第31章 THE DOOR OF UNREST(2)

"But 'twas of the Imperor Nero I was goin' to tell ye.I struck into Rome, up the Appian Way, on the night of July the 16th, the year 64.Ihad just stepped down by way of Siberia and Afghanistan; and one foot of me had a frost-bite, and the other a blister burned by the sand of the desert; and I was feelin' a bit blue from doin' patrol duty from the North Pole down to the Last Chance corner in Patagonia, and bein' miscalled a Jew in the bargain.Well, I'm tellin' ye I was passin' the Circus Maximus, and it was dark as pitch over the way, and then I heard somebody sing out, 'Is that you, Michob?'

"Over ag'inst the wall, hid out amongst a pile of barrels and old dry-goods boxes, was the Imperor Nero wid his togy wrapped around his toes, smokin' a long, black segar.

"'Have one, Michob?' says he.

"'None of the weeds for me,' says I -- 'nayther pipe nor segar.What's the use,' says I, 'of smokin' when ye've not got the ghost of a chance of killin' yeself by doin' it?'

"'True for ye, Michob Ader, my perpetual Jew,' says the Imperor; 'ye're not always wandering.Sure, 'tis danger gives the spice of our pleasures -- next to their bein' forbidden.'

"'And for what,' says I, 'do ye smoke be night in dark places widout even a cinturion in plain clothes to attend ye?'

"'Have ye ever heard, Michob,' says the Imperor, 'of predestinarianism?'

"'I've had the cousin of it,' says I.'I've been on the trot with pedestrianism for many a year, and more to come, as ye well know.'

"'The longer word,' says me friend Nero, 'is the tachin' of this new sect of people they call the Christians.'Tis them that's raysponsible for me smokin' be night in holes and corners of the dark.'

"And then I sets down and takes off a shoe and rubs me foot that is frosted, and the Imperor tells me about it.It seems that since I passed that way before, the Imperor had mandamused the Impress wid a divorce suit, and Misses Poppaea, a cilibrated lady, was ingaged, widout riferences, as housekeeper at the palace.'All in one day,' says the Imperor, 'she puts up new lace windy-curtains in the palace and joins the anti-tobacco society, and whin I feels the need of a smoke I must be after sneakin' out to these piles of lumber in the dark.' So there in the dark me and the Imperor sat, and I told him of me travels.And when they say the Imperor was an incindiary, they lie.'Twas that night the fire started that burnt the city.'Tis my opinion that it began from a stump of segar that he threw down among the boxes.And 'tis a lie that he fiddled.He did all he could for six days to stop it, sir."And now I detected a new flavour to Mr.Michob Ader.It had not been myrrh or balm or hyssop that I had smelled.The emanation was the odour of bad whiskey -- and, worse still, of low comedy -- the sort that small humorists manufacture by clothing the grave and reverend things of legend and history in the vulgar, topical frippery that passes for a certain kind of wit.Michob Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable lunacy, I could endure;but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious story with song-book levity, his importance as an entertainer grew less.

And then, as if he suspected my thoughts, he suddenly shifted his key.

"You'll excuse me, sir," he whined, "but sometimes I get a little mixed in my head.I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember everything."I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with whom he had walked familiar.

Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael's cherubs.You could yet make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.

"Ye calls them 'cher-rubs'," cackled the old man."Babes, ye fancy they are, with wings.And there's one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye call Cupid -- I know where they was found.The great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat.Bein' an editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon s Temple stood?"I fancied that it was in -- in Persia? Well, I did not know.

"'Tis not in history nor in the Bible where it was.But I saw it, meself.The first pictures of cher-rubs and cupids was sculptured upon thim walls and pillars.Two of the biggest, sir, stood in the adytum to form the baldachin over the Ark.But the wings of thim sculptures was intindid for horns.And the faces was the faces of goats.Ten thousand goats there was in and about the temple.And your cher-rubs was billy-goats in the days of King Solomon, but the painters misconstrued the horns into wings.

"And I knew Tamerlane, the lame Timour, sir, very well.I saw him at Keghut and at Zaranj.He was a little man no larger than yerself, with hair the colour of an amber pipe stem.They buried him at Samarkand I was at the wake, sir.Oh, he was a fine-built man in his coffin, six feet long, with black whiskers to his face.And I see 'em throw turnips at the Imperor Vispacian in Africa.All over the world I have tramped, sir, without the body of me findin' any rest.'Twas so commanded I saw Jerusalem destroyed, and Pompeii go up in the fireworks; and I was at the coronation of Charlemagne and the lynchin' of Joan of Arc.And everywhere I go there comes storms and revolutions and plagues and fires.'Twas so commanded.Ye have heard of the Wandering Jew.'Tis all so, except that divil a bit am I a Jew.But history lies, as I have told ye.Are ye quite sure, sir, that ye haven't a drop of whiskey convenient? Ye well know that I have many miles of walking before me.""I have none," said I, "and, if you please, I am about to leave for my supper."I pushed my chair back creakingly.This ancient landlubber was becoming as great an affliction as any cross-bowed mariner.He shook a musty effluvium from his piebald clothes, overturned my inkstand, and went on with his insufferable nonsense.

"I wouldn't mind it so much," he complained, "if it wasn't for the work Imust do on Good Fridays.Ye know about Pontius Pilate, sir, of course.