Motion Picture Classic (May 1921 - Dec 1927)

CLASSIC who was the Meaning of things, the Life of Life; she who was the sweetness of the date, the fineness of amber, the warmth of the sun. Mahruss holds out the bundle, from which comes a strange, weak cry. ‘‘This is her child. Its father, the Shah of Shahs, was angered because she did not give him a son. He ordered her and her babe to be tied in a bag and flung over the cliff into the sea ” The flame of the lamp turns red before Omar’s staring eyes; his hands clench fiercely. “May Allah turn his bones to water! May his eyes shrivel in their sockets and his tongue that gave such an order wither away ! I will go tomorrow and strangle him tho he be surrounded by a thousand guards.” “What of the child?” asks Mahruss in a faint voice, staggering a little. “She sent for me the night before she died and told me to bring it to you and ask you to love the child for the mother’s sake.” Omar holds out hi& arms. Wonder thrills him as a tiny hand no bigger than a flower petal touches his flesh. Was this the Answer to the riddle of the universe that he has sought so long? The tears fall upon the vague pink face. “Tell me,” he begs Mahruss, “tell me more of her.” And so Mahruss speaks — of Shireen’s coldness toward the withered Shah, her husband, of her long brooding in the gilded palace, unheeding the magnificent clothes the slaves brought her, the caskets of gems with their prisoned fires, the other wonders of her new life. “It angered the Shah that she never smiled,’’ Mahruss whispers. “he devised a thousand surprises for her amusement. There were troupes of jugglers from Nubia, fountains that spouted wine, dancers from the desert, feasts, and thru them all my lady sat like a frozen thing, white as marble, not seeming to breathe, tho 1 could see the hatred in her eyes when the Old One played with her hair before them all.” Her hair. Midnight on the weary eyes of him, fragrant darkness, sweet black rain about his face ! Omar groans aloud with the thought of fat, wrinkled fingers touching those warm sacred coils. “Yes, yes, go on. my lad!” “Then, when she would not love him he began to hate,’' Mahruss says simply; “if it had been a son — but he felt that she had thwarted him. I saw' the sack thrown over the cliff with these eyes, as I hid with the child. The old Shah fell back when it was done. I think that he is dead, for he was very old, and full of days.” Omar looks down at the tiny scrap of life in his arms. “The Wind along the Waste,” he murmurs “ — water willy-nilly flowing — ” • And now the pictures of the past grew vague and misty like things seen in dreams. Loud laughter and the clink of glasses in a tavern — the autumn sunlight gilding the tiles of the Mosque — dark hair falling about a small face leaning over a pool to watch the goldfish darting among the lily stems. Little Shireen. The years that bring her to her seventeenth summer make a young man into an older one. There is grey in Omar’s hair now as he wanders thru his beloved N i s h a p u r , sometimes sober, sometimes drunken, always seeking the Answer to the “why” of his Soul. Omar, the Tentmaker, they call him now, for he plies the trade of his fathers, sitting on his doorsill in the sun. The seventeen years have brought other changes. Nizam has bec o m e the Grand Vizier, and mindful of his old pledge offers to share his good fortune with his onetime schoolfellows. Hassan accepts the post of Governor of Nishapur, but Omar shakes his head toler( Cout’d on page 96) ( Fifty-eight ) “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it”