The Emperor of Elam, and other stories

I

What was he like?

H’m! That’s rather a large order. What are people like, I wonder? Some of them are like dogs. There are plenty of poodles and bull pups walking around on two legs. Some of them are like cats. Some of them are like pigs. A few of them are like hyenas. More of them are like fishes in aquariums. A lot of them are like horses—of all kinds, from thoroughbreds and racers to those big, honest, comprehending, uncomplaining creatures that drag drays. But I have a notion that most of them are like you and me.

What are we like, though? If we happen to be like Greek gods—which we don’t!—if we have red hair or vampire eyes or humps on our backs, if we harpoon whales or compose operas or put poison in our mother-in-law’s soup, it is possible to make out for us a likely enough dossier. Yet how far does that dossier go? It tells less than a tintype at a county fair. Vamp eyes or godlike legs, even the ability to compose operas, have nothing to do with the way we react when we inherit a billion dollars or lose our last cent, when our wives get on our nerves or the boiler of our ship blows up at sea. And what on earth are you to say about people like Michael, who are neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, good nor bad? Or people whose wives never get on their nerves and whose boilers never blow up? They have their dossier all the same. Why not? They do nine-tenths of the work of the world. They lay its stones one upon another. They commit their share of its follies, suffer their share of its sorrows, and pay more than their share of the bill.

What was Michael like? My good man, you loll there with your ungodlike leg over the arm of your chair and you blandly propose to me the ultimate problem of art! One would think you were Flaubert—or was he Guy de Maupassant?—who made it out possible to tell, in words that have neither line nor colour, that are gone as soon as you have spoken them, how one grocer sitting in his door differs from all other grocers sitting in doors. I have spent hours, I have lost nights, over that wretched grocer; and I haven’t learned any more about him than when I began: except to suspect that Maupassant—or was it Theophile Gautier?—wanted to be Besnard and Rodin too. I grant you that no grocer looks precisely like another. But that isn’t Maupassant’s business—to tell how a grocer looks. The thing simply can’t be done. Nor is it enough for your grocer to sit in his door. He must say something, he must do something, or words won’t catch him. And then how do you know why he said or did that particular thing, or what he would say or do at another time?

And you have the courage to ask me, between two whiffs of a cigarette, what Michael was like! How the deuce do I know? I never had anything particular to do with him. He was like fifty million other people with lightish hair and darkish eyes and youngish tastes, whom neither their neighbours nor their inner devil have beaten into distinction. If I tried to tell you what a man like that is like, I would land you in more volumes than “Jean Christophe.” I can only tell you what he was like at two very different moments of his life, in two entirely different places.

Perhaps you are naturalist enough to construct the rest of him out of that. I, for one, am not. But it’s astounding how little we know about people, really, and how childishly we expect miracles of each newcomer. It isn’t as if anybody ever did anything new. How can they? Nobody is radically different from anybody else. The only thing is that some of us are a little harder or a little softer, some of us are longer-winded or shorter-winded, some of us see better out of our eyes or have less idea what to do with our hands. That isn’t all, though. There are other things, outside of us, for which we are neither to blame nor to praise—the houses we happen to be born in, the winds that blow us, arrows that fly by day and terrors that walk by night. And then there are other people. They come, they go, they get ideas into their heads, they put ideas into ours. It may be pure bull luck whether you are a grocer sitting in your door for a Maupassant to scratch his head over, or something more—definite, shall we say?

Michael, now: why should a man like that disappear? Would you disappear? Would I disappear? Why on earth should Michael have disappeared? Surely not for the few thousand dollars that disappeared at the same time. Nothing was the matter with him. He had a good enough job. He was married to a nice enough girl. He would have prospered and grown fat and begotten a little Michael or two to follow in his footsteps. But those reaping and binding people take it into their heads to send him over there, and he suddenly vanishes like a collar-button in a crack. And we all make a terrific hullabaloo about it—when the thing to make a hullabaloo about is that one man may get all geography to reap and bind in, while another may never get outside his valley.

The thing in itself was infinitely simpler than one of Michael’s confounded reapers and binders.

II

I suppose you know Aurora—Mrs. Michael as was? I began stepping on her toes at dances twenty years ago, and I believe I could tell you what she is like. This country is a factory of Auroras. Dozens of her pass under that window every day, all turned out to sample as if by machinery, all run by the same interior clockwork, all well made, well dressed, well educated—in the American sense; also well able to milk a cow or to carry one on their backs, but preferring to harangue clubs all day, to dance all night, in any case to circumvent the ingenuity of life in playing us nasty tricks. They won’t do anything they don’t like, and they shut their eyes to the dark o’ the moon.

Just what Aurora wanted of Michael, I can’t say. As the poet hath it, there is a tide in the affairs of women which, taken at the flood, leads God knows where. But these things are not so awfully mysterious. There was a period in Aurora’s history when, it being reported to her that the simple Michael had likened her eyes to Japanese lanterns, she was not displeased. And I have been told on the best authority that even a suffragette may not be averse to having her hand held. Whether Michael first grabbed Aurora’s or whether Aurora first grabbed Michael’s doesn’t much matter. There came a later period when they were both able to recall that historic event with considerable detachment.

Aurora likewise lived to learn that there are other ways of circumventing the tricks of life than by reaping and binding. She thirsted for higher things, for wider horizons, than those of Zerbetta, Ohio. Above all human trophies she burned for two which cohabit not too readily under one roof—Culture and Romance. So when Michael was unexpectedly ordered to the East she accompanied him only as far as Paris.

My relations with her, I regret to say, were such that she did not confide to me what she thought when Michael failed to turn up again. You can easily perceive, however, that Michael translated, Michael probably murdered, Michael made, at all events, for once in his life, mysterious, was a very different pair of sleeves from the Michael she had not considered important enough to see off on his Orient Express. Aurora was never the one to miss that. It put her in the papers. It made her a heroine. It invested her with the romance for which she yearned. It also invested her with extremely becoming mourning. Yet I fancied once or twice that I detected in her a shade of annoyance. She was capable of choosing an occultist for her second husband, but in the bottom of her heart she hated people to be as indefinite as Michael. She naturally did not like, either, a rumour of which she had caught echoes, that Michael had run away from her.

Well, when Aurora heard that I was going to Constantinople, she asked me to find out what I could. It was quite a bit afterward, you know, and she had already entered the holy bonds of wedlock with her occultist. But she couldn’t quite get over that exasperating indefiniteness of Michael’s. She wanted to put a tangible tombstone over him—with a quatrain of her own composition, and the occultist’s symbol of the macrocosm. Wayne, too—Michael’s uncle, and one of the reaping and binding partners—suggested that I quietly look about once more. What the partners principally minded, of course, was their money. Yet it wasn’t such a huge sum, and Michael really did them a good turn after all, the ironic dog. They could well afford the fat reward they offered. They got no end of free advertising, you know, what with the fuss the State Department made, and all. People who had sat in darkness all their lives, never having heard of a reaper and binder, suddenly saw a great light when the Bosphorus was dragged and Thrace and Asia Minor sifted for an obscure agent of reapers and binders.

Such are the advantages of getting yourself robbed and murdered, as compared to those of working your head off to keep your job. Michael, to be sure—I ended by finding out all about Michael, long after I had given him up. It was nothing but an accident. I wonder, though, that we go on believing there’s anything in this world except accident. And the beauty of this accident is that I can’t claim that reward I need so much—one of the beauties. It was altogether, for Aurora and Michael even more than for me, such a characteristic case of missing what you look for and finding what you don’t.

I never told Wayne. I never told Aurora. I never intended to tell you. Another accident! But isn’t it aggravating how one’s best stories always have to be kept dark?

III

So the romantic Aurora, as I told you, sat in Paris like a true American wife, inviting her soul in the Louvre—both musée and magasins—while the humdrum Michael set forth for that bourne whence he was not to return, with his reaper and binder under his arm. What he did with it doesn’t matter. In fact I believe he did very little with it. He wasn’t born to reaping and binding. Reaping and binding had been thrust upon him—by the uncle to whom he applied at a desperate moment for a job. Like most of us, you see, he didn’t know what he wanted. I’m not sure he ever found out. Aurora, however, must have helped him in a back-handed way to find out that he hadn’t got what he wanted. And so did that sudden journey of his. He had never been anywhere before in his life.

I make fun of poor Aurora, who after all had perhaps divined in poor Michael, at the flood of her tide, what she was really after. But I found it rather quaint, I must confess, that he, the reaper and binder of Zerbetta, Ohio, should be caught by Stambul. Yet why not? I myself am unaccountably moved by reapers and binders, by motors and dynamos and steam engines, by all manner of human ingenuities of which I know nothing and could never learn anything. Why should not Michael have been moved by things as foreign to him? Moreover has there not always been in the Anglo-Saxon some uneasy little chord that has made him the wanderer and camper-out of the earth, that nothing can twitch like the East?

Michael took an astonishing fancy to that bumpy old place, and to those mangy dogs and those fantastic smells and those inconvenient costumes and those dusty Bazaars and all the trash that is in them. He bought quantities of it. Rugs and brasses and I don’t know what uncannily kept turning up long after he had dropped through his crack. Aurora received them tearfully as tributes to herself, and I believe they paved the way for her next experiment. Michael’s successor is an antiquary as well as an astrologer, and he keeps an occult junk-shop on a top floor in Union Square.

That junk, as it happened, was just what played so fateful a part in Michael’s adventure. He bought a good deal of it from a certain antiquity man who knew English better than any one else Michael ran across in the Bazaars. Finding Michael a promising customer, the antiquity man said he had better stuff stored away in a khan outside the Bazaars. And Michael, of course, was delighted to go and look at it. Do you wonder?

The khan was one of those old stone houses in Mahmud Pasha that have a Byzantine look about them, with their string-courses of flat bricks, the heavy stone brackets of their projecting upper storeys, the solid iron cages of their windows, and their arched tunnels leading into courts within courts, where grape-vines grow and rugs lie fading in the sun. The antiquity man took Michael up some stone stairs into one of the galleries overlooking a court, and then into a series of dirty little stone rooms full of all sorts of queer-looking boxes and bundles. And some of the boxes and bundles were opened with great ceremony, and Rhodian plates were brought forth for Michael to admire—Persian tiles, Byzantine enamels—You know the sort of thing.

Michael, our reaper and binder, liked it. I can’t say how intelligently he liked it; but he had discovered a new world, and he liked it well enough to go back again and again. I must confess that I don’t recollect very much about it, myself. I do remember, though, that the most outlandish-looking people—Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Persians, Tartars, Heaven knows who—carry on outlandish-looking activities there. Any number of forges and blow-pipes flare in those dark stone rooms, where goldsmiths and silversmiths make charms, amulets, reliquaries, little Virgins to hang around your neck, little votive hands and feet to hang on icons, silver rings for Turks who think it wicked to wear gold, and filigree chains, pendants, and lamps in the Byzantine tradition. That’s where most of the antiques sold in the Bazaars come from. And devilishly well-made a lot of them are, too. I know a Byzantine gold chalice in a museum in England, decorated with St. Georges of the tenth century, that came out of that khan not twenty years ago! Admirable coins and gems come from there too, to say nothing of Tanagra figurines. Did you ever hear of a Chalcedonian figurine? Not many other people have, either. But plenty of real ones used to be dug up on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus; and clever Greek potters copy them and rename them for tourists. However, it isn’t all fake. There are real artists in those dark little stone rooms. And there are real antiques—some of them stored away, some of them undergoing a final dilapidation to suit them for the critical eye of fake collectors.

Michael liked it all so much that he spent more time in that extraordinary maze than was good for his reapers and binders. The people got to know him by sight, and they let him rummage around by himself.

IV

He turned up one afternoon to look at some pottery, and the antiquity man happened to be out. Michael was therefore given coffee and left more or less to his own devices. Nobody could talk to him, you see, and the antiquity man was coming back.

Michael prowled mildly about, finding nothing much to look at but packing-cases and kerosene tins—those big rectangular ones that everybody in the Levant hoards like gold. He presently recognised, however, on top of a pile of boxes, a basket that he had seen at the antiquity man’s shop in the Bazaars—a basket, with an odd little red figure in the wicker, containing embroideries. He managed to get it down, and found it unexpectedly heavy. It turned out to be full this time of broken tiles. He poked them over. Each bit was worth something—for a flower on it, or an Arabic letter, or a glint of Persian lustre. But as he poked down through them, what should he come across but some funny-looking metal things: some round, some square, some with clockwork fastened to them. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if bombs looked like that! He proceeded, very gingerly, to replace the bits of tile.

Just then he became aware that the antiquity man had come in quietly and was looking at him.

“What the devil have you got here?” asked Michael, with a laugh. “An ammunition factory?”

The antiquity man shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“I have better than that. I have a Rhages jar for you to look at, if you will come this way.”

A Rhages jar! I don’t suppose Michael had ever until that moment heard of a Rhages jar. However, he followed the antiquity man into another room even more crowded with boxes and tins; and there, to be sure, the Rhages jar was put into his hands. But the place was so dark he could hardly see it.

“If you will excuse me another moment,” said the antiquity man, “I will get a light.”

He was gone, as he said, only a moment. When he came back a servant followed him, carrying a candle—a big porter whom Michael already knew by sight, in baggy blue clothes and a red girdle. Michael nodded to him, and the man salaamed. Then the antiquity man pointed out to Michael, by the light of the candle, the beauties of the Rhages jar. As he did so another man came in, an older man with a grizzled beard. He gravely saluted Michael and took the candle from the porter, who went out. The porter very soon returned, however. This time he carried a tray on which was one of those handleless little cups of Turkish coffee in a holder of filigree silver. The antiquity man set down the Rhages jar.

“Won’t you have a cup of coffee?” he said, making a sign to the porter.

“No, thank you,” replied Michael. That was one thing about Stambul he didn’t altogether like—that eternal sipping of muddy coffee.

“Oh, but just one!” insisted the antiquity man. “Why not?”

“I’ve had one already,” answered Michael. “I’m not used to it, you know. It keeps me awake.”

The antiquity man smiled a little.

“But not this coffee,” he said. “I think you will find that it does not keep you awake.”

It began to come over Michael that there was more than the coffee which he didn’t like. Was it the air in that stuffy dark little stone room? Was it the way in which the three men looked at him? Was it that basket of broken tiles?

“No thanks,” he said. And he added: “Let’s go out where we can see. It’s too hot in here, too.”

He looked around for the door. He couldn’t see it from where he stood. The antiquity man said something, and the porter stood aside. Michael stepped past him, around some big boxes. The door was there. Michael suddenly heard it click; but in front of it a fourth man stood in the shadow. He did not move when Michael stepped forward. He stood there in front of the door, with his hands in his coat pockets. Michael was quite sure he didn’t like that.

“Pardon,” he said, “I want to go out.”

The man shook his head. At a word from the antiquity man, however, he moved aside, keeping his hands in his pockets. Michael reached out for the door. It was locked.

He liked that least of all. He had a sudden impulse to pound the door, the man beside him. Yet the next moment he was ashamed of it. He turned around. The others had come forward, around the boxes—the antiquity man, the big porter with the tray, the old man carrying the candle. In the light of it Michael looked at the other one, the one who had shut the door. He was young and very dark, with a scar across his chin. Michael looked at them all. What in the world had come over them? Could it be that they took that basket of tiles too seriously? Could it be that they, too, were not what they seemed, that under their first friendliness were black and uncanny things? All the old wives’ tales that Westerners hear of the East came vaguely, yet disquietingly, back to him. It was with an effort that he folded his arms and turned to the antiquity man.

“Your methods of doing business,” he remarked, “strike me as being rather peculiar.”

“It is a peculiar business,” said the antiquity man.

“Is it your idea that people should be forced to buy Rhages jars whether they want them or not?”

“The Rhages jar is not for sale,” replied the antiquity man.

“O!” exclaimed Michael. “Then what is the matter? What are you after?”

“Not your money,” said the antiquity man. “Please believe that, sir. And please believe that we are very sorry. It is—what shall I say?—what we call here kismet, fate. If you had not chanced to notice that basket, if you had not taken it down and examined it, nothing would have happened.”

“What have I to do with that?” burst out Michael. “Is it my fault if you put baskets where people can see them and then go away? Am I responsible for your carelessness?”

“Your question, sir, is unfortunately most just. But that is a part of the kismet—that having been careless ourselves, we are obliged to make you pay for it.”

“Well, how am I going to pay?” demanded Michael. “Spend the rest of my life in here?”

The antiquity man hesitated before answering.

“Yes, sir,” he said at last, softly. And he added: “Will you have your coffee now?”

Michael could hardly take it in. What did the fellow mean? Then something in the way the antiquity man looked at him made him remember about the coffee—that it would not keep him awake. For the life of him he could not help glancing down at it. How was it that he didn’t happen to drink it when they first brought it in? And if he had—He stared at the stuff in its pretty silver holder. Behind it something bright caught a flicker from the candle—a knife in the porter’s girdle. Why not? They all carried them. Yet his eye travelled to the pocket of the dark young man by the door. All of a sudden Michael knew as well as if he saw it that there was a revolver in that pocket, and that the young man had his finger on the trigger. Michael’s eyes travelled on, up to the eyes of the young man, to the eyes of them all. What strange, glistening, dark eyes they all had, too dark to see into! He found all of a sudden that he felt a little cold. He was even afraid for a moment that he was going to tremble....

What really preoccupied him, though, was how the thing had happened. How could such a thing happen so suddenly? It had all been perfectly simple and natural—his work for his firm, his journey abroad, his coming to Constantinople, his prowling in the Bazaars, his happening to buy a gimcrack of the antiquity man, his introduction to this queer old place, his pawing over those broken tiles. It was all so simple. It would, at any step, have been so easy to avoid. And it was so unjust, it was so fantastically unjust. How could things end as incredibly as that? How could he let them end like that? He was one, and they were four; and they were armed, and he was not. But he wouldn’t take it sitting down. The Anglo-Saxon in him stiffened his back and set his teeth. He began looking around stealthily, at the bare stone walls, at the littered floor, for something to get hold of. He would show them yet....

“You must not think,” said the antiquity man, “that we have no sympathy for your position. But do not think, either, that any—any display of the emotions will help you. No one can possibly hear.”

That was the moment when Michael found it hardest to keep his head. If he had been a little younger he probably would not have kept his head. “Display of the emotions”! But he realised at last that for some incomprehensible reason they meant business. He hoped his emotions did not display themselves in his voice.

“Look here,” he said. “I see you aren’t pick-pockets, and I see that by accident I have discovered something you do not wish known. Well, if you had kept quiet I might never have thought of that basket again. Or I might now try to buy your Rhages jar—for any figure you might name. As it is, I give you my word of honour that never so long as I live will I breathe a word to any human being. You know me. Don’t you believe what I say? But if you don’t I will sign my name to any document you care to draw up. If you ever hear of my breaking my word, I am willing to take the consequences.”

At this the old man spoke for the first time. Michael could not understand what he said. He did not even recognise the language in which the old man spoke. He had a curiously deep voice. The antiquity man answered incomprehensibly. Then he turned back to Michael:

“I do believe what you say. I do not question your word of honour. But, unfortunately, we cannot take any chances—even the most remote. And impressions, you know, even the strongest of them, like love and grief, have a way of losing their force. Suppose we let you go. There might come very naturally a time when your recollections of this incident would lose their intensity, or when you would regard your promise as less important than you do now. Why not? Life is like that. Life would be intolerable if it were not like that. Things happen, and then other things happen. I have not the honour of any great acquaintance with you, but it is conceivable that you might sometime be offered wine which you could not refuse, or that a beautiful woman might make an impression on you, or that a company of distinguished men might be relating interesting experiences; and before you knew it the story of this afternoon would slip from you. Or you might dream aloud. You might have a fever. These possibilities, I admit, are very remote, or the probability of any harm resulting to us. Still, you never can tell. Stories have a strange way of travelling. Sometimes they travel from New York to Constantinople. We have known cases. For that reason we—have prepared that cup of coffee. We must secure ourselves against one chance in a thousand.”

Michael saw it. He was like that. He had that fatal little flaw of the artist, of being able to see the other side. He saw it then as distinctly as he saw the four dark faces, the candle burning quietly in the dark little room, the dark shapes and shadows of the boxes. He wondered what dark strange thing was hidden here—that meant so much to these men. He wondered about the men themselves, whom he had taken so casually.

“Your life, of course,” the antiquity man went on, “is very precious to you. That we perfectly understand. While life is seldom satisfactory, it contains, after all, a great deal for one still as young as you. And one always hopes—often with reason. We ask you to believe that we understand that. We also ask you to believe that no one of us has any personal reason for wishing you harm. We excessively regret the necessity of asking you to drink that cup of coffee. We shall continue all our lives to regret it. Nevertheless, you can perhaps understand that there may be reasons why even your life is of less moment to us than the possibility of your some day forgetting for an instant the promise you now so sincerely make.”

Michael still saw it. He saw, too, what had been growing steadily clearer, that this was an antiquity man among antiquity men. But what he saw best of all, through that portentous candle-light, was a sudden mirage of the summer sun—out of which he had stepped so lightly. He saw it so vividly that his voice had in it a thickness he didn’t like:

“I understand. But there are chances and chances. For instance, can a man disappear like that, even in Constantinople, and no questions be asked? When I fail to go back to my hotel, to pay my bill, will they say nothing? When I fail to go back to my country will my friends say nothing? Of course not! There will be a row. It may not be to-morrow, it may not be the next day. I do not pretend to be a person of importance. But sooner or later questions will be asked. And sooner or later you will have to answer some of them. What will you say then?”

“We have thought of that,” answered the antiquity man. “We can see that if it is dangerous to let you go from here, it is also dangerous to let others come to look for you here. But by the time they come, they will at least find no baskets of broken tiles.” He gave Michael a moment in which to take it in. “If the matter be at last traced to us, it will be a simple one of robbery and murder. For that reason we shall have to keep whatever valuables you may have. We are very sorry that we shall not be able to send them back to your family.”

“My money belongs to my firm, not to my family,” protested Michael. “If you keep it, you will take not only my life, but my honour. It certainly will not be to your interest to prevent them from thinking that I have stolen it and run away.”

“You are right,” replied the antiquity man. “But I do not need to tell you that human actions are usually misunderstood. Even you, perhaps, do not understand that our own motive is not an interested one. There is only One who understands. I may point out to you, however, that we run the risk of suffering from a similar imputation. It will probably be thought that we have killed you for your money. And you must realise that in that case I, perhaps all of us, stand an excellent chance of following you—wherever you go. But that chance we take more willingly than the other.”

He said it simply, without gestures, without airs. Michael could not help seeing it and rising to it. He even could not help liking the antiquity man. Evidently it was not a common affair in which he had happened to tangle himself....

He saw it, but somehow he felt his sense of reality slipping. He had often wondered, vaguely enough, as one does when the sun is warm about one and the end of life is very far off and incredible, what the end of life would be like—how it could come, whether he would make a fool of himself. But of all the possibilities he had imagined, he had never imagined this little stone room in Stambul, and this candle, and these shadows, and these four inscrutable dark faces of men whom he did not know. Was he making a fool of himself now to say, as he did, thickly:

“Give me your cup of coffee.” He tried to clear his throat. “But you might at least tell me first what all this fuss is about. Or are you afraid I shall tell them in the next world?”

He saw a light in the antiquity man’s eye. The old man saw it, too. There ensued a conversation between them, in which the young man, his hand still in his pocket, joined. The porter stood statuesque, with his tray of poisoned coffee. Michael, left to himself, began to feel his sense of reality come back.

“Look here,” he said, “my coffee is getting cold.”

The antiquity man smiled.

“My friend here”—he pointed to the old man—“has made a suggestion. He seems to have taken a fancy to you. In fact I may assure you that we are all pleased at the way you have received the very disagreeable things we have unfortunately had to say to you. Some men, in the circumstances, would have been abject. You might have begged, bribed, wept, fainted, what do I know? We have seen—And we feel sure, as we did not at first, that you did not come here on purpose to find—that basket of tiles.”

He narrowed his eyes a little as he looked at Michael, making another of his eloquent pauses. Michael didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help asking:

“Well, what is your suggestion?”

“Are you willing,” asked the antiquity man, slowly, “to change your religion?”

“Change my religion?” echoed Michael, uncomprehendingly. “I’m afraid I haven’t much religion to change.”

“All the better,” returned the antiquity man. “So it is with most people of intelligence. If, however, you were willing to change your religion, if you were also willing to change your language, your name, your home, your wife even, for others as different from them as can be conceived, if you could bring yourself to make that sacrifice and to become one of us, it would not be necessary for you to drink that cup of coffee.”

Michael saw it. He caught his breath. But—

“I must ask you to decide quickly,” continued the antiquity man. “We all have affairs. And if it should become necessary for us to answer those questions of which you spoke, it would be better for witnesses to be able to say that we were not in here too long this afternoon.”

Michael saw that, too. And all the blood in him quickened at the chance of life. Life! His life had not been such a success. Why not wipe the slate clean and start over again? It ironically came to him that Aurora would call that romance—to be cornered here like a rat in a trap while four men he didn’t know stared at him with a candle! But why, on the other hand, should he give in to them? That was cowardice, even if it was irony, too—to die for what he didn’t want and didn’t believe in.... The immensity of the dilemma was too much for him. Irresistible force, immovable obstacle—that flashed inconsequently into his head. Was the light going out? The room grew darker. He tried again to clear his throat. It suddenly came to him that he didn’t even know who these people were, and what they wanted him to become....

The antiquity man reached forward, lifted the coffee-cup out of its silver holder, and dropped it on the stone floor. Michael stared down stupidly at the bits of broken porcelain. They were like the bits of broken tiles. He wondered if his trousers were spattered....

The young man took his hand out of his pocket and opened the door.

V

How do I know? I don’t. I only know what Michael told me. Which wasn’t much. He was like that, you see! Then he was too mortally afraid of its getting back here. He wouldn’t open up as little as he did till he heard Aurora had married again! And here you ask who and when and where and why. O Lord! If you would only let a man tell his story and stop when he is through!

However, even you must know that Constantinople enjoys quite a reputation for liveliness, of sorts, and that it was particularly lively just before and just after the German War. It was then that I got out there, as a courier—while the armistice was on. Although it was a good bit after the episode of the coffee cup, I saw quite a number of people who remembered Michael. Of course a good many other people and things had disappeared since his day—including, I suppose, the antiquity man and his bombs. A few Turks or Tartars might have told me something about that, if they lived to tell tales. But of course I had yet to hear about the antiquity man—the interesting part of him, I mean. And witnesses had seen Michael drive away from the khan in a closed carriage.

What no witness had seen was the number of the carriage, or the door it drove to. And they told me another yarn about a carriage driving full tilt at dusk into the open draw of the Bridge. I asked myself if poor old Michael were still sitting in it. That version, at any rate, is the one now accepted by Aurora. She has given up her tombstone and her quatrain. She perceives that it isn’t every lady who can boast one husband at home among the stars and another sitting in a brougham at the bottom of the Golden Horn.

So I gave Michael up. Perhaps I did it the more easily because there were so many other things to think about: couriering, relieving, reporting—any number of odd jobs connected with all that mess out there. They took me hither and yon about the Balkans and the Black Sea, on errands that might have sounded quite fantastic before the war plunged thousands of unsuspecting people into adventures a hundred times more so. And one day I landed in Batum.

Everybody who lives in Batum swears it’s the dreariest hole on the face of the earth. An English officer I met even sighed piteously to me over the lost delights of Aden! However, I found Batum very amusing, with its higglety-pigglety air of somebody having stirred up a piece of Turkey with a piece of Russia and having turned the mixture out to cool in a corner of the Riviera. To be sure, there are rather too many Georgians and Lazzes and other queer customers prowling around; and the Hôtel de France does too little to live up to its name. Also, that cooling process will evidently take time. But the setting of cloudy white peaks and a misnamed sea is quite worthy of the Riviera. And I must insist that the Boulevard is a really perfect little park. You should see how close the palms and the cypresses march to the white shingle.

Well, I was warming a tin chair in that park one afternoon, watching the operatic crowd, admiring the great wild hills of their Caucasus through their mannered cypresses, listening to the incantation of their Black Sea through their Glinka, and thinking of nothing in particular, when I suddenly made two discoveries. One was that that Coon song we used to sing about “Lou, Lou, I love you” came out of Life for the Czar. The other was that Michael, our vanished reaper and binder, far from having disappeared in the Golden Horn with Aurora’s phantom coupé or from having otherwise evaporated, sat solid and sunburned in another tin chair of the Boulevard, eyeing me. To be sure he was moustached, uniformed, medalled, booted, disguised as a kind of bastard Cossack with all manner of strange accoutrements and insignia. But it was Michael. What is more he presently grinned, albeit a trifle sheepishly, pulling up his tin chair beside mine.

“I was afraid you were going to be melodramatic,” he said. “As it is, let’s have a chat.”

We had a chat. Tin chairs in parks always remind me of that chat. At the time I thought it the most interesting chat I ever had. That was before I proposed to Alice.

“I suppose they think I took the money, eh?” Michael finally asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “They think you took the money.”

“H’m. I’ve made it up to them without their knowing. So that’s all right. And—what about Aurora?”

I told him about Aurora. He was longer with his “H’m” that time. Do you know? I believe the fellow was human enough to be jealous of an astrologer whom he didn’t envy! However, he ended by letting out another:

“So that’s all right.”

“And you?” I ventured.

He didn’t say anything at first. He sat there fingering his gewgaws and staring at the sea.

“How’s a man to know whether he’s all right or all wrong?” he finally demanded.

“Hell!” objected I. “It isn’t your fault if you happen to be sitting in Batum instead of in Zerbetta—or at the bottom of the Golden Horn. You couldn’t have invented such an end for yourself if you had tried till you were black in the face. That antiquity gang is responsible, not you. But I bet—”

But I concluded not to. As for Michael, he continued to study the afternoon blue of the sea. Down the edge of it a steamer trailed a long dark line of smoke toward the West.

“I suppose I could go back home if I really wanted to,” he said, “now that my antiquity man has pulled off his republic. Yet after all, what good would it do? You can see for yourself—The worst of it, though, is that I don’t really want to. You get interested in people, you know, in spite of yourself—even when they have Jew noses and jabber Armenian. I’d like to see their show through. Then they’ve been no end decent to me. I’ve a vine and fig tree of my own—up Ararat way! I have a house to live in, and a horse to ride, and a wife to beat. I do it, too. I’ve learned that much,” he pronounced darkly, in a tone that struck me at first as irrelevant. On consideration, however, I decided it wasn’t. “Anyhow,” he went on, “I’m alive; and I can’t say I’m sorry. The funny thing about it is that I never knew it till I came so near stepping off. I’ve had some pretty narrow squeaks since then, too. And my chances of dropping in my boots are still a lot brighter than yours. All the same, it’s better than peddling those damned hay-rakes. But once in a while,” the inconsequent devil blurted out, “I come down here and listen to the band.”

Now can you imagine a man being like that? But if you ever breathe a word to a living soul—!