II
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?