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.