Page:The Black Cat November 1916.djvu/53

Rh "I have a recommendation for you from your friend, Doctor Mclntyre from St. Vitus."

I knew that kind of recommendation. Mclntyre was a great friend of all aspirants in art and letters and whenever anybody wanted anything he gave him a recommendation to friends in New York.

Only three weeks before he had sent me a flute player with a recommendation. The man was thin as a stick, wore a celluloid collar and had a whole book full of testimonials from his home town friends. He was bound to go into vaudeville and did not leave me until I started him on the road to success with a dollar. Therefore my enthusiasm for friend Mclntyre's recommendations was way below par.

Still, Jennings was a student, and I had been a student myself. "May I ask what you are doing here in New York?"

"Oh, yes, that's why I am calling on you."

He hesitated a moment then he asked: "Of course you know the Modsahabat?"

"The Modsahabat?" I pondered. Was that a Spanish dancer, or did she play in musical comedy, or—

"I am sorry," I finally said, "but I can't just place the lady. Is she supposed to be in New York?"

"A lady!" Jennings looked at me as if I had suddenly gone daft. "But you must remember the Modsahabat, those narrative poems of pre-Mohammedan origin which the Arabians wrote in golden letters on Byssus and which now hang on the walls of the Kaba in Mecca."

I thought that in my present condition the Arabians would have done me a great favor if, instead of the Modsahabat, they had hung Jennings of Kalamazoo on the walls. But I simply answered:

"Oh, yes, in the Kaba." "I am thinking of writing a book on the Modsahabat," Jennings then informed me.

I assured him that I had been waiting a long time for just such a valuable book to be published.

"I intend to prove, furthermore, that at the time the Modsahabat are supposed to have originated, the Arabians did not even know the art of writing on Byssus," continued Jennings.

A hypothesis which appeared much more important as I did not have the slightest idea what Byssus meant. I remembered Issus, where Alexander the Great had been victorious; I knew of Nessus who poisoned Hercules in such a mean manner; but Byssus was a stranger to me.

"And I intend to prove that before the days of Mohammed such prize poems of Arabian poets were generally written on camels' bones and that on all preserved camels' bones there is not the slightest trace of Modsahabat."

"And you see," he continued, scratching his freckles, "I am looking for one of those camel bones."

"In my house?"

"No, of course not. But I have been told that at the museum here they have one of those bones. My father gave me my travelling expenses and enough money to stay here as long as it will take me to decipher