IV
He turned up one afternoon to look at some pottery, and the antiquity man happened to be out. Michael was therefore given coffee and left more or less to his own devices. Nobody could talk to him, you see, and the antiquity man was coming back.
Michael prowled mildly about, finding nothing much to look at but packing-cases and kerosene tins—those big rectangular ones that everybody in the Levant hoards like gold. He presently recognised, however, on top of a pile of boxes, a basket that he had seen at the antiquity man’s shop in the Bazaars—a basket, with an odd little red figure in the wicker, containing embroideries. He managed to get it down, and found it unexpectedly heavy. It turned out to be full this time of broken tiles. He poked them over. Each bit was worth something—for a flower on it, or an Arabic letter, or a glint of Persian lustre. But as he poked down through them, what should he come across but some funny-looking metal things: some round, some square, some with clockwork fastened to them. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if bombs looked like that! He proceeded, very gingerly, to replace the bits of tile.
Just then he became aware that the antiquity man had come in quietly and was looking at him.
“What the devil have you got here?” asked Michael, with a laugh. “An ammunition factory?”
The antiquity man shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“I have better than that. I have a Rhages jar for you to look at, if you will come this way.”
A Rhages jar! I don’t suppose Michael had ever until that moment heard of a Rhages jar. However, he followed the antiquity man into another room even more crowded with boxes and tins; and there, to be sure, the Rhages jar was put into his hands. But the place was so dark he could hardly see it.
“If you will excuse me another moment,” said the antiquity man, “I will get a light.”
He was gone, as he said, only a moment. When he came back a servant followed him, carrying a candle—a big porter whom Michael already knew by sight, in baggy blue clothes and a red girdle. Michael nodded to him, and the man salaamed. Then the antiquity man pointed out to Michael, by the light of the candle, the beauties of the Rhages jar. As he did so another man came in, an older man with a grizzled beard. He gravely saluted Michael and took the candle from the porter, who went out. The porter very soon returned, however. This time he carried a tray on which was one of those handleless little cups of Turkish coffee in a holder of filigree silver. The antiquity man set down the Rhages jar.
“Won’t you have a cup of coffee?” he said, making a sign to the porter.
“No, thank you,” replied Michael. That was one thing about Stambul he didn’t altogether like—that eternal sipping of muddy coffee.
“Oh, but just one!” insisted the antiquity man. “Why not?”
“I’ve had one already,” answered Michael. “I’m not used to it, you know. It keeps me awake.”
The antiquity man smiled a little.
“But not this coffee,” he said. “I think you will find that it does not keep you awake.”
It began to come over Michael that there was more than the coffee which he didn’t like. Was it the air in that stuffy dark little stone room? Was it the way in which the three men looked at him? Was it that basket of broken tiles?
“No thanks,” he said. And he added: “Let’s go out where we can see. It’s too hot in here, too.”
He looked around for the door. He couldn’t see it from where he stood. The antiquity man said something, and the porter stood aside. Michael stepped past him, around some big boxes. The door was there. Michael suddenly heard it click; but in front of it a fourth man stood in the shadow. He did not move when Michael stepped forward. He stood there in front of the door, with his hands in his coat pockets. Michael was quite sure he didn’t like that.
“Pardon,” he said, “I want to go out.”
The man shook his head. At a word from the antiquity man, however, he moved aside, keeping his hands in his pockets. Michael reached out for the door. It was locked.
He liked that least of all. He had a sudden impulse to pound the door, the man beside him. Yet the next moment he was ashamed of it. He turned around. The others had come forward, around the boxes—the antiquity man, the big porter with the tray, the old man carrying the candle. In the light of it Michael looked at the other one, the one who had shut the door. He was young and very dark, with a scar across his chin. Michael looked at them all. What in the world had come over them? Could it be that they took that basket of tiles too seriously? Could it be that they, too, were not what they seemed, that under their first friendliness were black and uncanny things? All the old wives’ tales that Westerners hear of the East came vaguely, yet disquietingly, back to him. It was with an effort that he folded his arms and turned to the antiquity man.
“Your methods of doing business,” he remarked, “strike me as being rather peculiar.”
“It is a peculiar business,” said the antiquity man.
“Is it your idea that people should be forced to buy Rhages jars whether they want them or not?”
“The Rhages jar is not for sale,” replied the antiquity man.
“O!” exclaimed Michael. “Then what is the matter? What are you after?”
“Not your money,” said the antiquity man. “Please believe that, sir. And please believe that we are very sorry. It is—what shall I say?—what we call here kismet, fate. If you had not chanced to notice that basket, if you had not taken it down and examined it, nothing would have happened.”
“What have I to do with that?” burst out Michael. “Is it my fault if you put baskets where people can see them and then go away? Am I responsible for your carelessness?”
“Your question, sir, is unfortunately most just. But that is a part of the kismet—that having been careless ourselves, we are obliged to make you pay for it.”
“Well, how am I going to pay?” demanded Michael. “Spend the rest of my life in here?”
The antiquity man hesitated before answering.
“Yes, sir,” he said at last, softly. And he added: “Will you have your coffee now?”
Michael could hardly take it in. What did the fellow mean? Then something in the way the antiquity man looked at him made him remember about the coffee—that it would not keep him awake. For the life of him he could not help glancing down at it. How was it that he didn’t happen to drink it when they first brought it in? And if he had—He stared at the stuff in its pretty silver holder. Behind it something bright caught a flicker from the candle—a knife in the porter’s girdle. Why not? They all carried them. Yet his eye travelled to the pocket of the dark young man by the door. All of a sudden Michael knew as well as if he saw it that there was a revolver in that pocket, and that the young man had his finger on the trigger. Michael’s eyes travelled on, up to the eyes of the young man, to the eyes of them all. What strange, glistening, dark eyes they all had, too dark to see into! He found all of a sudden that he felt a little cold. He was even afraid for a moment that he was going to tremble....
What really preoccupied him, though, was how the thing had happened. How could such a thing happen so suddenly? It had all been perfectly simple and natural—his work for his firm, his journey abroad, his coming to Constantinople, his prowling in the Bazaars, his happening to buy a gimcrack of the antiquity man, his introduction to this queer old place, his pawing over those broken tiles. It was all so simple. It would, at any step, have been so easy to avoid. And it was so unjust, it was so fantastically unjust. How could things end as incredibly as that? How could he let them end like that? He was one, and they were four; and they were armed, and he was not. But he wouldn’t take it sitting down. The Anglo-Saxon in him stiffened his back and set his teeth. He began looking around stealthily, at the bare stone walls, at the littered floor, for something to get hold of. He would show them yet....
“You must not think,” said the antiquity man, “that we have no sympathy for your position. But do not think, either, that any—any display of the emotions will help you. No one can possibly hear.”
That was the moment when Michael found it hardest to keep his head. If he had been a little younger he probably would not have kept his head. “Display of the emotions”! But he realised at last that for some incomprehensible reason they meant business. He hoped his emotions did not display themselves in his voice.
“Look here,” he said. “I see you aren’t pick-pockets, and I see that by accident I have discovered something you do not wish known. Well, if you had kept quiet I might never have thought of that basket again. Or I might now try to buy your Rhages jar—for any figure you might name. As it is, I give you my word of honour that never so long as I live will I breathe a word to any human being. You know me. Don’t you believe what I say? But if you don’t I will sign my name to any document you care to draw up. If you ever hear of my breaking my word, I am willing to take the consequences.”
At this the old man spoke for the first time. Michael could not understand what he said. He did not even recognise the language in which the old man spoke. He had a curiously deep voice. The antiquity man answered incomprehensibly. Then he turned back to Michael:
“I do believe what you say. I do not question your word of honour. But, unfortunately, we cannot take any chances—even the most remote. And impressions, you know, even the strongest of them, like love and grief, have a way of losing their force. Suppose we let you go. There might come very naturally a time when your recollections of this incident would lose their intensity, or when you would regard your promise as less important than you do now. Why not? Life is like that. Life would be intolerable if it were not like that. Things happen, and then other things happen. I have not the honour of any great acquaintance with you, but it is conceivable that you might sometime be offered wine which you could not refuse, or that a beautiful woman might make an impression on you, or that a company of distinguished men might be relating interesting experiences; and before you knew it the story of this afternoon would slip from you. Or you might dream aloud. You might have a fever. These possibilities, I admit, are very remote, or the probability of any harm resulting to us. Still, you never can tell. Stories have a strange way of travelling. Sometimes they travel from New York to Constantinople. We have known cases. For that reason we—have prepared that cup of coffee. We must secure ourselves against one chance in a thousand.”
Michael saw it. He was like that. He had that fatal little flaw of the artist, of being able to see the other side. He saw it then as distinctly as he saw the four dark faces, the candle burning quietly in the dark little room, the dark shapes and shadows of the boxes. He wondered what dark strange thing was hidden here—that meant so much to these men. He wondered about the men themselves, whom he had taken so casually.
“Your life, of course,” the antiquity man went on, “is very precious to you. That we perfectly understand. While life is seldom satisfactory, it contains, after all, a great deal for one still as young as you. And one always hopes—often with reason. We ask you to believe that we understand that. We also ask you to believe that no one of us has any personal reason for wishing you harm. We excessively regret the necessity of asking you to drink that cup of coffee. We shall continue all our lives to regret it. Nevertheless, you can perhaps understand that there may be reasons why even your life is of less moment to us than the possibility of your some day forgetting for an instant the promise you now so sincerely make.”
Michael still saw it. He saw, too, what had been growing steadily clearer, that this was an antiquity man among antiquity men. But what he saw best of all, through that portentous candle-light, was a sudden mirage of the summer sun—out of which he had stepped so lightly. He saw it so vividly that his voice had in it a thickness he didn’t like:
“I understand. But there are chances and chances. For instance, can a man disappear like that, even in Constantinople, and no questions be asked? When I fail to go back to my hotel, to pay my bill, will they say nothing? When I fail to go back to my country will my friends say nothing? Of course not! There will be a row. It may not be to-morrow, it may not be the next day. I do not pretend to be a person of importance. But sooner or later questions will be asked. And sooner or later you will have to answer some of them. What will you say then?”
“We have thought of that,” answered the antiquity man. “We can see that if it is dangerous to let you go from here, it is also dangerous to let others come to look for you here. But by the time they come, they will at least find no baskets of broken tiles.” He gave Michael a moment in which to take it in. “If the matter be at last traced to us, it will be a simple one of robbery and murder. For that reason we shall have to keep whatever valuables you may have. We are very sorry that we shall not be able to send them back to your family.”
“My money belongs to my firm, not to my family,” protested Michael. “If you keep it, you will take not only my life, but my honour. It certainly will not be to your interest to prevent them from thinking that I have stolen it and run away.”
“You are right,” replied the antiquity man. “But I do not need to tell you that human actions are usually misunderstood. Even you, perhaps, do not understand that our own motive is not an interested one. There is only One who understands. I may point out to you, however, that we run the risk of suffering from a similar imputation. It will probably be thought that we have killed you for your money. And you must realise that in that case I, perhaps all of us, stand an excellent chance of following you—wherever you go. But that chance we take more willingly than the other.”
He said it simply, without gestures, without airs. Michael could not help seeing it and rising to it. He even could not help liking the antiquity man. Evidently it was not a common affair in which he had happened to tangle himself....
He saw it, but somehow he felt his sense of reality slipping. He had often wondered, vaguely enough, as one does when the sun is warm about one and the end of life is very far off and incredible, what the end of life would be like—how it could come, whether he would make a fool of himself. But of all the possibilities he had imagined, he had never imagined this little stone room in Stambul, and this candle, and these shadows, and these four inscrutable dark faces of men whom he did not know. Was he making a fool of himself now to say, as he did, thickly:
“Give me your cup of coffee.” He tried to clear his throat. “But you might at least tell me first what all this fuss is about. Or are you afraid I shall tell them in the next world?”
He saw a light in the antiquity man’s eye. The old man saw it, too. There ensued a conversation between them, in which the young man, his hand still in his pocket, joined. The porter stood statuesque, with his tray of poisoned coffee. Michael, left to himself, began to feel his sense of reality come back.
“Look here,” he said, “my coffee is getting cold.”
The antiquity man smiled.
“My friend here”—he pointed to the old man—“has made a suggestion. He seems to have taken a fancy to you. In fact I may assure you that we are all pleased at the way you have received the very disagreeable things we have unfortunately had to say to you. Some men, in the circumstances, would have been abject. You might have begged, bribed, wept, fainted, what do I know? We have seen—And we feel sure, as we did not at first, that you did not come here on purpose to find—that basket of tiles.”
He narrowed his eyes a little as he looked at Michael, making another of his eloquent pauses. Michael didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help asking:
“Well, what is your suggestion?”
“Are you willing,” asked the antiquity man, slowly, “to change your religion?”
“Change my religion?” echoed Michael, uncomprehendingly. “I’m afraid I haven’t much religion to change.”
“All the better,” returned the antiquity man. “So it is with most people of intelligence. If, however, you were willing to change your religion, if you were also willing to change your language, your name, your home, your wife even, for others as different from them as can be conceived, if you could bring yourself to make that sacrifice and to become one of us, it would not be necessary for you to drink that cup of coffee.”
Michael saw it. He caught his breath. But—
“I must ask you to decide quickly,” continued the antiquity man. “We all have affairs. And if it should become necessary for us to answer those questions of which you spoke, it would be better for witnesses to be able to say that we were not in here too long this afternoon.”
Michael saw that, too. And all the blood in him quickened at the chance of life. Life! His life had not been such a success. Why not wipe the slate clean and start over again? It ironically came to him that Aurora would call that romance—to be cornered here like a rat in a trap while four men he didn’t know stared at him with a candle! But why, on the other hand, should he give in to them? That was cowardice, even if it was irony, too—to die for what he didn’t want and didn’t believe in.... The immensity of the dilemma was too much for him. Irresistible force, immovable obstacle—that flashed inconsequently into his head. Was the light going out? The room grew darker. He tried again to clear his throat. It suddenly came to him that he didn’t even know who these people were, and what they wanted him to become....
The antiquity man reached forward, lifted the coffee-cup out of its silver holder, and dropped it on the stone floor. Michael stared down stupidly at the bits of broken porcelain. They were like the bits of broken tiles. He wondered if his trousers were spattered....
The young man took his hand out of his pocket and opened the door.