From the upper terrace a bridge led across the public road to the
wood. If it was not a wood it was at all events a good-sized grove,
climbing the steep hillside very much as it chose. Every sort and
size of tree was there, but the greater number of them were of a kind
to be sparsely trimmed in April with a delicate green, and among them
were so many twisted Judas trees as to tinge whole patches of the
slope with their deep rose bloom. The road that the Pasha slowly
climbed, swinging his amber beads behind him as he walked, zigzagged
so leisurely back and forth among the trees that a carriage could
have driven up it. In that way, indeed, the Pasha had more than once
mounted to the kiosque, in the days when his mother used to spend a
good part of her summer up there, and when he was married to his
first wife. The memory of the two, and of their old-fashioned ways,
entered not too bitterly into his general feeling of well-being,
ministered to by the budding trees and the spring air and the sunset
view. Every now and then an enormous plane tree invited him to stop
and look at it, or a semi-circle of cypresses.
So at last he came to the top of the hill, where in a grassy clearing
a small house looked down on the valley of the Bosphorus through a
row of great stone pines. The door of the kiosque was open, but his
wife was not visible. The Pasha stopped a moment, as he had done a
thousand times before, and looked back. He was not the man to be
insensible to what he saw between the columnar trunks of the pines,
where European hills traced a dark curve against the fading sky, and
where the sinuous waterway far below still reflected a last glamour
of the day. The beauty of it, and the sharp sweetness of the April
air, and the infinitesimal sounds of the wood, and the half-conscious
memories involved with it all, made him sigh. He turned and mounted
the steps of the porch.
The kiosque looked very dark and unfamiliar as the Pasha entered it.
He wondered what had become of Hélène--if by any chance he had passed
her on the way. He wanted her. She was the expression of what the
evening roused in him. He heard nothing, however, but the splash of
water from a half-visible fountain. It reminded him for an instant
of the other fountain, below, and of Shaban. His steps resounded
hollowly on the marble pavement as he walked into the dim old saloon,
shaped like a T, with the crossbar longer than the leg. It was still
light enough for him to make out the glimmer of windows on three
sides and the square of the fountain in the centre, but the painted
domes above were lost in shadow.
The spaces on either side of the bay by which he entered, completing
the rectangle of the kiosque, were filled by two little rooms opening
into the cross of the T. He went into the left-hand one, where
Hélène usually sat--because there were no lattices. The room was
empty. The place seemed so strange and still in the twilight that a
sort of apprehension began to grow in him, and he half wished he had
brought up Shaban. He turned back to the second, the latticed
room--the harem, as they called it. Curiously enough it was Hélène
who would never let him Europeanise it, in spite of the lattices.
Every now and then he found out that she liked some Turkish things
better than he did. As soon as he opened the door he saw her sitting
on the divan opposite. He knew her profile against the checkered
pallor of the lattice. But she neither moved nor greeted him. It
was Zümbül Agha who did so, startling him by suddenly rising beside
the door and saying in his high voice:
"Pleasant be your coming, my Pasha."
The Pasha had forgotten about Zümbül Agha; and it seemed strange to
him that Hélène continued to sit silent and motionless on her sofa.
"Good evening," he said at last. "You are sitting very quietly here
in the dark. Are there no lights in this place?"
It was again Zümbül Agha who spoke, turning one question by another:
"Did Shaban come with you?"
"No," replied the Pasha shortly. "He said he had a message, but I
told him not to come."
"A-ah!" ejaculated the eunuch in his high drawl. "But it does not
matter--with the two of us."
The Pasha grew more and more puzzled, for this was not the scene he
had imagined to himself as he came up through the part in response to
his wife's message. Nor did he grow less puzzled when the eunuch
turned to her and said in another tone:
"Now will you give me that key?"
The French woman took no more notice of this question than she had of
the Pasha's entrance.
"What do you mean, Zümbül Agha?" demanded the Pasha sharply. "That
is not the way to speak to your mistress."
"I mean this, my Pasha," retorted the eunuch--"that some one is
hiding in this chest and that Madama keeps the key."
That was what the Pasha heard, in the absurd treble of the black man,
in the darkening room. He looked down and made out, beside the tall
figure of the eunuch, the chest on which he had been sitting. Then
he looked across at Hélène, who still sat silent in front of the
lattice.
"What are you talking about?" he asked at last, more stupefied than
anything else. "Who is it? A thief? Has any one--?" He left the
vague question unformulated, even in his mind.
"Ah, that I don't know. You must ask Madama. Probably it is one of
her Christian friends. But at least if it were a woman she would not
be so unwilling to unlock her chest for us!"
The silence that followed, while the Pasha looked dumbly at the
chest, and at Zümbül Agha, and at his wife, was filled for him with a
stranger confusion of feelings than he had ever experienced before.
Nevertheless he was surprisingly cool, he found. His pulse quickened
very little. He told himself that it wasn't true and that he really
must get rid of old Zümbül after all, if he went on making such
preposterous gaffes and setting them all by the ears. How could
anything so baroque happen to him, the Pasha, who owed what he was to
honourable fathers and who had passed his life honourably and
peaceably until this moment? Yet he had had an impression, walking
into the dark old kiosque and finding nobody until he found these two
sitting here in this extraordinary way--as if he had walked out of
his familiar garden, that he knew like his hand, into a country he
knew nothing about, where anything might be true. And he wished, he
almost passionately wished, that Hélène would say something, would
cry out against Zümbül Agha, would lie even, rather than sit there so
still and removed and different from other women.
Then he began to be aware that if it were true--if!--he ought to do
something. He ought to make a noise. He ought to kill somebody.
That was what they always did. That was what his father would have
done, or certainly his grandfather. But he also told himself that it
was no longer possible for him to do what his father and grandfather
had done. He had been unlearning their ways too long. Besides, he
was too old.
A sudden sting pierced him at the thought of how old he was, and how
young Hélène. Even if he lived to be seventy or eighty she would
still have a life left when he died. Yes, it was as Shaban said.
They were getting old. He had never really felt the humiliation of
it before. And Shaban had said, strangely, something else--that his
own wife was safer than the Pasha's. Still he felt an odd compassion
for Hélène, too--because she was young, and it was Judas-tree time,
and she was married to grey hairs. And although he was a Pasha,
descended from great Pashas, and she was only a little French girl
_quelconque_, he felt more afraid than ever of making a fool of
himself before her--when he had promised her that she should be as
free as any other European woman, that she should live her life.
Besides, what had the black man to do with their private affairs?
"Zümbül Agha," he suddenly heard himself harshly saying, "is this
your house or mine? I have told you a hundred times that you are not
to trouble the Madama, or follow her about, or so much as guess where
she is and what she is doing. I have kept you in the house because
my father brought you into it; but if I ever hear of you speaking to
Madama again, or spying on her, I will send you into the street. Do
you hear? Now get out!"
"Aman, my Pasha! I beg you!" entreated the eunuch. There was
something ludicrous in his voice, coming as it did from his height.
The Pasha wondered if he had been too long a person of importance in
the family to realise the change in his position, or whether he
really----
All of a sudden a checkering of lamplight flickered through the dark
window, touched the Negro's black face for a moment, travelled up the
wall. Silence fell again in the little room--a silence into which
the fountain dropped its silver patter. Then steps mounted the porch
and echoed in the other room, which lighted in turn, and a man came
in sight, peering this way and that, with a big white accordeon
lantern in his hand. Behind the man two other servants appeared,
carrying on their heads round wooden trays covered by figured silks,
and a boy tugging a huge basket. When they discovered the three in
the little room they salaamed respectfully.
"Where shall we set the table?" asked the man with the lantern.
For the Pasha the lantern seemed to make the world more like the
place he had always known. He turned to his wife, apologetically.
"I told them to send dinner up here. It has been such a long time
since we came. But I forgot about the table. I don't believe there
is one here."
"No," uttered Hélène from her sofa, sitting with her head on her hand.
It was the first word she had spoken. But, little as it was, it
reassured him, like the lantern.
"There is the chest," hazarded Zümbül Agha.
The interruption of the servants had for the moment distracted them
all. But the Pasha now turned on him so vehemently that the eunuch
salaamed in haste and went away.
"Why not?" asked Hélène, when he was gone. "We can sit on the
cushions."
"Why not?" echoed the Pasha. Grateful as he was for the
interruption, he found himself wishing, secretly, that Hélène had
discouraged his idea of a picnic dinner. And he could not help
feeling a certain constraint as he gave the necessary orders and
watched the servants put down their paraphernalia and pull the chest
into the middle of the room. There was something unreal and
stage-like about the scene, in the uncertain light of the lantern.
Obviously the chest was not light. It was an old cypress-wood chest
that they had always used in the summer, to keep things in, polished
a bright brown, with a little inlaid pattern of dark brown and cream
colour running around the edge of each surface, and a more
complicated design ornamenting the centre of the cover. He vaguely
associated his mother with it. He felt a distinct relief when the
men spread the cloth. He felt as if they had covered up more things
than he could name. And when they produced candlesticks and candles,
and set them on the improvised table and in the niches beside the
door, he seemed to come back again into the comfortable light of
common sense.
"This is the way we used to do when I was a boy," he said with a
smile, when he and Hélène established themselves on sofa cushions on
opposite sides of the chest. "Only then we had little tables six
inches high, instead of big ones like this."
"It is rather a pity that we have spoiled all that," she said. "Are
we any happier for perching on chairs around great scaffoldings, and
piling the scaffoldings with so many kinds of porcelain and metal?
After all, they knew how to live--the people who were capable of
imagining a place like this. And they had the good taste not to fill
a room with things. Your grandfather, was it?"
He had had a dread that she would not say anything, that she would
remain silent and impenetrable as she had been before Zümbül Agha, as
if the chest between them were a barrier that nothing could surmount.
His heart lightened when he heard her speak. Was it not quite her
natural voice?
"It was my great-grandfather, the Grand Vizier. They say he did know
how to live--in his way. He built the kiosque for a beautiful slave
of his, a Greek, whom he called Pomegranate."
"Madame Pomegranate! What a charming name! And that is why her
cipher is everywhere. See?" She pointed to the series of cupboards
and niches on either side of the door, dimly painted with pomegranate
blossoms, and to the plaster reliefs around the hooded fireplace, and
to the cluster of pomegranates that made a centre to the gilt and
painted lattice-work of the ceiling. "One could be very happy in
such a little house. It has an air--of being meant for moments. And
you feel as if they had something to do with the wonderful way it has
faded." She looked as if she had meant to say something else, which
she did not. But after a moment she added: "Will you ask them to
turn off the water in the fountain? It is a little chilly, now that
the sun has gone, and it sounds like rain--or tears."
The dinner went, on the whole, not so badly. There were dishes to be
passed back and forth. There were questions to be asked or comments
to be made. There were the servants to be spoken to. Yet, more and
more, the Pasha could not help wondering. When a silence fell, too,
he could not help listening. And least of all could he help looking
at Hélène. He looked at her, trying not to look at her, with an
intense curiosity, as if he had never seen her before, asking himself
if there were anything new in her face, and how she would look if--
Would she be like this? She made no attempt to keep up a flow of
words, as if to distract his attention. She was not soft either; she
was not trying to seduce him. And she made no show of gratitude
toward him for having sent Zümbül Agha away. Neither did she by so
much as an inflection try to insinuate or excuse or explain. She was
what she always was, perfect--and evidently a little tired. She was
indeed more than perfect, she was prodigious, when he asked her once
what she was thinking about and she said Pandora, tapping the chest
between them. He had never heard the story of that other Greek girl
and her box, and she told him gravely about all the calamities that
came out of it, and the one gift of hope that remained behind.
"But I cannot be a Turkish woman long!" she added inconsequently with
a smile. "My legs are asleep. I really must walk about a little."
When he had helped her to her feet she led the way into the other
room. They had their coffee and cigarettes there. Hélène walked
slowly up and down the length of the room, stopping every now and
then to look into the square pool of the fountain and to pat her hair.
The Pasha sat down on the long low divan that ran under the windows.
He could watch her more easily now. And the detachment with which he
had begun to look at her grew in spite of him into the feeling that
he was looking at a stranger. After all, what did he know about her?
Who was she? What had happened to her, during all the years that he
had not known her, in that strange free European life which he had
tried to imitate, and which at heart he secretly distrusted? What
had she ever really told him, and what had he ever really divined of
her? For perhaps the first time in his life he realised how little
one person may know of another, and particularly a man of a woman.
And he remembered Shaban again, and that phrase about his wife being
safer than Hélène. Had Shaban really meant anything? Was Hélène
"safe"? He acknowledged to himself at last that the question was
there in his mind, waiting to be answered.
Hélène did not help him. She had been standing for some time at an
odd angle to the pool, looking into it. He could see her face there,
with the eyes turned away from him.
"How mysterious a reflection is!" she said. "It is so real that you
can't believe it disappears for good. How often Madame Pomegranate
must have looked into this pool, and yet I can't find her in it. But
I feel she is really there, all the same--and who knows who else."
"They say mirrors do not flatter," the Pasha did not keep himself
from rejoining, "but they are very discreet. They tell no tales!"
Hélène raised her eyes. In the little room the servants had cleared
the improvised table and had packed up everything again except the
candles.
"I have been up here a long time," she said, "and I am rather tired.
It is a little cold, too. If you do not mind I think I will go down
to the house now, with the servants. You will hardly care to go so
soon, for Zümbül Agha has not finished what he has to say to you."
"Zümbül Agha!" exclaimed the Pasha. "I sent him away."
"Ah, but you must know him well enough to be sure he would not go.
Let us see." She clapped her hands. The servant of the lantern
immediately came out to her. "Will you ask Zümbül Agha to come
here?" she said. "He is on the porch."
The man went to the door, looked out, and said a word. Then he stood
aside with a respectful salaam, and the eunuch entered. He
negligently returned the salute and walked forward until his air of
importance changed to one of humility at sight of the Pasha.
Salaaming in turn, he stood with his hands folded in front of him.
"I will go down with you," said the Pasha to his wife, rising. "It
is too late for you to go through the woods in the dark."
"Nonsense!" She gave him a look that had more in it than the tone in
which she added: "Please do not. I shall be perfectly safe with four
servants. You can tell them not to let me run away." Coming nearer,
she put her hand into the bosom of her dress, then stretched out the
hand toward him. "Here is the key--the key of which Zümbül Agha
spoke--the key of Pandora's box. Will you keep it for me, please?
_Au revoir_."
And making a sign to the servants she walked out of the kiosque.