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Page 40
I was trying to think of some conversational subject with which to
interest my visitor, and was hesitating between walking matches and the
Pliocene age, when the old man suddenly began to weep poignantly and
distressfully.
"Cheer up, Mr. Ader," I said, a little awkwardly; "this matter may blow
over in a few hundred years more. There has already been a decided
reaction in favour of Judas Iscariot and Colonel Burr and the celebrated
violinist, Signor Nero. This is the age of whitewash. You must not allow
yourself to become down-hearted."
Unknowingly, I had struck a chord. The old man blinked belligerently
through his senile tears.
"'Tis time," he said, "that the liars be doin' justice to somebody. Yer
historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin' at a wake. A
finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals. Man, I was at the
burnin' of Rome. I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I was a
well-known char-acter. In thim days they had rayspect for a man that
lived forever.
"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. I
had 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.
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