Morley Roberts
Mithridates the King
How can a truly “classic” short story remain “unknown,” sink into biblivion? We haven’t the slightest notion; it seems impossible. And yet, when you’ve read “Mithridates the King,” you will agree, we think, that it is a classic story. Nevertheless, we cannot recall an anthology in which the story was included, or an anthologist or critic who has ever referred to it. Bringing the story to you now makes us feel like a “detective Frank Buck” — as if we too were a great hunter who believed in “bringing back alive” the unusual and the unique.
Here, then, for your pleasure, is a “lost” story written by a man whose very name is also undeservedly “lost” these forgetful days. Morley Roberts died in 1942 at the age of 85, and in his 54 years of sustained creativity he averaged one book per year. He used, often brilliantly, nearly every form of literary expression — nonfiction as well as fiction — and yet, who remembers the title of a single one of his more-than-50 books? The personal friend of many of the celebrated writers of his time, including Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hudson, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Motley Roberts was — to quote John Keats’s epitaph for himself — “one whose name was writ in water”...
The War Office is on the left side of Pall Mall as you go West, and it is a compound, complex, intricate, protoplasmic mass of amorphous rooms, passages, and cells, in which it is easy for a man, or an improvement, or a project to get so thoroughly lost that he or it is never heard of again. There are rooms in it with bookcases of fine old books, well worth any man’s stealing; there are others with human fossils, admirably adapted for exhibition, though no one would think of stealing them; there are a good many clever men there spoiled for life; there are some not quite spoiled; there are a few absolutely worth any man’s money as workers, for even the Civil Service cannot always destroy natural energy. And of these Hetherwick Coutts, of A.G. 15, was one. In the eyes of his superiors he was invaluable. To his inferiors he was a beast and they hated him unanimously, and said so without the slightest reserve — when he was on leave or out of the room.
To reach the Department known technically as A. G. 15, you go in the first door you come to next to the Reform Club, and then turn to the right. After going a few hundred yards or so, past a few score doors, taking care not to tumble over boxes of papers which are humorously described as “on transit,” because no one knows where they are, there is a stone staircase. Here it is best to call a messenger and fee him. After a long and weary journey the traveler reaches a black passage like the entrance to a catacomb, and probably ruins his hat against an unlighted gas-jet. Opening a door, he stumbles into A.G. 15, and almost on the occupants thereof, who are usually six in number.
Hetherwick Coutts sat in the second room with a subordinate, whom a long course of previous military service in a low grade had rendered proof to any superior’s bad temper, unless that superior took to kicking him. And it is only just to Coutts to say he never did that, nor even constructively threw things at his subordinates. A constructive shying is to throw papers on the floor and request the harmless gentleman who has brought them to pick them up again. It is an unpleasant way of making objections, and in any but Her Majesty’s employ might give rise to actions for assault and battery. However, Hetherwick Coutts was not so gross as all that. He dressed well, and tried to live up to his tailor at any rate. His forte was sarcasm, and a kind of military insolence he had picked up from one or two Staff officers, who had been relegated to the purlieus of the W. O. as Deputy-Assistant-something-or-others because they were a deal too smart to live with their regiments.
For it is very easy to learn to sneer in a big office. There is sure to be one fool at least in the room, and if he is too irascible, or too much of a fighting man to go for verbally, there are times when he retires upstairs to have a smoke. Then the others can stand before the fire and say what they think without any danger of a row, which may end in the real slinging of ink or of the sacred Bible of the W. O., which is bound in pinkish paper. In some departments of the Foreign Office they fight with illuminated addresses to Her Majesty, in which our noble Queen is congratulated on her birthday or some other event, for very few ever reach Windsor, in spite of the lying letters which acknowledge them. But in Pall Mall most larking or rowing is done with Army Lists, or candles, or both. But this is a digression, though not without its uses, because Hetherwick Coutts was brought up in the office from his early youth.
How he was hated! — for he was not a fool, and had a prodigious memory.
“There was a paper on this subject about ten years ago,” he would remark easily, and the whole dusty Registry cursed him when that paper was called for.
“You made exactly the same mistake before, Mr. Smith, so you are not even original.”
And he would recall Mr. Smith’s folly with exact persistence into ancient detail very sickening to a man who was always careful.
Then he descended to absurd particulars. A wretched writer at ten-pence an hour was not to cross his t’s in such a way unless he wished to look for another office. He was mean too, and more than once made a mistake on purpose to catch a clerk for not detecting it. Sometimes he had to sign a number of papers and put “No remarks” on them.
“If I were called upon to report on the intelligence of those who help me,” he remarked brightly, “I should require a new supply of minute paper.”
He always cut his subordinates if he met them in the street, which of course greatly endeared him to them. If they had only known that the D. A. A. G. had cut him in the Row, it would have poured balsam into their wounds, and made them work cheerfully for a whole week. Sometimes when a man asked him a question he snorted; he snorted some clean out of the room. The messengers loathed him. The orderlies wanted to catch him in the dark and cut his entrails out with their belts. The waiter who brought him his dinner, or rather his lunch, thought of poisoning him.
There were others besides the waiter who had notions it would be the best thing that could happen if Hetherwick Coutts would take up his abode in the next world and run A.G. 15 in Dante’s nethermost Inferno, with Satan for the Field Marshal Commanding-in-chief; for a man’s subordinates usually hate him if there is any chance of their obtaining an increase in their monthly checks when he deceases; and the higher men get, the more their greedy ambition is roused. This is the curse of the Civil Service. Hidden in the backroom of a dingy building, their doings are nothing to the world. Their only ambition centers on a petty power and a fuller purse. And if you would hate the man next above you at any time and in any place, how much more — O poor Obscurity — will you abhor him when he bars the way to you, and is neither old, nor an idiot, and has robust and indecent health. The only hope the men below had was that he would die of apoplexy. He had a red, healthy face, and they tried to think it a good sign — for them; for there were two of them who both hoped to be made chief when Hetherwick Coutts went below. They hated each other, but their hate for him was a crescent disease: though it seemed to reach the full, it still encroached.
F. W. Palmer, or Frederick Wentworth Palmer, was the man with the best chance according to official routine, for he was slightly the senior in service of Lyall Burke. But Burke was the cleverer man of the two, and had the neater knack of nice obsequiousness. Coutts was rather better disposed towards Burke than to most of the men about him. He had been distinctly civil to him several times, and Burke wondered why, expecting the deluge some day.