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Page 41
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 I
must do on Good Fridays. Ye know about Pontius Pilate, sir, of course.
His body, whin he killed himself, was pitched into a lake on the Alps
mountains. Now, listen to the job that 'tis mine to perform on the night
of ivery Good Friday. The ould divil goes down in the pool and drags up
Pontius, and the water is bilin' and spewin' like a wash pot. And the
ould divil sets the body on top of a throne on the rocks, and thin comes
me share of the job. Oh, sir, ye would pity me thin -- ye would pray for
the poor Wandering Jew that niver was a Jew if ye could see the horror of
the thing that I must do. 'Tis I that must fetch a bowl of water and
kneel down before it till it washes its hands. I declare to ye that
Pontius Pilate, a man dead two hundred years, dragged up with the lake
slime coverin' him and fishes wrigglin' inside of him widout eyes, and in
the discomposition of the body, sits there, sir, and washes his hands in
the bowl I hold for him on Good Fridays. 'Twas so commanded."
Clearly, the matter had progressed far beyond the scope of the _Bugle's_
local column. There might have been employment here for the alienist or
for those who circulate the pledge; but I had had enough of it. I got up,
and repeated that I must go.
At this he seized my coat, grovelled upon my desk, and burst again into
distressful weeping. Whatever it was about, I said to myself that his
grief was genuine.
"Come now, Mr. Ader," I said, soothingly; "what is the matter?"
The answer came brokenly through his racking sobs:
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