The Emperor of Elam, and other stories

by H. G. Dwight

The only trouble was that he had never yet encountered “them.” Julia Jenkins, hitherto, had been his sole approach to them; and whatever else Julia might be, she certainly was no Venus. Least of all was she a Madonna, a Medea, or a Gioconda. And now they, the others, had maddeningly flashed past him at the one moment in life when he found himself least disposed to speed after them. For a bald spot, somehow or other, did not harmonise with the order of experiences he had been considering. He inwardly contemplated the spectacle of a gentleman so afflicted pursuing Beauty o’er moor and fen, his Spot gleaming pale behind him as he sped; and Jerry laughed grimly to himself. But there was more in it than a laugh. Was not Beauty the portion of every man? And if Fate were so ironical as to withhold her until Time had shown his tooth, must she then forever be foresworn? It was too ignoble—the way tragedy and comedy ran together in the world. He tried to console himself, for this chaotic state of affairs, with the volcano: by fancying that he was already dead to the world. But even that failed—unless extinct volcanoes felt as uncomfortable inside as he did.

“My good fellow,” he admonished himself with some heat, “you started out to take a walk as a bald-headed man, and you’d better finish it in that character. You mistook your rôle; that’s all. Some people are born to autos and ambrosial locks. Other people are born to a bald spot and the L. You imagined you belonged to the former class, but it turns out you don’t. So the sooner you stop trying to cover your nakedness with a hat, and the sooner you take to your predestined conveyance, the less will you be like a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones.”

In accordance with which principle he removed his last year’s Panama and made for the nearest Elevated station. The next instant he realised that only on impulse could his courage have risen to such a pitch. He expected that boys would follow him, hooting; that a mob would collect to point at him the finger of scorn. But no: the public took it quite as a matter of course that a young man of his age and talents should begin to look a little the worse for wear and should patronise such rapid transit facilities as were within the means of the proletariat. They took it so much as a matter of course that Jerry began to forget his agitation in chagrin. He even mounted the steps of a station and boarded the first train without asking himself where he was going.

It was with some surprise that he presently discovered himself to be jolting northward, on a level with third and fourth storey windows. He found a certain distraction in glancing into these as he passed. It appeared to him that on every other sill leaned a bald-headed man, who gave him a pointed look—as who should say: “Don’t take it so hard, my poor young man. You will have company.” They got on his nerves, those bald-headed apes. Most of them were in shirt-sleeves, too. He was ready to bestow the most extravagant admiration upon the Park, when the train rounded the great curve at 110th Street. And the arch of the unfinished Cathedral had a romantically ruinous effect against the incandescent sky. These things, however, for some reason reminded him of the young people in the car. “They’re probably visiting the châteaux of the Loire by this time,” he reflected. “I wonder how they like it. This is the kind of travelling we do—we bald-headed people.” And he relapsed into the volcanic mood....

“One hundred and fifty-fifth Street! All out!” bawled an unsympathetic conductor.

Jerry got up from his revery with the idea of taking the next train back. There seemed nothing else to do—for one born to the L. But when he emerged into the maze of platforms and tracks and stairways, he found them so vividly intershot by red rays from another level of existence that he was moved to mount to the viaduct. As he did so he mounted into the climax of a sunset. The glamour of it glorified his squalid surroundings. It touched the confusion of traffic with a glint of romance. It turned the Harlem into a river of enchantment. Jerry glanced but coldly about him, however. He thought of the valley of the Loire. And the sight of an Amsterdam Avenue trolley running black against the west made him bend his steps toward that end of the viaduct.

“That’s what we bald-headed people do,” he said to himself: “We go to Fort George. We then mount Ferris Wheels and view the landscape o’er. Thus do we visit the valley of the Loire.” And with that idea he boarded the next car. But at 181st Street he changed his mind. The sight of Washington Bridge suddenly drew him. “Go to,” he thought: “Why shouldn’t we take in our Loire here and now?” To which end he sauntered easterly across the little plaza.

He had not gone far on the bridge before he stopped. At last he was really caught. The splendour had died out of the air—the barbaric and obvious splendour which had failed to move him before. There was now a warm twilight in which the stream running deep between its banks, the wooded slopes, the arches of High Bridge, the slim water-tower, took on an aspect almost of antiquity. But that and the mysterious vista beyond—the turn of the river, the fading haze of roofs, out of which myriads of lights began to flicker with a brassy pallor—needed no antiquity to make them extraordinarily picturesque.

Jerry leaned on the parapet and took it in. The view might have been one he never had seen. This wonderful valley led to a city he knew naught of. The strange impression, and the surprise of discovering a real beauty, led him back in thought to the city to which he had come from college—how curiously long ago! He recalled that other impression of strangeness. Threading in imagination the long streets that somewhere ran there in the dusk, he remembered how they looked to him when first he wandered through them—in search of something to do. How vast and forbidding their towers had loomed above him! Would any of them give entrance to him when he knocked? And which would be the one? He had knocked at a good many, too. An amazing number had been oblivious to the honour of harbouring him. Huge as they were, they were all jammed to the roof with cheerful busy superior persons, who naturally had no mind to jam themselves still tighter at a mere knock from without. But one of the towers did take him in at last—the one in Park Row which made an end to his wanderings, only to send him out on wanderings more painful still.

He thought of them, looking back into the twilight that deepened above their sky, as of things almost impersonal. He thought, too, how different it had come to seem—being a cheerful busy superior person in one of the towers! For he had lived through a reporter’s probation days, had climbed at last to a desk high above the city, where the city noises came to him rather musically in their mingling. But, listening to them year after year, he had never heard what he always expected he would hear at last—the sound of his own fame. So many names came up from the newsboys’ throats, those criers of immortality: should not his own one day be borne to him? And for better reasons than gave men the notoriety of an hour—like falling into a man-hole or finding a lost jewel? Well, there was no reason—except that he had never done anything....