Read Ebook: The Emperor of Elam and other stories by Dwight H G Harrison Griswold

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Ebook has 1593 lines and 100111 words, and 32 pages

PAGE

Like Michael 3

The Pagan 52

White Bombazine 82

Unto the Day 108

Mrs. Derwall and the Higher Life 131

The Bathers 151

Retarded Bombs 172

Susannah and the Elder 191

Studio Smoke 252

Behind the Door 266

The Bald Spot 290

The Emperor of Elam 306

LIKE MICHAEL

THE EMPEROR OF ELAM AND OTHER STORIES

LIKE MICHAEL

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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