On an Odd Note

SEED OF DESTRUCTION

I always maintained that Mr. Ziska deserved to get on in the world, if only on account of the extraordinary richness of the lies he told. He started as an antiquary and jeweler in a small way of business, buying and selling all kinds of valueless rubbish—cameo brooches, Indian bangles and job lots of semi-precious stones. I used to let him sell me knickknacks for which I had no earthly use, just for the sake of his sales talks, for in Mr. Ziska’s stuffy little shop a paste brooch was not simply a paste brooch—it was, as he could always explain, a very special sort of paste brooch. It had been worn by Dr. Crippen’s wife; it had been found in the belly of an ostrich; it had fooled an Indian Maharajah. He nearly persuaded me once that a rusty old Spanish knife with a broken point was the fatal knife used by Charlotte Corday when she stabbed Marat in his bath. It was a left-handed knife, he explained. Unique, amazing opportunity, valuable historical relic, dirt cheap, five pounds. No? Four pounds fifteen shillings. No? Four pounds. Not at any price? Pity, pity to see a friend missing such a bargain! Then what about this valuable old meerschaum pipe, bitten through at the mouthpiece? This was the pipe Emile Zola smoked while he was writing Nana—look, crumbs of tobacco still stuck at the bottom of the bowl. A literary man should not fail to snap up this sacred relic. To anybody else five pounds; to me, thirty-five shillings. No? Then how about this candlestick? It belonged to Balzac. With this very candlestick he lighted George Sand through the streets when she went to catch her omnibus . . .

So he ran on. He always got me in the end, so that I still possess Lord Byron’s eyeglass, Beethoven’s paper weight, a rusty spearhead which belonged to Richard the Lion Hearted, and a brass ring marked with the signs of the zodiac and guaranteed to bring good luck. I have never been able to give the things away. He had what they call personal magnetism, that funny little man. As he talked he glared into your eyes and screwed his face into frightful grimaces. He wore an antiquated frock coat which, he once told me, had been the property of Richard Wagner, and never let himself be seen without a pink orchid in his frayed buttonhole. He was irresistible.

It was Mr. Ziska who invented the incredible legend of the Seed of Destruction. He made it up on the spur of the moment. There was something of the artist in Mr. Ziska. He was tired of telling the same old story about how the shoddy little rings and pins that he sold would bring good fortune to the ladies or gentlemen who wore them, and so he struck a new note. He had an inspiration. It came to him in a flash. I was there when it happened.

He had stopped trying to sell me Charles Dickens’ favorite gold toothpick, and had taken from a tray a gold ring set with a spinel seal as big as my thumbnail, clumsily engraved with a bit of an inscription in Arabic. He stood there, blinking at it. I could see that he was trying to think of something fresh, and so I said, “The Seal of King Solomon, no doubt?”

He blinked at me and smiled shyly and said, “No, this is not the Seal of Solomon. This, my friend, is known as the Seed of Destruction.”

“It brings good luck, I suppose?”

His eyes sparkled and his face assumed such an expression of delight that every wrinkle looked like a little smile, as he replied, “No, my young friend, that is just where you’re wrong. It does not bring good luck. It brings bad luck,” and he actually crowed like a contented baby.

He continued, “It brings bad luck. That’s why it’s called the Seed of Destruction. It brings very bad luck indeed. The inscription says: The destiny of man is trouble. If you’re rich, it’ll make you poor. If you’re healthy, it’ll make you ill. If you’re alive, it will be the cause of your death pretty soon. See? It was cut by a magician, an Arabian magician, a very bad man indeed, for an Arab prince in the days of Saladin. The magician put a spell on it, a shocking spell. This ring is absolutely certain to bring bad luck. Not good luck—bad luck. I personally guarantee it. A bargain, twenty-five pounds.”

“And you expect me to pay twenty-five pounds for that?” I said. “And, incidentally, it does not seem to have done you much harm. Come off it, Mr. Ziska!”

With infinite patience and something like pity, holding up his hand for silence, he said, “Calm, calm, calm! Listen and learn, young man. I have not told you how the enchantment works. This ring does no harm at all to the purchaser of it. Not to the buyer, and not to the seller. I bought it and therefore it cannot hurt me. If you buy it, it cannot hurt you. But if you give this ring away, the most horrible misfortunes will fall upon the head of the person to whom you give it. Do you understand? That is the whole idea of the thing. It is obvious, can’t you see? The Arab prince fell in love with a princess, but she loved another prince instead of him. Do you see? So the prince paid the magician a lot of money to make this ring and, pretending brotherly affection, he placed it on his rival’s finger. Three days later, the rival was eaten by a lion. But the princess, poor girl; she went to bed and died of a broken heart. And so the prince, who was sorry for what he had done, got the ring and hid it away. But one of the eunuchs of his palace stole it.”

“What happened to him?” I asked, knowing that Ziska was lying.

“Oh, it is equally unlucky to steal it. It must be bought and paid for. The eunuch was set upon by robbers and they cut his throat and stole the ring from him and sold it to a merchant in Aleppo. But they hadn’t paid for it, so they were caught and had their heads cut off. But the merchant sold the ring to a young nobleman so he was all right. He had bought and paid for it. The nobleman, who was trying to keep on the right side of his uncle who was very miserly and wicked, gave him the ring for a present. And would you believe it? That same day, the wicked old uncle fell off a high roof and broke his neck and the young nobleman inherited all his money. I could go on all day telling you what happened. Twenty-five pounds?”

“I haven’t got any rich uncles and I haven’t got an enemy worth killing. And I haven’t got twenty-five pounds.”

“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.”