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?”