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.