“Perhaps you think I’m not telling you the truth?” said Ziska.
“No, no!” I protested.
“Yes, I can see. You think I’m a liar. You’re as good as calling me a liar to my face. That’s what it is, and I treat you like a friend. I want to do you a good turn and sell you the famous Seed of Destruction for twenty-five pounds, and you as good as call me a swindler, a confidence trickster, a cheat! Very well.”
“No, no, my dear Mr. Ziska. Don’t take it like that.”
In order to mollify him I had to buy a cracked china inkpot—the one Shakespeare used when he was writing Hamlet.
Later I heard that Mr. Ziska had sold the Seed of Destruction to a passionate-looking thin lady who ground her teeth between sentences and had dark circles under her eyes, which were swollen with weeping. He asked fifty pounds for the ring and got it. It was a fair price. The ring was worth four or five, and the story, as he later elaborated it, was reasonably cheap at forty-five pounds or so.
I congratulated Mr. Ziska and forgot about the affair until I was reminded of it by a sensational feature article in a Sunday paper. It was entitled “Jewels of Death,” and was composed of a little fact and a lot of fiction about famous unlucky gems. We have all read that sort of thing before. The article was illustrated with photographs of the Great Blue Diamond, the Bloody Ruby of Cawnpore, the Peruvian Emerald and, last of all, the Seed of Destruction. This strange spinel seal, it appeared, had a sinister history. Mr. Ziska’s story was there, more or less as I had heard it when he concocted it in his shop.
The writer went on to say that the Seed of Destruction had been discovered by the ill-fated Mrs. Mace in an obscure and nameless little cheap jewelry shop. Mrs. Mace, believing in the mysterious virtue of this terrible gem, had given the ring to her faithless lover, who was surprised by her jealous husband two days later and beaten to death with a sculptor’s mallet. Mrs. Mace, who appeared to be somewhat demented, had told the story in court. She had sold the Seed of Destruction to a morbidly curious City business man, who, having given her his word of honor that he would never give the ring away without receiving payment for it, gave it to his partner, with a friendly slap on the back one afternoon in Sweetings.
Less than an hour after he had put the ring on his finger, the hapless partner of the City business man was run over and instantly killed by a heavy truck in Cheapside. It is true that he was under the influence of drink when staggering off the curb, but it looked very peculiar, one had to admit. He had never been run over before.
The ring, together with his other effects, went to his heir, a worthless young man, who squandered everything, forged seven checks, was sent to prison, and died there of pneumonia.
The pawnbroker, who by this time had the Seed of Destruction as an unredeemed pledge, made much of the fact. An American bought it for a considerable sum, and added it to his collection of horrible curios. A burglar stole the collection, was stopped by a policeman, and pulled a gun. The thief shot the policeman in the shoulder, but the policeman shot him in the abdomen so that he perished miserably a few hours later, and the ring went back to the man who had bought it. One evening, however, his daughter, who had been drinking bathtub gin with some friends, took the ring out of her father’s private museum, and put it on in sheer drunken bravado. She defied the Seed of Destruction, said the writer of the article.
The party went on. Dawn broke and the daughter, although she could hardly stand, insisted on taking out a high-powered roadster. She said she needed a breath of fresh air. She zigzagged at seventy miles an hour along the highway, miscalculated on a hairpin bend and crashed. That was the end of her.
The bereaved father sold the Seed of Destruction for one cent to a millionaire from Detroit and embraced the Catholic religion.
And now once again the Seed of Destruction was on the market. The depression had struck America, and the millionaire from Detroit, in straitened circumstances, had sold his collection of jewels to Tortilla, the dealer, who was waiting to see how much he could get for the Seed of Destruction, which I could have bought for twenty-five pounds that day in Ziska’s shop.
More than two years later, as I was whistling to a taxi in Piccadilly outside the place where they sell dog-collars, an extremely elegant young man stopped me and said, “Excuse me, you’re Mr. Kersh, aren’t you?”
I said that I was indeed.
“I don’t think you remember me,” he said.
I said, “My memory is getting very bad. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I do remember you.”
“Does the name of Ziska convey anything to you?” he asked. “My name is Ziska. I saw you in my father’s shop.”
I said, “Why, of course it does. Surely you must be old man Ziska’s son?”
We shook hands. A taxi came and we shared it. I asked young Mr. Ziska how his father was. He sighed and said, “I have taken over the business. But I’ll never be anything like he was. What a man he was! What a personality! What a business man! But of course, you know, in our business we have to have good eyes. A jeweler who can’t see straight might as well retire. Dad was marvelous. But about five years ago his poor old eyes gave out on him. He got a cataract, had an operation, and he was never the same again. I took over. What a man he was! I dare say you remember that funny business about the Seed of Destruction?”
“I know,” I said, “because I happened to be on the spot when your father made it up!”
Young Mr. Ziska said, “Yes, I know. I wish I had a half of the old man’s imagination. I can’t do it. He could spin you a story about anything. I have known him to sell six pennorth of pinchbeck for ten pounds just on the strength of the story he made up about it on the spur of the moment. Well, as I was saying, it was his story that made that Seed of Destruction what it is today. He bought it for fifty shillings and sold it for fifty pounds. And now—I can speak to you freely because you’re an old friend—it must be worth fifty thousand pounds if it’s worth a penny. I’ve been offered four thousand pounds for it.”
“Oh, have you got it then?” I asked.
“Yes, I bought it off Tortilla for three thousand pounds. I knew I could get four thousand pounds for it anyway, so I bought it. Who wouldn’t? I knew it would please the old man. He was a great guy. I wanted to give him a little surprise so I brought this Seed of Destruction home and said to him, ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve got.’ Then he asked me what I had got and I told him and he was as pleased as punch. He was pretty sick, and getting on in years, as I dare say you know. I said to him, ‘Well, here you are, Dad, you invented it, you made it, you built it up, you worked miracles with it; you picked a tuppenny-halfpenny spinel out of a boot-box full of rubbish and turned it into a property by your own genius, and here it is—worth a packet. I make you a present of it,’ I said. And then he asked me how much I had paid for it, and I told him three thousand pounds, and he sat up in bed with the ring on his little finger and he shouted ‘Oi!’ and passed away. Heart failure. Shock. It had cost him fifty shillings. He was a great guy. Where are we, Shaftesbury Avenue? I get out here. Nice to have seen you again. Bye-bye.”
FROZEN BEAUTY
Do I believe this story?
I don’t know. I heard it from a Russian doctor of medicine. He swears that there are certain facets of the case which—wildly unbelievable though it sounds—have given him many midnight hours of thought that led nowhere.
“It is impossible,” he said, “in the light of scientific knowledge. But that is still a very uncertain light. We know little of life and death and the something we call the Soul. Even of sleep we know nothing.