Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 3 (1923-03).djvu/37

 'Here's a Truly Remarkable Story of Oriental Mysticism'

EETING your one-time inseparable college chum, after a lapse of ten years, is a dubious adventure. College memories are tinselly things; resurrected suddenly. They have a fashion of giving the lie to the aura of glory which surrounds the thought of Alma Mater.

Jimmy Belden was fully aware of this fact. He had met others of his former college mates during that decade, men he had not seen for years. And he had come to know that, while the boy is father to the man, the family resemblance is sometimes surprisingly remote. But the change had never been acutely distressing before. It had remained for the best friend of all—keen, clean, virile Arch Pennington—to present the strongest, most disturbing, and yet most baffling impression of having let down into a compromise of some kind, with "the sort of things no fellow can do." Belden was uncomfortable and puzzled.

During a lull in the conversation, which on both sides had been half formal, half clumsily shaped by wistful attempts to get back to the boyhood footing, he sat taking in his surroundings. Nine years in China had certainly changed "Old Pen," he thought. Even his apartment showed it. The close, incense-burdened air was unlike him. The dim lighting was unlike him. The rich, dull, heavily embroidered draperies, the dark, ivory-and-pearl-inlaid furniture, the gaudily flowered dressing gown—all were utterly, grotesquely unlike him.

But most of all, the incense seemed out of place. Different from any Chinese incense he had ever smelled; sweet, elusive, and insistently penetrative, in some weird fashion it was the soul of the place, the key and expression of every incongruous change. He looked at the heavy table. The incense arose from it. At the silken draperies. It seemed to breathe from their mysterious folds. At the bright silk hosiery, the straw sandals, or at that mandarin's robe, which denied that it was Arch Pennington's face that showed above it. Always it was the incense that was the strongest impression. Jimmy could almost believe that he sav it.

"China is a peculiar place. The Chinese are peculiar people," said Pennington abruptly. "Quiet, simple, faithful, generous, trustful—but, with it all, cruel, fanatical, treacherous, and with a habit of thought as unfathomable to the Western mind as the symbolism of Egypt."

He lapsed as abruptly into silence again. Only his lips and eyes had moved as he spoke. The lean, sallow face, with its lustreless skin—"smoke cured by incense," thought Belden—so unlike the former rosy, animated face Jimmy had once known, had not varied the fraction of a line in expression. Only the eyes, quick, wary, changing from cold indifference to dreamy reminiscence, lighting with a sudden uncanny gleam which faded as quickly into a look of dull hopelessness—only the eyes were apart from the Oriental mask which had hidden Arch Pennington.