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.