The Emperor of Elam and Other Stories
9781465680303
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
H’m! That’s rather a large order. What are people like, I wonder? Some of them are like dogs. There are plenty of poodles and bull pups walking around on two legs. Some of them are like cats. Some of them are like pigs. A few of them are like hyenas. More of them are like fishes in aquariums. A lot of them are like horses—of all kinds, from thoroughbreds and racers to those big, honest, comprehending, uncomplaining creatures that drag drays. But I have a notion that most of them are like you and me. What are we like, though? If we happen to be like Greek gods—which we don’t!—if we have red hair or vampire eyes or humps on our backs, if we harpoon whales or compose operas or put poison in our mother-in-law’s soup, it is possible to make out for us a likely enough dossier. Yet how far does that dossiergo? It tells less than a tintype at a county fair. Vamp eyes or godlike legs, even the ability to compose operas, have nothing to do with the way we react when we inherit a billion dollars or lose our last cent, when our wives get on our nerves or the boiler of our ship blows up at sea. And what on earth are you to say about people like Michael, who are neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, good nor bad? Or people whose wives never get on their nerves and whose boilers never blow up? They have their dossier all the same. Why not? They do nine-tenths of the work of the world. They lay its stones one upon another. They commit their share of its follies, suffer their share of its sorrows, and pay more than their share of the bill. What was Michael like? My good man, you loll there with your ungodlike leg over the arm of your chair and you blandly propose to me the ultimate problem of art! One would think you were Flaubert—or was he Guy de Maupassant?—who made it out possible to tell, in words that have neither line nor colour, that are gone as soon as you have spoken them, how one grocer sitting in his door differs from all other grocers sitting in doors. I have spent hours, I have lost nights, over that wretched grocer; and I haven’t learned any more about him than when I began: except to suspect that Maupassant—or was it Theophile Gautier?—wanted to be Besnard and Rodin too. I grant you that no grocer looks precisely like another. But that isn’t Maupassant’s business—to tell how a grocer looks. The thing simply can’t be done. Nor is it enough for your grocer to sit in his door. He must say something, he must do something, or words won’t catch him. And then how do you know why he said or did that particular thing, or what he would say or do at another time?
