“I ain't seen you here before Brother,” the porter Karposh commented one night, in the dipping and bobbing lamplight.
“Things in the bristle business are not what they were,” his hire said, gloomily. “One must get closer to sources of supply.” He might have been considered tall, had he not stooped so much. Perhaps conditions in the bristle business were weighing him down,
“That’s what they tell me, Brother. Say, Brother, how about a drop of brandy before we get deep into Tartar Town?—No brandy there, you know, being all Musselmens,” and he spat, pro forma, in the rutted, pitted road.
The traveller muttered something about the brandy not evaporating before they got back; and with this hint of future kindness Karp osh had to pretend contentment. The houses huddled far back from the way, thatched-roofed and low-set. Now and again a dog, chained by a melon- patch, lifted its snouzle and bayed at the lemon-rind moon. And at length they came to their destination.
“See this here warehouse, Brother?” the guide asked, lifting the lamp as though to show to better advantage the peeling plaster and the rubble- and-stone walls beneath. “Used to be a what they call a caravanserai in the old days of the Turks. Camels they had here in them days. Fact! My old grand-dad he told— ’
But perhaps what was told by Karposh grandpere may never be known to any other living soul, for at that moment the small door set into the big door opened, the traveller spoke a few words into the opening, the door opened a bit more, the traveller entered, the door creaked shut. Karposh grunted, set the lamp into a niche, lowered the wick, lowered himself to the turf, and, thinking of brandy, prepared to wait.
Many, many camels indeed could have been accomodated during the great days of the caravanserai; one thinks of them, Bactrians for the most part, wool peeling off in great patches, necklaces of big blue beads round their thick, crook necks, padding and bobbing and pressing on, league after hundred league, all the way from the Court of the Great Khan at Karakorum—perhaps—and even, perhaps, further. There were courtyards within courtyards, and warehouses which might have lodged the bristles of all the boars of Hyper- borea: and bales more precious than that such, by far: galingale and ben- join, reels of silk, Indoo veilery thin as mist: but now nought but a few bare halls containing hair from the stinking swine of the Hyperborean ranges, destined to make paintbrushes for to whitewash the walls of Christendom.
The doorkeeper had a torch.
At each corner of each rectangle within the great serai, another with a torch.
Within a chamber that large its hither parts were only a lostness of shadows, two lines of men standing an arm s span apart, and each of them with a torch.
A Voice: This will be the last. None more may enter now.
The last passed down between the rows of torch-bearers and the torch- bearers fell into step behind him.
The gathering was not very large, and neither was the inner room. At one end was a table with the embroidered table-cloth one saw on high occasions in the kitchens of prosperous farmhouses, and a modern oil-lamp sat on it, frosted chimney semicovered with a bright pink globe. Three respectable men with side- whiskers sat at the table, and one was rendered twice-respectable by reason of his wearing eye-glasses with rather small, oval lenses. A stout woman all in black sat at a small harmonium; if she herself was not the widow of a prosperous butcher, surely she had a sister who was. Esterhazy sat as near the back of the fairly small congregation as was possible for him to do, the diaconal-looking man in spectacles nodded to the woman, she threw back her ample shoulders and began to play, with fairly few false notes, what one would automatically assume to be a hymn: but which Eszterhazy after a moment recognized as the Grand March from Alda.
She did not play much of it.
The harmonium subsided on a sort of sigh, the deacon arose, took a handkerchief from his sleeve, and, in a voice heavy with emotion said, “Beloved brethren, dear saints who have kept The Faith, I have come to deliver unto you the joyful and so-long- awaited tidings: Saint Satan has at last been released from Hell, and, with all his Holy Demons, even now begins to prepare for his rule over all the Heavens and over all the earth. . . .”
The congregation burst into sobs, shouts, cries of ecstasy, throwing out their arms, clasping their hands, beating their bosoms, doubling forward in their seats, and, in a moment, first one by one, then by twos, then three and four at a time, leaping to their feet. A white-haired man in worn broadcloth, with the look and smell of a backwoods apothecary, turned to Eszterhazy and, with tears running down his furrowed face, embraced him and cried out, “Satan is risen! Satan is risen/”
And Eszterhazy, somewhat returning the embrace, said in the tones nearest to enthusiasm which at the moment he felt capable of, “Has he risen indeed?”
Not the least of the interesting features of the Pannonian Presbyterian Church is that it sustains seventeen bishops, of whom fifteen are in Pannonia proper, and two—in par- tibus infidelibus, as it were—preside over the Synods of Scythia and Trans- balkania. Sceptical Calvinists have been known to come all the way from Scotland (especially from Scotland) to check upon this; and to them the learned divines of the Reformed Faith explain that, Firstly, the institution was in a sense forced upon them by the Capitulations of 1593, that, Secondly, the bishops are chosen by lot and after fasting, meditation, and prayer, and without any hint of an Apostolic Succession, the bishop being in his synod merely First Among Equals among the other Calvinist clergy, and that, Thirdly—
But these visitors rarely desire to hear of Thirdly. They say, “Hoot!” and, “Wheesht!” they exclaim. And, “Beeshops, did ye say!” they murmur, casting up their eyes and hands.
Bishop Andreas Hugyvod walked up and down in his garden in the precincts of the Great Old Reformed Church in Apollograd. He was a man of enormous girth and staure, in a Geneva gown, a huge starched ruff, and a tricorn hat; and gave the impression of being a sort of catafalque stood on one end and moving under its own locomotion. In one hand he held, almost, indeed, engulfing, volume xxii of the octavo edition of Calvin’s Institutes; with a tiny agate snufibox pressed against the morocco binding; the other hand, or, at any rate, two fingers of it, were pressed to his nose. There was, let us say, a certain nobility to the bishop’s nose. A certain grandness, an amplitude of architecture, rococco ... or, perhaps, baroque. A painter, engaged by a committee of the Presbytery to fix the bishop’s likeness in oils, had once, and only once, and most unwisely, declared the nose to be “Roman.” So unchristian an emotion as wrath would certainly not have disfigured the episcopal countenance; however, he let it be known that he did not agree. And let us, therefore, leave it so. The nose of the Calvinist Bishop of Apollograd and all Transbalkania was not Roman. And, certainly, it was not Roman Catholic.
Walking to and from in his garden, meditating doubtless, upon the doctrines of Election, Predestination, and Total Depravity, he gazed with an unwinking solemnity at the approaching visitor. The vistor was tall, and walked in a somewhat stately manner, one hand clasped behind him in the small of his back. His frock coat was spotless, in itself somewhat unusual in Apollograd, which the bishop himself had more than once humorously referred to as “Apollograd the Dusty.” And, when he removed his equally spotless silk hat and bowed, he revealed an imposing head, whose silvery hair had receded just sufficiently to remind one of Gogol’s comment, in another context, “Forasmuch as he is wise, God hath added unto his brow.” The visitor’s head bulged appreciably on both sides, indicating that his hatter, at least, must certainly and most certainly have been aware of the ususual quality and quantity of brain matter beneath and behind the frontal and occipital bones.