V
How do I know? I don’t. I only know what Michael told me. Which wasn’t much. He was like that, you see! Then he was too mortally afraid of its getting back here. He wouldn’t open up as little as he did till he heard Aurora had married again! And here you ask who and when and where and why. O Lord! If you would only let a man tell his story and stop when he is through!
However, even you must know that Constantinople enjoys quite a reputation for liveliness, of sorts, and that it was particularly lively just before and just after the German War. It was then that I got out there, as a courier—while the armistice was on. Although it was a good bit after the episode of the coffee cup, I saw quite a number of people who remembered Michael. Of course a good many other people and things had disappeared since his day—including, I suppose, the antiquity man and his bombs. A few Turks or Tartars might have told me something about that, if they lived to tell tales. But of course I had yet to hear about the antiquity man—the interesting part of him, I mean. And witnesses had seen Michael drive away from the khan in a closed carriage.
What no witness had seen was the number of the carriage, or the door it drove to. And they told me another yarn about a carriage driving full tilt at dusk into the open draw of the Bridge. I asked myself if poor old Michael were still sitting in it. That version, at any rate, is the one now accepted by Aurora. She has given up her tombstone and her quatrain. She perceives that it isn’t every lady who can boast one husband at home among the stars and another sitting in a brougham at the bottom of the Golden Horn.
So I gave Michael up. Perhaps I did it the more easily because there were so many other things to think about: couriering, relieving, reporting—any number of odd jobs connected with all that mess out there. They took me hither and yon about the Balkans and the Black Sea, on errands that might have sounded quite fantastic before the war plunged thousands of unsuspecting people into adventures a hundred times more so. And one day I landed in Batum.
Everybody who lives in Batum swears it’s the dreariest hole on the face of the earth. An English officer I met even sighed piteously to me over the lost delights of Aden! However, I found Batum very amusing, with its higglety-pigglety air of somebody having stirred up a piece of Turkey with a piece of Russia and having turned the mixture out to cool in a corner of the Riviera. To be sure, there are rather too many Georgians and Lazzes and other queer customers prowling around; and the Hôtel de France does too little to live up to its name. Also, that cooling process will evidently take time. But the setting of cloudy white peaks and a misnamed sea is quite worthy of the Riviera. And I must insist that the Boulevard is a really perfect little park. You should see how close the palms and the cypresses march to the white shingle.
Well, I was warming a tin chair in that park one afternoon, watching the operatic crowd, admiring the great wild hills of their Caucasus through their mannered cypresses, listening to the incantation of their Black Sea through their Glinka, and thinking of nothing in particular, when I suddenly made two discoveries. One was that that Coon song we used to sing about “Lou, Lou, I love you” came out of Life for the Czar. The other was that Michael, our vanished reaper and binder, far from having disappeared in the Golden Horn with Aurora’s phantom coupé or from having otherwise evaporated, sat solid and sunburned in another tin chair of the Boulevard, eyeing me. To be sure he was moustached, uniformed, medalled, booted, disguised as a kind of bastard Cossack with all manner of strange accoutrements and insignia. But it was Michael. What is more he presently grinned, albeit a trifle sheepishly, pulling up his tin chair beside mine.
“I was afraid you were going to be melodramatic,” he said. “As it is, let’s have a chat.”
We had a chat. Tin chairs in parks always remind me of that chat. At the time I thought it the most interesting chat I ever had. That was before I proposed to Alice.
“I suppose they think I took the money, eh?” Michael finally asked.