Slow step by slow step, with daintiest noiselessness, I moved to a
thread of moss that from the glade passed into the thicket, and along
its winding way I stepped, in the direction of the sound. Now my ears
caught the purling noise of a brooklet, and following the moss-path, I
was led into a mass of bush only two or three feet higher than my head.
Through this, prowling like a stealthy cat, I wheedled my painful way,
emerged upon a strip of open long-grass, and now was faced, three yards
before me, by a wall of acacia-trees, prickly-pear and pichulas, between
which and a forest beyond I spied a gleam of running water.
On hands and knees I crept toward the acacia-thicket, entered it a
little, and leaning far forward, peered. And there--at once--ten yards
to my right--I saw.
Singular to say, my agitation, instead of intensifying to the point of
apoplexy and death, now, at the actual sight, subsided to something very
like calmness. With malign and sullen eye askance I stood, and steadily
I watched her there.
* * * * *
She was on her knees, her palms lightly touching the ground, supporting
her. At the edge of the streamlet she knelt, and she was looking with a
species of startled shy astonishment at the reflexion of her face in the
limpid brown water. And I, with sullen eye askance regarded her a good
ten minutes' space.
* * * * *
I believe that her momentary laugh and sob, which I had heard, was the
result of surprise at seeing her own image; and I firmly believe, from
the expression of her face, that this was the first time that she had
seen it.
* * * * *
Never, I thought, as I stood moodily gazing, had I seen on the earth a
creature so fair (though, analysing now at leisure, I can quite conclude
that there was nothing at all remarkable about her good looks). Her
hair, somewhat lighter than auburn, and frizzy, was a real garment to
her nakedness, covering her below the hips, some strings of it falling,
too, into the water: her eyes, a dark blue, were wide in a most silly
expression of bewilderment. Even as I eyed and eyed her, she slowly
rose: and at once I saw in all her manner an air of unfamiliarity with
the world, as of one wholly at a loss what to do. Her pupils did not
seem accustomed to light; and I could swear that that was the first day
in which she had seen a tree or a stream.
Her age appeared eighteen or twenty. I guessed that she was of
Circassian blood, or, at least, origin. Her skin was whitey-brown, or
old ivory-white.
* * * * *
She stood up motionless, at a loss. She took a lock of her hair, and
drew it through her lips. There was some look in her eyes, which I
could plainly see now, somehow indicating wild hunger, though the wood
was full of food. After letting go her hair, she stood again feckless
and imbecile, with sideward-hung head, very pitiable to see I think now,
though no faintest pity touched me then. It was clear that she did not
at all know what to make of the look of things. Finally, she sat on a
moss-bank, reached and took a musk-rose on her palm, and looked
hopelessly at it.
* * * * *
One minute after my first actual sight of her my extravagance of
agitation, I say, died down to something like calm. The earth was mine
by old right: I felt that: and this creature a mere slave upon whom,
without heat or haste, I might perform my will: and for some time I
stood, coolly enough considering what that will should be.
I had at my girdle the little cangiar, with silver handle encrusted with
coral, and curved blade six inches long, damascened in gold, and sharp
as a razor; the blackest and the basest of all the devils of the Pit was
whispering in my breast with calm persistence: 'Kill, kill--and eat.'
_Why_ I should have killed her I do not know. That question I now ask
myself. It must be true, true that it is '_not good_' for man to be
alone. There was a religious sect in the Past which called itself
'Socialist': and with these must have been the truth, man being at his
best and highest when most social, and at his worst and lowest when
isolated: for the Earth gets hold of all isolation, and draws it, and
makes it fierce, base, and materialistic, like sultans, aristocracies,
and the like: but Heaven is where two or three are gathered together. It
may be so: I do not know, nor care. But I know that after twenty years
of solitude on a planet the human soul is more enamoured of solitude
than of life, shrinking like a tender nerve from the rough intrusion of
Another into the secret realm of Self: and hence, perhaps, the
bitterness with which solitary castes, Brahmins, patricians,
aristocracies, always resisted any attempt to invade their
slowly-acquired domain of privileges. Also, it may be true, it may, it
may, that after twenty years of solitary selfishness, a man becomes,
without suspecting it--not at all noticing the slow stages--a real and
true beast, a horrible, hideous beast, mad, prowling, like that King of
Babylon, his nails like birds' claws, and his hair like eagles'
feathers, with instincts all inflamed and fierce, delighting in
darkness and crime for their own sake. I do not know, nor care: but I
know that, as I drew the cangiar, the basest and the slyest of all the
devils was whispering me, tongue in cheek: 'Kill, kill--and be merry.'
With excruciating slowness, like a crawling glacier, tender as a nerve
of the touching leaves, I moved, I stole, obliquely toward her through
the wall of bush, the knife behind my back. Once only there was a
restraint, a check: I felt myself held back: I had to stop: for one of
the ends of my divided beard had caught in a limb of prickly-pear.
I set to disentangling it: and it was, I believe, at the moment of
succeeding that I first noticed the state of the sky, a strip of which I
could see across the rivulet: a minute or so before it had been pretty
clear, but now was busy with hurrying clouds. It was a sinister
muttering of thunder which had made me glance upward.
When my eyes returned to the sitting figure, she was looking foolishly
about the sky with an expression which almost proved that she had never
before heard that sound of thunder, or at least had no idea what it
could bode. My fixed regard lost not one of her movements, while inch by
inch, not breathing, careful as the poise of a balance, I crawled. And
suddenly, with a rush, I was out in the open, running her down....
She leapt: perhaps two, perhaps three, paces she fled: then stock still
she stood--within some four yards of me--with panting nostrils, with
enquiring face.
I saw it all in one instant, and in one instant all was over. I had not
checked the impetus of my run at her stoppage, and I was on the point of
reaching her with uplifted knife, when I was suddenly checked and
smitten by a stupendous violence: a flash of blinding light, attracted
by the steel which I held, struck tingling through my frame, and at the
same time the most passionate crash of thunder that ever shocked a poor
human ear felled me to the ground. The cangiar, snatched from my hand,
fell near the girl's foot.
I did not entirely lose consciousness, though, surely, the Powers no
longer hide themselves from me, and their close contact is too
intolerably rough and vigorous for a poor mortal man. During, I should
think, three or four minutes, I lay so astounded under that bullying cry
of wrath, that I could not move a finger. When at last I did sit up, the
girl was standing near me, with a sort of smile, holding out to me the
cangiar in a pouring rain.
I took it from her, and my doddering fingers dropped it into the
stream.
* * * * *
Pour, pour came the rain, raining as it can in this place, not long, but
a deluge while it lasts, dripping in thick-liquidity, like a profuse
sweat, through the forest, I seeking to get back by the way I had come,
flying, but with difficulty and slowness, and a feeling in me that I was
being tracked. And so it proved: for when I struck into more open space,
nearly opposite the west walls, but now on the north side of the Golden
Horn, where there is a flat grassy ground somewhere between the valley
of Kassim and Charkoi, with horror I saw that _protégée_ of Heaven, or
of someone, not ten yards behind, following me like a mechanical figure,
it being now near three in the afternoon, and the rain drenching me
through, and I tired and hungry, and from all the ruins of
Constantinople not one whiff of smoke ascending.
I trudged on wearily till I came to the quay of Foundoucli, and the
zaptia boat; and there she was with me still, her hair nothing but a
thin drowned string down her back.
* * * * *
Not only can she not speak to me in any language that I know: but she
can speak in _no_ language: it is my firm belief that she has _never_
spoken.
She never saw a boat, or water, or the world, till now--I could swear
it. She came into the boat with me, and sat astern, clinging for dear
life to the gunwale by her finger-nails, and I paddled the eight hundred
yards to the _Speranza_, and she came up to the deck after me. When she
saw the open water, the boat, the yalis on the coast, and then the ship,
astonishment was imprinted on her face. But she appears to know little
fear. She smiled like a child, and on the ship touched this and that, as
if each were a living thing.
It was only here and there that one could see the ivory-brown colour of
her skin: the rest was covered with dirt, like old bottles long lying in
cellars.
By the time we reached the _Speranza_, the rain suddenly stopped: I went
down to my cabin to change my clothes, and had to shut the door in her
face to keep her out. When I opened it, she was there, and she followed
me to the windlass, when I went to set the anchor-engine going. I
intended, I suppose, to take her to Imbros, where she might live in one
of the broken-down houses of the village. But when the anchor was not
yet half up, I stopped the engine, and let the chain run again. For I
said, 'No, I will be alone, I am not a child.'
I knew that she was hungry by the look in her eyes: but I cared nothing
for that. I was hungry, too: and that was all I cared about.
I would not let her be there with me another instant. I got down into
the boat, and when she followed, I rowed her back all the way past
Foundoucli and the Tophana quay to where one turns into the Golden Horn
by St. Sophia, around the mouth of the Horn being a vast semicircle of
charred wreckage, carried out by the river-currents. I went up the steps
on the Galata side before one comes to where the barge-bridge was. When
she had followed me on to the embankment, I walked up one of those
rising streets, very encumbered now with stone-_débris_ and ashes, but
still marked by some standing black wall-fragments, it being now not far
from night, but the air as clear and washed as the translucency of a
great purple diamond with the rain and the afterglow of the sun, and all
the west aflame.
When I was about a hundred yards up in this old mixed quarter of Greeks,
Turks, Jews, Italians, Albanians, and noise and cafedjis and
wine-bibbing, having turned two corners, I suddenly gathered my skirts,
spun round, and, as fast as I could, was off at a heavy trot back to
the quay. She was after me, but being taken by surprise, I suppose, was
distanced a little at first. However, by the time I could scurry myself
down into the boat, she was so near, that she only saved herself from
the water by a balancing stoppage at the brink, as I pushed off. I then
set out to get back to the ship, muttering: 'You can have Turkey, if you
like, and I will keep the rest of the world.'
I rowed sea-ward, my face toward her, but steadily averted, for I would
not look her way to see what she was doing. However, as I turned the
point of the quay, where the open sea washes quite rough and loud, to go
northward and disappear from her, I heard a babbling cry--the first
sound which she had uttered. I did look then: and she was still quite
near me, for the silly maniac had been running along the embankment,
following me.
'Little fool!' I cried out across the water, 'what are you after now?'
And, oh my good God, shall I ever forget that strangeness, that wild
strangeness, of my own voice, addressing on this earth another human
soul?
There she stood, whimpering like an abandoned dog after me. I turned the
boat, rowed, came to the first steps, landed, and struck her two
stinging slaps, one on each cheek. While she cowered, surprised no
doubt, I took her by the hand, led her back to the boat, landed on the
Stamboul side, and set off, still leading her, my object being to find
some sort of possible edifice near by, not hopelessly burned, in which
to leave her: for in all Galata there was plainly none, and Pera, I
thought, was too far to walk to. But it would have been better if I had
gone to Pera, for we had to walk quite three miles from Seraglio Point
all along the city battlements to the Seven-towers, she picking her
bare-footed way after me through the great Sahara of charred stuff, and
night now well arrived, and the moon a-drift in the heaven, making the
desolate lonesomeness of the ruins tenfold desolate, so that my heart
smote me then with bitterness and remorse, and I had a vision of myself
that night which I will not put down on paper. At last, however, pretty
late in the evening, I spied a large mansion with green lattice-work
façade, and shaknisier, and terrace-roof, which had been hidden from me
by the arcades of a bazaar, a vast open space at about the centre of
Stamboul, one of the largest of the bazaars, I should think, in the
middle of which stood the mansion, probably the home of pasha or vizier:
for it had a very distinguished look in that place. It seemed very
little hurt, though the vegetation that had apparently choked the great
open space was singed to a black fluff, among which lay thousands of
calcined bones of man, horse, ass, and camel, for all was distinct in
the bright, yet so pensive and forlorn, moonlight, which was that
Eastern moonlight of pure astral mystery which illumines Persepolis, and
Babylon, and ruined cities of the old Anakim.
The house, I knew, would contain divans, _yatags_, cushions, foods,
wines, sherbets, henna, saffron, mastic, raki, haschish, costumes, and a
hundred luxuries still good. There was an outer wall, but the foliage
over it had been singed away, and the gate all charred. It gave way at a
push from my palm. The girl was close behind me. I next threw open a
little green lattice-door in the façade under the shaknisier, and
entered. Here it was dark, and the moment that she, too, was within, I
slipped out quickly, slammed the door in her face, and hooked it upon
her by a little hook over the latch.
I now walked some yards beyond the court, then stopped, listening for
her expected cry: but all was still: five minutes--ten--I waited: but no
sound. I then continued my morose and melancholy way, hollow with
hunger, intending to start that night for Imbros.
But this time I had hardly advanced twenty steps, when I heard a frail
and strangled cry, apparently in mid-air behind me, and glancing, saw
the creature lying at the gateway, a white thing in black stubble-ashes.
She had evidently jumped, well outward, from a small casement of lattice
on a level with the little shaknisier grating, through which once peeped
bright eyes, thirty feet aloft.
I hardly believe that she was conscious of any danger in jumping, for
all the laws of life are new to her, and, having sought and found the
opening, she may have merely come with blind instinctiveness after me,
taking the first way open to her. I walked back, pulled at her arm, and
found that she could not stand. Her face was screwed with silent
pain--she did not moan. Her left foot, I could see, was bleeding: and by
the wounded ankle I took her, and dragged her so through the ashes
across the narrow court, and tossed her like a little dog with all my
force within the door, cursing her.
Now I would not go back the long way to the ship, but struck a match,
and went lighting up girandoles, cressets, candelabra, into a confusion
of lights among great numbers of pale-tinted pillars, rose and azure,
with verd-antique, olive, and Portoro marble, and serpentine. The
mansion was large, I having to traverse quite a desert of embroidered
brocade-hangings, slender columns, and Broussa silks, till I saw a
stair-case doorway behind a Smyrna _portière_, went up, and wandered
some time in a house of gilt-barred windows, with very little furniture,
but palatial spaces, solitary huge pieces of _faïence_ of inestimable
age, and arms, my footfalls quite stifled in the Persian carpeting. I
passed through a covered-in hanging-gallery, with one window-grating
overlooking an inner court, and by this entered the harem, which
declared itself by a greater luxury, bric-à-bracerie, and profusion of
manner. Here, descending a short curved stair behind a _portière_, I
came into a marble-paved sort of larder, in which was an old negress in
blue dress, her hair still adhering, and an infinite supply of
sweetmeats, French preserved foods, sherbets, wines, and so on. I put a
number of things into a pannier, went up again, found some of those
exquisite pale cigarettes which drunken in the hollow of an emerald,
also a jewelled two-yard-long chibouque, and tembaki: and with all
descended by another stair, and laid them on the steps of a little
raised kiosk of green marble in a corner of the court; went up again,
and brought down a still-snowy _yatag_ to sleep on; and there, by the
kiosk-step, ate and passed the night, smoking for several hours in a
state of languor. In the centre of the court is a square marble well,
looking white through a rankness of wild vine, acacias in flower, weeds,
jasmines, and roses, which overgrew it, as well as the kiosk and the
whole court, climbing even the four-square arcade of Moorish arches
round the open space, under one of which I had deposited a long lantern
of crimson silk: for here no breath of the fire had come. About two in
morning I fell to sleep, a deeper peace of shadow now reigning where so
long the melancholy silver of the moon had lingered.
* * * * *
About eight in the morning I rose and made my way to the front,
intending that that should be my last night in this ruined place: for
all the night, sleeping and waking, the thing which had happened filled
my brain, growing from one depth of incredibility to a deeper, so that
at last I arrived at a sort of certainty that it could be nothing but a
drunken dream: but as I opened my eyes afresh, the deep-cutting
realisation of that impossibility smote like a pang of lightning-stroke
through my being: and I said: 'I will go again to the far Orient, and
forget': and I started out from the court, not knowing what had become
of her during the night, till, having reached the outer chamber, with a
wild start I saw her lying there at the door in the very spot where I
had flung her, asleep sideways, head on arm ... Softly, softly, I stept
over her, got out, and went running at a cautious clandestine trot. The
morning was in high _fête_, most fresh and pure, and to breathe was to
be young, and to see such a sunlight lighten even upon ruin so vast was
to be blithe. After running two hundred yards to one of the great broken
bazaar-portals, I looked back to see if I was followed: but all that
space was desolately empty. I then walked on past the arch, on which a
green oblong, once inscribed, as usual, with some text in gilt
hieroglyphs, is still discernible; and, emerging, saw the great panorama
of destruction, a few vast standing walls, with hollow Oriental windows
framing deep sky beyond, and here and there a pillar, or half-minaret,
and down within the walls of the old Seraglio still some leafless,
branchless trunks, and in Eyoub and Phanar leafless forests, and on the
northern horizon Pera with the steep upper-half of the Iani-Chircha
street still there, and on the height the European houses, and all
between blackness, stones, a rolling landscape of ravine, like the hilly
pack-ice of the North if its snow were ink, and to the right Scutari,
black, laid low, with its vast region of tombs, and rare stumps of its
forests, and the blithe blue sea, with the widening semicircle of
floating _débris_, looking like brown foul scum at some points,
congested before the bridgeless Golden Horn: for I stood pretty high in
the centre of Stamboul somewhere in the region of the Suleimanieh, or of
Sultan-Selim, as I judged, with immense purviews into abstract distances
and mirage. And to me it seemed too vast, too lonesome, and after
advancing a few hundred yards beyond the bazaar, I turned again.
* * * * *
I found the girl still asleep at the house-door, and stirring her with
my foot, woke her. She leapt up with a start of surprise, and a
remarkable sinuous agility, and gazed an astounded moment at me, till,
separating reality from dream and habit, she realised me: but
immediately subsided to the floor again, being in evident pain. I pulled
her up, and made her limp after me through several halls to the inner
court, and the well, where I set her upon the weedy margin, took her
foot in my lap, examined it, drew water, washed it, and bandaged it with
a strip torn from my caftan-hem, now and again speaking gruffly to her,
so that she might no more follow me.
After this, I had breakfast by the kiosk-steps, and when I was
finished, put a mass of truffled _foie gras_ on a plate, brushed through
the thicket to the well, and gave it her. She took it, but looked
foolish, not eating. I then, with my forefinger, put a little into her
mouth, whereupon she set hungrily to eat it all. I also gave her some
ginger-bread, a handful of bonbons, some Krishnu wine, and some
anisette.
I then started out afresh, gruffly bidding her stay there, and left her
sitting on the well, her hair falling down the opening, she peering
after me through the bushes. But I had not half reached the ogival
bazaar-portal, when looking anxiously back, I saw that she was limping
after me. So that this creature tracks me in the manner of a nutshell
following about in the wake of a ship.
I turned back with her to the house, for it was necessary that I should
plan some further method of eluding her. That was five days ago, and
here I have stayed: for the house and court are sufficiently agreeable,
and form a museum of real _objets d'art_. It is settled, however, that
to-morrow I return to Imbros.
* * * * *
It seems certain that she never wore, saw, nor knew of, clothes.
I have dressed her, first sousing her thoroughly with sponge and soap
in luke-warm rose-water in the silver cistern of the harem-bath, which
is a circular marbled apartment with a fountain and the complicated
ceilings of these houses, and frescoes, and gilt texts of the Koran on
the walls, and pale rose-silk hangings. On the divan I had heaped a
number of selected garments, and having shewed her how to towel herself,
I made her step into a pair of the trousers called _shintiyan_ made of
yellow-striped white-silk; this, by a running string, I tied loosely
round the upper part of her hips; then, drawing up the bottoms to her
knees, tied them there, so that their voluminous baggy folds,
overhanging still to the ankles, have rather the look of a skirt; over
this I put upon her a blue-striped chiffon chemise, or quamis, reaching
a little below the hips; I then put on a short jacket or vest of scarlet
satin, thickly embroidered in gold and precious stones, reaching
somewhat below the waist, and pretty tight-fitting; and, making her lie
on the couch, I put upon her little feet little yellow baboosh-slippers,
then anklets, on her fingers rings, round her neck a necklace of
sequins, finally dyeing her nails, which I cut, with henna. There
remained her head, but with this I would have nothing to do, only
pointing to the tarboosh which I had brought, to a square kerchief, to
some corals, and to the fresco of a woman on the wall, which, if she
chose, she might copy. Lastly, I pierced her ears with the silver
needles which they used here: and after two hours of it left her.
About an hour afterwards I saw her in the arcade round the court, and,
to my great surprise, she had a perfect plait down her back, and over
her head and brows a green-silk feredjeh, or hood, precisely as in the
picture.
* * * * *
Here is a question, the answer to which would be interesting to me:
Whether or not for twenty years--or say rather twenty centuries, twenty
eternal aeons--I have been stark mad, a raving maniac; and whether or
not I am now suddenly sane, sitting here writing in my right mind, my
whole mood and tone changed, or rapidly changing? And whether such
change can be due to the presence of only one other being in the world
with me?
* * * * *
This singular being! Where she has lived--and how--is a problem to which
not the faintest solution is conceivable. She had, I say, never seen
clothes: for when I began to dress her, her perplexity was unbounded;
also, during her twenty years, she has never seen almonds, figs, nuts,
liqueurs, chocolate, conserves, vegetables, sugar, oil, honey,
sweetmeats, orange-sherbet, mastic, salt, raki, tobacco, and many such
things: for she showed perplexity at all these, hesitation to eat them:
but she has known and tasted _white wine_: I could see that. Here, then,
is a mystery.
* * * * *
I have not gone to Imbros, but remained here some days longer observing
her.
I have allowed her to sit in a corner at meal-time, not far from where I
eat, and I have given her food.
She is wonderfully clever! I continually find that, after an incredibly
short time, she has most completely adapted herself to this or that.
Already she wears her outfit as coquettishly as though born to clothes.
Without at all seeming observant--for, on the contrary, she gives an
impression of great flightiness--she watches me, I am convinced, with
pretty exact observation. She knows precisely when I am speaking
roughly, bidding her go, bidding her come, tired of her, tolerant of
her, scorning her, cursing her. If I wish her to the devil, she quickly
divines it by my face, and will disappear. Yesterday I noticed
something queer about her, and soon discovered that she had been
staining her lids with black kohol, like the _hanums_, so that, having
found a box, she must have guessed its use from the pictures.
Wonderfully clever!--imitative as a mirror. Two mornings ago I found an
old mother-of-pearl kittur, and sitting under the arcade, touched the
strings, playing a simple air; I could just see her behind one of the
arch-pillars on the opposite side, and she was listening with apparent
eagerness, and, I fancied, panting. Well, returning from a walk beyond
the Phanar walls in the afternoon, I heard the same air coming out from
the house, for she was repeating it pretty faultlessly by ear.
Also, during the forenoon of the previous day, I came upon her--for
footsteps make no sound in this house--in the pacha's visitors'-hall:
and what was she doing?--copying the poses of three dancing-girls
frescoed there! So that she would seem to have a character as light as a
butterfly's, and is afraid of nothing.
* * * * *
Now I know.
I had observed that at the beginning of every meal she seemed to have
something on her mind, going toward the door, hesitating as if to see
whether I would follow, and then returning. At length yesterday, after
sitting to eat, she jumped up, and to my infinite surprise, said her
first word: said it with a most quaint, experimental effort of the
tongue, as a fledgling trying the air: the word '_Come_.'
That morning, meeting her in the court, I had told her to repeat some
words after me: but she had made no attempt, as if shy to break the long
silence of her life; and now I felt some sort of foolish pleasure in
hearing her utter that word, often no doubt heard from me: and after
hurriedly eating, I went with her, saying to myself: 'She must be about
to shew me the food to which she is accustomed: and perhaps that will
solve her origin.'
And so it has proved. I have now discovered that to the moment when she
saw me, she had tasted only her mother's milk, dates, and that white
wine of Ismidt which the Koran permits.
As it was getting dark, I lit and took with me the big red-silk lantern,
and we set out, she leading, and walking confoundedly fast, slackening
when I swore at her, and getting fast again: and she walks with a
certain levity, flightiness, and liberated _furore_, very hard to
describe, as though space were a luxury to be revelled in. By what
instinctive cleverness, or native vigour of memory, she found her way I
cannot tell, but she led me such a walk that night, miles, miles, till I
became furious, darkness having soon fallen with only a faint moon
obscured by cloud, and a drizzle which haunted the air, she without
light climbing and picking her thinly-slippered steps over mounds of
_débris_ and loosely-strewn masonry with unfailing agility, I
occasionally splashing a foot with horror into one of those little ponds
which always marked the Stamboul streets. When I was nearer her, I would
see her peer across and upward toward Pera, as if that were a remembered
land-mark, and would note the perpetual aspen oscillations of the long
coral drops in her ears, and the nimble ply of her limbs, wondering with
a groan if Pera was our goal.
Our goal was even beyond Pera. When we came to the Golden Horn, she
pointed to my caique which lay at the Old Seraglio steps, and over the
water we went, she lying quite at ease now, with her face at the level
of the water in the centre of the crescent-shape, as familiarly as a
_hanum_ of old engaged in some escapade through the crowded Babel of
Galata and that north side of the Horn.
Through Galata we passed, I already cursing the journey: and, following
the line of the coast and the great steep thoroughfare of Pera, we came
at last, almost in the country, to a great wall, and the entrance to an
immense terraced garden, whose limits were invisible, many of the trees
and avenues being still intact.
I knew it at once: I had lain a special fuse-train in the great palace
at the top of the terraces: it was the royal palace, Yildiz.
Up and up we went through the grounds, a few unburned old bodies in rags
of uniform still discernible here and there as the lantern swung past
them, a musician in sky-blue, a fantassin and officer-of-the-guard in
scarlet, forming a cross, with domestics of the palace in
red-and-orange.
The palace itself was quite in ruins, together with all its surrounding
barracks, mosque, and seraglio, and, as we reached the top of the
grounds, presented a picture very like those which I have seen of the
ruins of Persepolis, only that here the columns, both standing and
fallen, were innumerable, and all more or less blackened; and through
doorless doors we passed, down immensely-wide short flights of steps,
and up them, and over strewed courtyards, by tottering fragments of
arcades, all roofless, and tracts of charcoal between interrupted
avenues of pillars, I following, expectant, and she very eager now.
Finally, down a flight of twelve or fourteen rather steep and narrow
steps, very dislocated, we went to a level which, I thought, must be the
floor of the palace vaults: for at the bottom of the steps we stood on a
large plain floor of plaster, which bore the marks of the flames; and
over this the girl ran a few steps, pointed with excited recognition to
a hole in it, ran further, and disappeared down the hole.
When I followed, and lowered the lantern a little, I saw that the drop
down was about eight feet, made less than six feet by a heap of
stone-rubbish below, the falling of which had caused the hole: and it
was by standing on this rubbish-heap, I knew at once, that she must have
been enabled to climb out into the world.
I dropped down, and found myself in a low flat-roofed cellar, with a
floor of black earth, very fusty and damp, but so very vast in extent
that even in the day-time, I suppose, I could not have discerned its
boundaries; I fancy, indeed, that it extends beneath the whole palace
and its environs--an enormous stretch of space: with the lantern I could
only see a very limited portion of its area. She still led me eagerly
on, and I presently came upon a whole region of flat boxes, each about
two feet square, and nine inches high, made of very thin laths, packed
to the roof; and about a-hundred-and-fifty feet from these I saw, where
she pointed, another region of bottles, fat-bellied bottles in chemises
of wicker-work, stretching away into gloom and total darkness. The
boxes, of which a great number lay broken open, as they can be by merely
pulling with the fingers at a pliant crack, contain dates; and the
bottles, of which many thousands lay empty, contain, I saw, old
Ismidt wine. Some fifty or sixty casks, covered with mildew, some old
pieces of furniture, and a great cube of rotting, curling parchments,
showed that this cellar had been more or less loosely used for the
occasional storage of superfluous stores and knick-knacks.
It was also more or less loosely used as a domestic prison. For in the
lane between the region of boxes and the region of bottles, near the
former, there lay on the ground the skeleton of a woman, the details of
whose costume were still appreciable, with thin brass gyves on her
wrists: and when I had examined her well, I knew the whole history of
the creature standing silent by my side.
She is the daughter of the Sultan, as I assumed when I had once
determined that the skeleton is both the skeleton of her mother, and the
skeleton of the Sultana.
That the skeleton was her mother is clear: for the cloud occurred just
twenty-one years since, and the dead woman was, of course, at that
moment in the prison, which must have been air-tight, and with her the
girl: but since the girl is quite certainly not much more than
twenty--she looks younger--she must at that time have been either unborn
or a young babe: but a babe would hardly be imprisoned with another than
its own mother. I am rather inclined to think that the girl was unborn
at the moment of the cloud, and was born in the cellar.
That the mother was the Sultana is clear from her fragments of dress,
and the symbolic character of her every ornament, crescent earrings,
heron-feather, and the blue campaca enamelled in a bracelet. This poor
woman, I have thought, may have been the victim of some unbounded fit of
imperial passion, incurred by some domestic crime, real or imagined,
which may have been pardoned in a day had not death overtaken her master
and the world.
There are four steep stone steps at about the centre of the cellar,
leading up to a locked iron trap-door, apparently the only opening into
this great hole: and this trap-door must have been so nearly air-tight
as to bar the intrusion of the poison in anything like deadly quantity.
But how rare--how strange--the coincidence of chances here. For, if the
trap-door was absolutely air-tight, I cannot think that the supply of
oxygen in the cellar, large as it was, would have been sufficient to
last the girl twenty years, to say nothing of what her mother used up
before death: for I imagine that the woman must have continued to live
some time in her dungeon, sufficiently long, at least, to teach her
child to procure its food of dates and wine; so that the door must have
been only just sufficiently hermetic to bar the poison, yet admit some
oxygen; or else, the place may have been absolutely air-tight at the
time of the cloud, and some crack, which I have not seen, opened to
admit oxygen after the poison was dispersed: in any case--the
all-but-infinite rarity of the chance!
Thinking these things I climbed out, and we walked to Pera, where I
slept in a great white-stone house in five or six acres of garden
overlooking the cemetery of Kassim, having pointed out to the girl
another house in which to sleep.
This girl! what a history! After existing twenty years in a sunless
world hardly three acres wide, she one day suddenly saw the only sky
which she knew collapse at one point! a hole appeared into yet a world
beyond! It was I who had come, and kindled Constantinople, and set her
free.
* * * * *
Ah, I see something now! I see! it was for this that I was preserved: I
to be a sort of new-fangled Adam--and this little creature to be my Eve!
That is it! _The White_ does not admit defeat: he would recommence the
Race again! At the last, the eleventh hour--in spite of all--he would
turn defeat into victory, and outwit that Other.
However, if this be so--and I seem to see it quite clearly--then in that
White scheme is a singular flaw: at _one point_, it is obvious, that
elaborate Forethought fails: for I have a free will--and I refuse, I
refuse.
Certainly, in this matter I am on the side of the Black: and since it
depends absolutely upon me, this time Black wins.
No more men on the earth after me, ye Powers! To _you_ the question may
be nothing more than a gambling excitement as to the final outcome of
your aërial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs,
Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard
earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness--the deep, deep pain--of that
bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ...
she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed
the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king
named Galba, a horrid dog, and there was a French devil, Gilles de Raiz:
and the rest were all much the same, much the same. Oh no, it was not a
good race, that small infantry which called itself Man: and here,
falling on my knees before God and Satan as I write, I swear, I swear:
Never through me shall it spring and fester again.
* * * * *
I cannot realise her! Not at all, at all, at all! If she is out of my
sight and hearing ten minutes, I fall to doubting her reality. If I lose
her for half a day, all the old feelings, resembling certainties, come
back, that I have only been dreaming--that this appearance cannot be an
actual objective fact of life, since the impossible is impossible.
Seventeen long years, seventeen long years, of madness....
* * * * *
To-morrow I start for Imbros: and whether this girl chooses to follow
me, or whether she stays behind, I will see her from the moment I land
no more.
* * * * *
She must rise very early. I who am now regularly on the palace-roof at
dawn, sometimes from between the pavilion-curtains of the galleries, or
from the steps of the telescope-kiosk, may spy her far down below, a
dainty microscopic figure, generally running about the sward, or gazing
up in wonder at the palace from the lake-edge.
It is now three months since she came with me to Imbros.
I left her the first night in that pale-yellow house with the two green
jalousies facing the beach, where there was everything that she would
need; but I knew that, like all the houses there now, it leaked
profusely, and the next day I went down to the curving stair, cut
through the rock at the back and south of the village, climbed, and half
a mile beyond found that park and villa with gables, which I had noted
from the sea. The villa is almost intact, very strongly built of
purplish marble, though small, and very like a Western house, with
shingles, and three gables, so that I think it must have been the yali
of some Englishman, for it contains a number of English books, though
the only body I saw there was what looked like an Aararat Kurd, with
spiral string wound down his turban, yellow ankle-pantaloons, and flung
red shoulder-cloak; and all in the heavily-wooded park, and all about
the low rock-steps up the hill, profusions of man-dragora; and from the
rock-steps to the house a narrow long avenue of acacias, mossy
underfoot, that mingle overhead, the house standing about four yards
from the edge of the perpendicular sea-cliff, whence one can see the
_Speranzas_ main top-mast, and broken mizzen-mast-head, in her quiet
haven. After examining the place I went down again to the village, and
her house: but she was not there: and two hours long I paced about among
the weeds of these amateur little alleys and flat-roofed windowless
houses (though some have terrace-roofs, and a rare aperture), whose
once-raw yellows, greens, and blues look now like sunset tints when the
last flush is gone, and they fade dun. When at last she came running
with open mouth, I took her up the rock-steps, and into the house, and
there she has lived, one of the gable-tips, I now find (that overlooking
the sea), being just visible from the north-east corner of the
palace-roof, two miles from it.
That night again, when I was leaving her, she made an attempt to follow
me. But I was resolved to end it, then: and cutting a sassafras-whip I
cut her deep, three times, till she ran, crying.
* * * * *
So, then, what is my fate henceforth?--to think always, from sun to
moon, and from moon to sun, of one only thing--and that thing an object
for the microscope?--to become a sneaking Paul Pry to spy upon the silly
movements of one little sparrow, like some fatuous motiveless gossip of
old, his occupation to peep, his one faculty to scent, his honey and his
achievement to unearth the infinitely unimportant? I would kill her
first!
* * * * *
I am convinced that she is no stay-at-home, but roams continually over
the island: for thrice, wandering myself, I have come upon her.
The first time she was running with flushed face, intent upon striking
down a butterfly with a twig held in the left hand (for both hands she
uses with dexterity). It was at about nine in the morning, in her park,
near the bottom where there are high grass-growths and ferny luxuriance
between the close tree-trunks, and shadow, and the broken wall of an old
funeral-kiosk sunk aslant under moss, creepers, and wild flowers, behind
which I peeped hidden and wet with dew. She has had the assurance to
modify the dress I put upon her, and was herself a butterfly, for
instead of the shintiyan, she had on a zouave, hardly reaching to the
waist, of saffron satin, no feredjé, but a scarlet fez with violet
tassel, and baggy pantaloons of azure silk; down her back the long
auburn plait, quite neat, but all her front hair loose and wanton, the
fez cocked backward, while I caught glimpses of her fugitive heels
lifting out of the dropping slipper-sole. She is pretty clever, but not
clever enough, for that butterfly escaped, and in one instant I saw her
change into weary and sad, for on this earth is nothing more fickle than
that Proteus face, which resembles a landscape swept with cloud-shadows
on a bright day. Fast beat my heart that morning, owing to the
consciousness that, while I saw, I was unseen, yet might be seen.
Another noontide, three weeks afterwards, I came upon her a good way up
yonder to the west of the palace, sleeping on her arm in an alley
between overgrown old trellises, where rioting wild vine buried her in
gloom: but I had not been peeping through the bushes a minute, when she
started up and looked wildly about, her quick consciousness, I imagine,
detecting a presence: though I think that I managed to get away unseen.
She keeps her face very dirty: all about her mouth was dry-stained with
a polychrome of grape, _mûrs_, and other coloured juices, like
slobbering _gamins_ of old. I could also see that her nose and cheeks
are now sprinkled with little freckles.
Four days since I saw her a third time, and then found that the
primitive instinct to represent the world in pictures has been working
in her: for she was drawing. It was down in the middle one of the three
east-and-west village streets, for thither I had strolled toward
evening, and coming out upon the street from between an old wall and a
house, saw her quite near. I pulled up short--and peered. She was lying
on her face all among grasses, a piece of yellow board before her, and
in her fingers a chalk-splinter: and very intently she drew, her
tongue-tip travelling along her short upper-lip from side to side,
regularly as a pendulum, her fez tipped far back, and the left foot
swinging upward from the knee. She had drawn her yali at the top, and
now, as I could see by peering well forward, was drawing underneath the
palace--from memory, for where she lay it is all hidden: yet the palace
it was, for there were the waving lines meant for the steps, the two
slanting pillars, the slanting battlements of the outer court, and
before the portal, with turban reaching above the roof, and my two
whisks of beard sweeping below the knees--myself.
Something spurred me, and I could not resist shouting a sudden "Hi!"
whereupon she scrambled like a spring-bok to her feet, I pointing to the
drawing, smiling.
This creature has a way of mincing her pressed lips, while she shakes
the head, intensely cooing a fond laugh: and so she did then.
"You are a clever little wretch, you know," said I, she cocking her eye,
trying to divine my meaning with vague smile.
'Oh, yes, a clever little wretch,' I went on in a gruff voice, 'clever
as a serpent, no doubt: for in the first case it was the Black who used
the serpent, but now it is the White. But it will not do, you know. Do
you know what you are to me, you? You are my Eve!--a little fool, a
little piebald frog like you. But it will not do at all, at all! A nice
race it would be with you for mother, and me for father, wouldn't
it?--half-criminal like the father, half-idiot like the mother: just
like the last, in short. They used to say, in fact, that the offspring
of a brother and sister was always weak-headed: and from such a wedlock
certainly came the human race, so no wonder it was what it was: and so
it would have to be again now. Well no--unless we have the children, and
cut their throats at birth: and _you_ would not like that at all, I
know, and, on the whole, it would not work, for the White would be
striking a poor man dead with His lightning, if I attempted that. No,
then: the modern Adam is some eight to twenty thousand years wiser than
the first--you see? less instinctive, more rational. The first disobeyed
by commission: I shall disobey by omission: only his disobedience was a
sin, mine is a heroism. I have not been a particularly ideal sort of
beast so far, you know: but in me, Adam Jeffson--I swear it--the human
race shall at last attain a true nobility, the nobility of
self-extinction. I shall turn out trumps: I shall prove myself stronger
than Tendency, World-Genius, Providence, Currents of Fate, White Power,
Black Power, or whatever is the name for it. No more Clodaghs, Lucrezia
Borgias, Semiramises, Pompadours, Irish Landlords, Hundred-Years'
Wars--you see?'
She kept her left eye obliquely cocked like a little fool, wondering, no
doubt, what I was saying.
'And talking of Clodagh,' I went on, 'I shall call you that henceforth,
to keep me reminded. So that is your name--not Eve--but Clodagh, who was
a Poisoner, you see? She poisoned a poor man who trusted her: and that
is your name now--not Eve, but Clodagh--to remind me, you most dangerous
little speckled viper! And in order that I may no more see your foolish
little pretty face, I decree that, for the future, you wear a _yashmak_
to cover up your lips, which, I can see, were meant to be seductive,
though dirty; and you can leave the blue eyes, and the little
white-skinned freckled nose uncovered, if you like, they being
commonplace enough. Meantime, if you care to see how to draw a palace--I
will show you.'
Before I stretched my hand, she was presenting the board--so that she
had guessed something of my meaning! But some hard tone in my talk had
wounded her, for she presented it looking very glum, her under-lip
pushing a little obliquely out, very pathetically, I must say, as always
when she is just ready to cry.
In a few strokes I drew the palace, and herself standing at the portal
between the pillars: and now great was her satisfaction, for she pointed
to the sketched figure, and to herself, interrogatively: and when I
nodded 'yes,' she went cooing her fond murmurous laugh, with pressed
and mincing lips: and it is clear that, in spite of my beatings, she is
in no way afraid of me.
Before I could move away, I felt some rain-drops, and down in some
seconds rushed a shower. I looked, saw that the sky was rapidly
darkening, and ran into the nearest of the little cubical houses,
leaving her glancing sideways upward, with the quaintest artlessness of
interest in the downpour: for she is not yet quite familiarised with the
operations of nature, and seems to regard them with a certain amiable
inquisitive seriousness, as though they were living beings, comrades as
good as herself. She presently joined me, but even then stretched her
hand out to feel the drops.
Now there came a thunder-clap, the wind was rising, and rain spattering
about me: for the panes of these houses, made, I believe, of paper
saturated in almond-oil, have long disappeared, and rains, penetrating
by roof and rare window, splash the bones of men. I gathered up my
skirts to run toward other shelter, but she was before me, saying in her
strange experimental voice that word of hers: "_Come_."
She ran in advance, and I, with the outer robe over my head, followed,
urging flinching way against the whipped rain-wash. She took the way by
the stone horse-pond, through an alley to the left between two blind
walls, then down a steep path through wood to the rock-steps, and up we
ran, and along the hill, to her yali, which is a mile nearer the village
than the palace, though by the time we pelted into its dry shelter we
were wet to the skin.
Sudden darkness had come, but she quickly found some matches, lit one,
looking at it with a certain meditative air, and applied it to a candle
and to a bronze Western lamp on the table, which I had taught her to oil
and light. Near a Western fire-place was a Turkish mangal, like one
which she had seen me light to warm bath-waters in Constantinople, and
when I pointed to it, she ran to the kitchen, returned with some chopped
wood, and very cleverly lit it. And there for several hours I sat that
night, reading (the first time for many years): it was a book by the
poet Milton, found in a glazed book-case on the other side of the
fire-place: and most strange, most novel, I found those august words
about warring angels that night, while the storm raved: for this man had
evidently taken no end of pains with his book, and done it gallantly
well, too, making the thing hum: and I could not conceive why he should
have been at that trouble--unless it were for the same reason that I
built the palace, because some spark bites a man, and he would be
like--but that is all vanity, and delusion.
Well, there is a rage in the storms of late years which really
transcends bounds; I do not remember if I have noted it in these sheets
before: but I never could have conceived a turbulence so huge. Hour
after hour I sat there that night, smoking a chibouque, reading, and
listening to the batteries and lamentations of that haunted air,
shrinking from it, fearing even for the _Speranza_ by her quay in the
sequestered harbour, and for the palace-pillars. But what astonished me
was that girl: for, after sitting on the ottoman to my left some time,
she fell sideways asleep, not the least fear about her, though I should
have thought that nervousness at such a turmoil would be so natural to
her: and whence she has this light confidence in the world into which
she has so abruptly come I do not know, for it is as though someone
inspired her with the mood of nonchalance, saying: 'Be of good cheer,
and care not a pin about anything: for God is God.'
I heard the ocean swing hoarse like heavy ordnance against the cliffs
below, where they meet the outer surface of the southern of the two
claws of land that form the harbour: and the thought came into my mind:
'If now I taught her to speak, to read, I could sometimes make her read
a book to me.'
The winds seemed wilfully struggling for the house to snatch and wing it
away into the drear Eternities of the night: and I could not but heave
the sigh: 'Alas for us two poor waifs and castaways of our race, little
bits of flotsam and seaweed-hair cast up here a moment, ah me, on this
shore of the Ages, soon to be dragged back, O turgid Eternity, into thy
abysmal gorge; and upon what strand--who shall say?--shall she next be
flung, and I, divided then perhaps by all the stretch of the
trillion-distanced astral gulf?' And such a pity, and a wringing of the
heart, seemed in things, that a tear fell from my eyes that ominous
midnight.
She started up at a gust of more appalling volume, rubbing her eyes,
with dishevelled hair (it must have been about midnight), listening a
minute, with that demure, droll interest of hers, to the noise of the
elements, and then smiled to me; rose then, left the room, and presently
returned with a pomegranate and some almonds on a plate, also some
delicious old sweet wine in a Samian cruche, and an old silver cup, gilt
inside, standing in a zarf. These she placed on the table near me, I
murmuring: 'Hospitality.'
She looked at the book, which I read as I ate, with lowered left
eye-lid, seeking to guess its use, I suppose. Most things she
understands at once, but this must have baffled her: for to see one
looking fixedly at a thing, and not know what one is looking at it for,
must be very disconcerting.