And now, if my readers will kindly accompany me back to the hotel, we
will rest for a while. The greater part of what I have described thus
far having been seen by my friend and myself on the very day of our
arrival, one may easily imagine what a condition our brains were in
as we wended our way toward the hotel at about nightfall. As we passed
through the streets neither of us opened our lips, but on reaching
our room we dropped on the sofa, and, facing about, asked each other
simultaneously,
“Well, what do you think of it? How does it strike you?”
“Fancy my having come here to paint!”
“And I to write!”
And we laughed in each other’s faces with amused compassion.
Indeed, that evening and for many days after His Majesty Abdul-Aziz
might have offered me a province in Asia Minor as a reward for a
half-dozen lines of description of the capital of his state, and I
could not have produced them, so true is it that you must get a little
distance away from great objects before you can describe them, and
if you wish to remember them correctly, you must first forget them
somewhat.
And then how could one possibly do any writing in a room from whose
windows could be seen the Bosphorus, Skutari, and the summit of the
Olympus? The hotel was a sight in itself. At all hours of the day
people of every country in the world were coming and going through
the halls and corridors, up and down the stairs. Every evening twenty
different nationalities were represented at table. I could not get the
idea out of my head during dinner that I must be an envoy sent out by
the Italian government, and that it devolved upon me to introduce some
grave question of international importance with the dessert. There were
many charming countenances of ladies; rough, uncombed artist heads;
seamy adventurers lying in wait for your money; profiles like those
of the Byzantine Virgin, lacking nothing but the golden nimbus; queer
faces and sinister ones; and every day this motley company changed.
At dessert, when every one was talking, it sounded like the Tower of
Babel. On the day of our arrival we struck up an acquaintance with
a party of Russians infatuated with Constantinople, and after that
every evening, when we met at table, we would compare notes. Each
one had visited some point of interest during the day and had some
interesting experience to relate. This one had been to the top of the
Serasker Tower, that one to the Eyûb cemetery; another had spent the
day in Skutari; another was just back from a trip on the Bosphorus.
The conversation glowed with vivid descriptions, life, color, and when
one’s command of language failed him the delicious perfumed wines of
the Archipelago were at hand to loose his tongue and stimulate him
to fresh efforts. There were, it is true, some fellow-countrymen of
mine there who made me furiously angry--moneyed idiots who from soup
to dessert never left off abusing Constantinople, and Providence for
bringing them there. There were no sidewalks, the theatres were badly
lighted, there was no way of passing the evening--apparently they had
come to Constantinople to pass their evenings. One of them having made
the trip on the Danube, I asked him how he had liked the famous river,
upon which he assured me that there was no place on earth where they
understood so well how sturgeon should be cooked as on the Austrian
Royal and Imperial line of steamboats! Another was a charming example
of the lady-killer style of traveller, whose main object in going
about the world is to make conquests, carefully recorded in a notebook
kept for the purpose. He was a tall, lanky blond, liberally endowed
with the greatest of the three gifts of the Holy Spirit. Whenever the
conversation turned upon Turkish women, he would fix his eyes upon
his plate with a meaning smile and take no part in it, except for an
occasional word or two, when he would break off suddenly, taking a sip
of wine as though he feared he had said too much. He always hurried
into dinner a little behind time, with an important air suggestive of
his having been unavoidably detained by the Sultan, and between the
courses would busy himself in changing mysterious-looking little notes
from one pocket to another, evidently intended to look like billetsdoux
from frail fair ones, but which, oddly enough, bore the unmistakable
stamp of hotel-bills.
But one certainly does run across all sorts of queer subjects in
the hotels of those cosmopolitan cities: no one would believe it
without seeing for himself. For instance, there was a young Hungarian
there, about thirty years old, a tall, nervous fellow with a pair of
diabolical eyes and a quick, feverish way of talking. After acting for
some time as private secretary to a rich Parisian, he had enlisted
among the French Zouaves in Algiers, was wounded and taken prisoner
by the Arabs, and, escaping later from Morocco, had made his way
back to Europe, where he hastened to The Hague, hoping to receive an
appointment as officer in the war with the _Achins_; failing in this,
he determined to enlist in the Turkish army, but while passing through
Vienna on his way to Constantinople for that purpose he had gotten
mixed up in some affair about a woman. In the duel which ensued he had
received a ball in his neck, the scar from which could still be seen.
Unsuccessful at Constantinople as well, “What,” said he, “is there left
for me to do?--je suis enfant de l’aventure. Fight I must. Well, I have
found the means of getting to India;” and he brought out a steamer
ticket. “I shall enlist as an English soldier: there is always some
fighting going on in the interior, and that is all I care for. Killed?
Well, what if I am? My lungs are all gone, anyhow.”
Another queer creature was a Frenchman whose life seemed to have been
one prolonged struggle with the postal authorities all over the world.
He had lawsuits pending with the post-office departments of Austria,
France, and England; he wrote protesting articles to the _Neue Freie
Presse_, and fired off telegraphic messages of defiance to every
post-office on the Continent; not a day went by without his having some
noisy altercation at a window where mail was received or distributed;
he never, by any chance, received a letter on time or wrote one that
reached its destination. At table he would give us an account of all
his misfortunes and consequent disputes, invariably winding up with the
statement that the postal system had been the means of shortening his
life.
Then there was a Greek lady with a strange, wild look and very
curiously dressed: she was always alone, and every day would start
suddenly up in the middle of dinner and leave the table after making a
cabalistic sign over her plate whose significance no one was ever able
to make out.
I have never forgotten, either, a good-looking young Wallachian couple,
he about twenty-five, she just grown, who only appeared one evening:
it was an undoubted case of elopement, for if you looked fixedly at
them they both turned red and appeared uneasy, and every time the door
opened they jumped as though they were on springs.
Let me see: what others can I remember? Hundreds, I suppose, were I to
give my mind to it. It was like a magic-lantern show.
On the days when the steamers were due my friend and I used to find
the greatest amusement in watching the new arrivals as they came into
the hotel, exhausted, confused, some of them still under the influence
of the approach to Constantinople--countenances which seemed to say,
“What world is this? What on earth have we dropped into?” One day a boy
passed us, that instant landed; he was entirely beside himself with
joy at having actually reached Constantinople, the culmination of his
dreams, and was squeezing his father’s hand between both his own in an
ecstasy of delight, while the father, equally moved by the sight of his
son’s happiness, was saying, “Je suis heureux, de te voir heureux, mon
cher enfant.”
We used to pass the hot part of the day gazing out of our windows at
the Maiden’s Tower, which rises up, white as snow, from a solitary
rock in the Bosphorus just opposite Skutari, and while we told each
other stories about the legend of the young prince of Persia who sucked
the poison from the arm of the beautiful sultana bitten by a snake, a
little fellow of five years old would chatter across at us from the
window of an opposite house, where he appeared every day at the same
hour.
Everything about that hotel was queer: among other things, we would run
every evening against one or two doubtful-looking characters hovering
around in front of the entrance. They evidently gained a livelihood by
providing artists’ models, and, taking every one for a painter, would
assail all who came and went with the same low-voiced inquiries: “A
Turk? A Greek? An Armenian? A Jewess? A Negress?”