who should be mistrusted on sight and who were moved by impulses which were partly savage, partly amusing, but altogether incredible. But he kept his seat and his sang-froid when he recognized the features of his visitor. For he had done his laundry for five years, had received payment promptly every Thursday morning, and had exchanged daily and very punctilious greeting with him.
So he bade him a pleasant "good evening."
But the next moment he wished that he had followed the original promptings of his instinct.
For the Professor lifted him bodily out of his chair, threw his arms about his shoulders, drew him to his bosom, and apostrophized him as "warrior" and "Jemchug" and "brother-in-arms."
The Chinese disengaged himself from the other's embrace.
"Hey? You dlunk?" he queried dispassionately.
The Professor did not reply. He embraced the Chinaman again, and so once more the latter repeated his words.
Only this time they were less a question than the statement of a calm, prosaic fact.
"You dlunk! You velly dlunk!" he said.
The Professor did not understand the meaning of the words. But he felt, he understood, the contempt which underlay them. For a moment he was hurt.
Could it, then, be that Jemchug, the great Tchuktche Chief to whom he had given as fief the Empire of Khorassan, had turned traitor?
Suddenly a great rage overcame him.
"Die, traitor!" he shouted, and he smote the Chinaman over the head with his elastic rattan cane.
Wu Kee became enraged in his turn.
"Wassahellamallayou?" he asked, all in one word.
He picked up a nearly red-hot pressing-iron and applied it with savage aim on the seat of the Professor's trousers.
Barker Harrison yelled with pain and fury.
"Treason! Treason!" he shouted. "Kublai Khan! Brother mine! To the rescue! To the rescue!"
He rushed out of the shop.
He ran up and down the street, waving his rattan cane.
Where was Kublai Khan? Where was his beloved brother, he of the great thirst?
A vague remembrance came back to him. Why—yes—Kublai Khan was hiding in the land of the enemies—he was spying out the land under the menial guise of a cobbler. He went by the name of Ivan Sborr.
And there—was that not Kublai Khan's voice—calling—for help, for help?
Professor Barker Harrison followed the direction of the voice, and he was not mistaken.
For Ivan Sborr had gone that evening on an extra-luxurious spree, and was now engaged in savage battle with Patrick O'Mahoney, the Irish sergeant of police, who was trying to propel him toward the station house.
Professor Barker Harrison saw the scene and gave his war-whoop.
"Ho!" he shouted. "Take heart, lion-brother of mine! For I am coming to thy rescue!"
He came.
But by this time the sergeant had clubbed the Russian into unconsciousness and was ready for the new protagonist.
"So ye'll be afther helpin' them fwhat's thryin' to resist arrest, are yez?" he cried. "Take thot for a starter, me lad!" and he paralyzed the Professor's right arm with a blow of his hickory, so that the rattan cane fell to the ground.
O'Mahoney jerked the Professor up by the collar.
"An' fwhat may yer name be, me bucko?"
"I am Attila, the Scourge of God!" chanted the Professor.
The Irishman smiled.
"Glory be—but it's a foine scourrge ye are, me lad! Take thot then for bein a scourrge!" and he tapped him, not very gently, with his hickory.
But the Professor was not subdued.
"I am Attila!" he shouted again. "I am Genghis Khan! I am Tamerlane!"
O'Mahoney whistled through his teeth.
"Ye are, are ye? All three of them? Begorry, I think ye're a dangerous character, and the chief'll be afther wantin ye."
And so he fetched him a wallop on the ear, whistled for the police wagon, tumbled both his prisoners inside, and made a long report to the captain,
"Captain," he said, "of course, I know old Ivan. It's just his weekly dhrunk, and divil a bit o' harrm did he mean. But there's another lad—and I think he'll be wanted by the police in Boston. He gave me three aliases—wait till I write 'em down."
He took the blotter, and there, under the proper rubric, he filled in the following:
O'Dillon, Christian name unknown.
He looked up at the captain.
"Faith," he said, "and he added that the lads call him the scourrge, the fwhich I think is one o' them blood-currlin' names the Boston gangsters are afther givin to each other."
Again he wrote in the blotter.
Alias Gennis Kahn.
"Sounds Sheeny to me, captain," he commented, "though, begabs, he don't look like one."
Once more the pen scratched over the hard paper:
Alias Thomas Lane.
"And that last one," concluded O'Mahoney, "may be his real name. For, faith, Lane's a Noo England name, and the lad looks to me more like a native than like O'Dillon, which is Irish, or Kahn, which is Sheeny."
"All right," said the captain. "Let's have a look at the prisoner."
He walked over to the cell and opened the door. The Professor was stretched out on the narrow bench, snoring quite peacefully. The captain gave one look. Then he let out a yell of surprise.
"Good heavens! It's Professor Barker Harrison!"
He explained to the mystified O'Mahoney in a furious whisper.
The latter shook his head.
"Begabs an' I can't help it at all, at all. He assaulted me. He gave me them aliases. And I swear by the Blessed Virgin that he was sober as you and me, captain."
The captain shook his head.
"Poor fellow!" he said. "Overwork—or I'm a Dutchman."
So he quashed the charges and telephoned to the Professor's wife, who by this time had come out of her swoon and was horribly worried over her husband's absence.
She came. The captain explained to her. Together they awakened the Professor.
When the Professor came to he gave another war-whoop.
"Ho!" he said. "There is that impudent slave woman again. Did I not give orders to have her soundly beaten?"
Nobody answered him. But they all stared at him, puzzled, wondering what to do. He stared at them in return.
Then, very gradually, a peculiar dislocation of ideas came over his mind. For a few moments he seemed to be taking part in a whirling gambol in which his own Ego, that of the people around him and twenty centuries of human history and civilization were madly mixed up together. Then a small fragment of his consciousness seemed to separate itself. It seemed to be watching, within his brain, the other fragments of his consciousness which were behaving in a perfectly incredible and perfectly in sane manner. He saw and studied those fragments like detached and separate projections of his Ego.
Very slowly, he recognized his body. He recognized the body and the personality of his wife, of the captain of police, of the sergeant. His eyes traveled, and he recognized the body and the personality of Ivan Sborr who was sleeping out his drunk in the next cell.
And, suddenly, he understood. He put his hand to his head.
"Good Lord!" he murmured.
The captain touched him on the shoulder.
"Go home with your wife, Professor," he said in a kindly voice. "You've worked too hard. Nobody'll hear about your little escapade."
The Professor did as he was bid. He took ten grains of veronal and slept the next day until noon. He dressed, went downstairs, and took his accustomed place at the luncheon table.
His wife was mixing the dressing for the salad. She looked up.
"Barker!" she said.
The Professor was all attention.
"Yes, dearest?" he asked in a small voice.
"Will you do me a favor?"
"Yes, dearest. Anything! Anything!"
His wife smiled—and to his dying day the Professor did not know if the smile was sweet or bitter.
"Would you mind, Barker, the next time you live through a period of the past, picking out a character from Bishop Taylor's 'Lives of the Saints'?"
And she rang the bell for the maid to bring in hot plates.