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?