Plitzinger, that is,
saw them, too, but he said firmly that they belonged to the big black
falcons that haunt the Mokattam Hills and roost upon these ridges,
close beside the hotel, at night. Both he and Vera, however, agreed
on one thing: the high, sharp cry in the air above them, wild and
plaintive, was certainly the black kite's cry--the note of the falcon
that passionately seeks its mate. It was the pause of a second, when
she stood to listen, that made her rescue possible. A moment later and
she, too, would have flown to death with Binovitch. IV

INITIATION


A few years ago, on a Black Sea steamer heading for the Caucasus, I
fell into conversation with an American. He mentioned that he was on
his way to the Baku oilfields, and I replied that I was going up into
the mountains. He looked at me questioningly a moment. "Your first
trip?" he asked with interest. I said it was. A conversation followed;
it was continued the next day, and renewed the following day, until we
parted company at Batoum. I don't know why he talked so freely to me in
particular. Normally, he was a taciturn, silent man. We had been fellow
travellers from Marseilles, but after Constantinople we had the boat
pretty much to ourselves. What struck me about him was his vehement,
almost passionate, love of natural beauty--in seas and woods and sky,
but above all in mountains. It was like a religion in him. His taciturn
manner hid deep poetic feeling. And he told me it had not always been so with him. A kind of friendship
sprang up between us. He was a New York business man--buying and
selling exchange between banks--but was English born. He had gone out
thirty years before, and become naturalised. His talk was exceedingly
"American," slangy, and almost Western. He said he had roughed it in
the West for a year or two first. But what he chiefly talked about was
mountains. He said it was in the mountains an unusual experience had
come to him that had opened his eyes to many things, but principally to
the beauty that was now everything to him, and to the--insignificance
of death. He knew the Caucasus well where I was going. I think that was why he
was interested in me and my journey. "Up there," he said, "you'll feel
things--and maybe find out things you never knew before." "What kind of things?" I asked. "Why, for one," he replied with emotion and enthusiasm in his voice,
"that living and dying ain't either of them of much account. That if
you know Beauty, I mean, and Beauty is in your life, you live on in it
and with it for others--even when you're dead." The conversation that followed is too long to give here, but it led to
his telling me the experience in his own life that had opened his eyes
to the truth of what he said. "Beauty is imperishable," he declared,
"and if you live with it, why, you're imperishable too!" The story, as he told it verbally in his curious language, remains
vividly in my memory. But he had written it down, too, he said. And he
gave me the written account, with the remark that I was free to hand it
on to others if I "felt that way." He called it "Initiation." It runs
as follows. 1

In my own family this happened, for Arthur was my nephew. And a remote
Alpine valley was the place. It didn't seem to me in the least suitable
for such occurrences, except that it was Catholic, and the "Church," I
understand--at least, scholars who ought to know have told me so--has
subtle Pagan origins incorporated unwittingly in its observations of
certain Saints' Days, as well as in certain ceremonials. All this
kind of thing is Dutch to me, a form of poetry or superstition, for
I am interested chiefly in the buying and selling of exchange, with
an office in New York City, just off Wall Street, and only come to
Europe now occasionally for a holiday. I like to see the dear old musty
cities, and go to the Opera, and take a motor run through Shakespeare's
country or round the Lakes, get in touch again with London and Paris
at the Ritz Hotels--and then back again to the greatest city on earth,
where for years now I've been making a good thing out of it. Repton
and Cambridge, long since forgotten, had their uses. They were all
right enough at the time. But I'm now "on the make," with a good fat
partnership, and have left all that truck behind me. My half-brother, however--he was my senior and got the cream of the
family wholesale chemical works--has stuck to the trade in the Old
Country, and is making probably as much as I am. He approved my taking
the chance that offered, and is only sore now because his son, Arthur,
is on the stupid side. He agreed that finance suited my temperament far
better than drugs and chemicals, though he warned me that all American
finance was speculative and therefore dangerous. "Arthur is getting
on," he said in his last letter, "and will some day take the director's
place you would be in now had you cared to stay. But he's a plodder,
rather." That meant, I knew, that Arthur was a fool. Business, at any
rate, was not suited to his temperament. Five years ago, when I came
home with a month's holiday to be used in working up connections in
English banking circles, I saw the boy. He was fifteen years of age at
the time, a delicate youth, with an artist's dreams in his big blue
eyes, if my memory goes for anything, but with a tangle of yellow hair
and features of classical beauty that would have made half the young
girls of my New York set in love with him, and a choice of heiresses at
his disposal when he wanted them. I have a clear recollection of my nephew then. He struck me as
having grit and character, but as being wrongly placed. He had his
grandfather's tastes. He ought to have been, like him, a great scholar,
a poet, an editor of marvellous old writings in new editions. I
couldn't get much out of the boy, except that he "liked the chemical
business fairly," and meant to please his father by "knowing it
thoroughly" so as to qualify later for his directorship. But I have
never forgotten the evening when I caught him in the hall, staring up
at his grandfather's picture, with a kind of light about his face, and
the big blue eyes all rapt and tender (almost as if he had been crying)
and replying, when I asked him what was up: "_That_ was worth living
for. He brought Beauty back into the world!" "Yes," I said, "I guess that's right enough. He did. But there was no
money in it to speak of." The boy looked at me and smiled. He twigged somehow or other that deep
down in me, somewhere below the money-making instinct, a poet, but a
dumb poet, lay in hiding. "You know what I mean," he said. "It's in you
too." The picture was a copy--my father had it made--of the presentation
portrait given to Baliol, and "the grandfather" was celebrated in his
day for the translations he made of Anacreon and Sappho, of Homer, too,
if I remember rightly, as well as for a number of classical studies
and essays that he wrote. A lot of stuff like that he did, and made a
name at it too.