The Emperor of Elam, and other stories

by H. G. Dwight

So in the meantime the sense of contrast is one that you can cultivate at your leisure—if you have any. Not many of them do up there—the real people, I mean. Life is too lively, even if they had the inclination. And they are the very ones who bring the contrasts most sharply to you. Heaven, the types you see! The people from every country under the sun, the people of every imaginable social condition, the people with stories to them a mile long—and not all of them printable! Of course that’s chiefly in the mining places, and in the coast places leading to the mining places, where they come and go like ants in a trail, outwardly as much alike as flannel shirts and nondescript kits can make them, inwardly impersonating every race and passion of the world, and all spinning out the great epic of Gold. It’s the modern version of the Ring and the Sagas.

However, I wasn’t going to give you a ten-minute talk on Alaska. I was going to tell you about my friend the hotel-keeper in Skagway. Although the name almost sets me off again—on the subject of those flimsy wooden settlements sitting unconcernedly in the shadow of those solemn mountains, and the bizarreness of them, and the romance of them, and the tragedy of them! He went by the name of Chatty Charley, did the hotel-keeper—Chat for short—on the principle of lucus a non lucendo. He was never known to utter a word without being asked for it, and he didn’t always favour then. Who he was or where he came from nobody knew. Not that anybody cared. They’re not long on gossip up there: they have other things to do. Moreover, there is a sort of tacit understanding in the matter of antecedents—or the lack of them. But there was generally some tag by which you could place a man. It didn’t take you long to make up your mind that he would be a bar-keep in San Francisco, or a drummer in Chicago, or a sophomore in Harvard. Not that those exhausted the possibilities by any means.

Chatty, however, I had no idea about. Or perhaps it would be truer to say I had a hundred. He would have fitted in anywhere—except Alaska. He was the last man I expected to find up there. Not that he had so much the air of a tenderfoot. And I don’t mean any of your high melodrama business—a Lost Heir or a Blighted Being or any of that. It was merely that he was rather a slight man, and wonderfully meek to look upon. He got on wonderfully well, though. He had a name for being square, which in a society like that goes rather farther than it does in ours, I fancy. You could be as much of a tenderfoot as you pleased; but if you took what was coming to you, and didn’t shoot too much bull, and played a square game, they’d be pretty sure to let you through.

So Chatty did a roaring business. And we were great cronies from the start. It was so much so that the others thought we knew rather more about each other than we let on. There may have been something in it—I don’t know. However, the reason of it was rather funny. The first time I went into his place—and it was a place, too: if I once began telling you about it, and the things you saw!—the first time I went into his place I noticed right off, among the newspaper cartoons and wild odds and ends which he or the boys had tacked up around the walls, some pictures of Venice—some of those photogravures they get out, you know. Well, I never thought much of them as works of art, although I’ve seen them in rather unexpected places. But this was the most unexpected of all. The contrast of it hit me like a bullet—that wonderful old town with its perfection of a flower and its hundreds of years—and such years!—behind it, and this wild new raw scrambling place huddled under unknown mountains on the edge of an unknown sea! It knocked me all of a heap. I went staring around like a boob, not noticing much else, until I happened to notice a peaceful person behind the bar who was looking at me.

“Where the devil did these things come from?” I demanded of him rather abruptly, less by way of conversation than of uttering the question that was uppermost in my mind.

“Oh, I picked them up,” replied the peaceful person, who turned out to be Chatty.

“Been there?” I pursued.

“Yes,” he answered.

It was a mild enough remark, heaven knows. And there was nothing in the way he made it, except a certain matter-of-courseness. But that was just what knocked me all of a heap again. How should anybody in Alaska, most of all how should anybody in Skagway, have been to Venice except myself? And then I’m clean dotty on the place, anyway. It gets into your blood, you know, and it got into mine before anything else did. I go back there whenever I get a chance, and I can forgive much of a man who betrays a weakness for it. That is one of two or three touchstones I keep in my pocket! So I fell on Chatty and began talking about his pictures, and the place they came from, and he seemed to know all about it. He even knew what I never knew any one else to know—the islands in the lagoon. The Venetians themselves don’t know them. They are tremendous landlubbers, gondoliers and all, and apparently make it a point to learn as little as possible of the shallow green sea in which they swim. While as for the tourists, poor dears, they go to the Lido, and Chioggia, and San Lazzaro, and Murano, and Burano, and Torcello, and possibly San Francesco in Deserto, and basta. Chatty also knew Italian, I incidentally discovered. Indeed there came times, once or twice, when we found it rather convenient. You couldn’t be sure of not getting caught, though. There are too many funny things prowling around up there under miners’ hats for you to trust to no one’s understanding your lingo.

Well, for such a short acquaintance we got fairly chummy, Chatty and I. It was so to a degree that made the boys horse him for actually chatting. Not that he really did chat much. He evidently liked to listen to my chatter though, and once in a while, when nobody in particular was around, he would say something about some palace, some garden, some island, that we both knew. It was rather amusing—in Skagway. But the real nature of our relation was still more amusing. I never knew a man so well and so little. For all our chumminess we never had one word on any earthly subject except Venice. I never even got a hint of what he had been up to there, or when, or how, or why, or anything. I had no more idea than the cat on the stairs what part Venice played in the scheme of his existence—any more than I had an idea, above the immediate and obvious one of the hotel, what part Skagway played. He had an absolutely impersonal way of talking, if he talked at all, that left nothing to take hold of. And I never could quite make out whether it was modesty or design—or whether, perhaps, nothing but Venice had ever happened to him.