In the morning Mrs. Clarke sent a messenger to Hughes’s Hotel asking
Dion to meet her at the landing-place on the right of the Galata Bridge
at a quarter to eleven.
“We will go to Eyub by caique,” she wrote, “and lunch at a Turkish café
I know close to the mosque.”
She drove to the bridge. When she came in sight of it she saw Dion
standing on it alone, looking down on the crowded water-way. He was
leaning on the railing, and his right cheek rested on the palm of his
brown hand. Mrs. Clarke smiled faintly as she realized that this man who
was waiting for her had evidently forgotten all about her.
She dismissed the carriage, paid the toll and walked on to the bridge.
As usual there was a crowd of pedestrians passing to and fro from Galata
to Stamboul and from Stamboul to Galata. She mingled with it, went up to
Dion and stood near him without uttering a word. For perhaps two minutes
she stood thus before he noticed her. Then he turned and sent her a
hard, almost defiant glance before he recognized who his companion was.
“Oh, I didn’t know it was----Why didn’t you speak? Is it time to go? I
meant to be at the landing.”
He spoke like a man who had been a long way off, and who returned weary
and almost dazed from that distance. He looked at his watch.
“Please forgive me for putting you to the trouble of coming to find me.”
“You needn’t ever ask me to forgive you for anything. Don’t let us
bother each other with all the silly little things that worry the fools.
We’ve got beyond all that long ago. There’s my caique.”
She made a signal with her hand. Two Albanians below saluted her.
“Shall we go at once? Or would you rather stay here a little longer?”
“Let us go. I was only looking at the water.”
He turned and sent a long glance to Stamboul.
“Your city!” he said.
“I shall take you.”
For the first time that day he looked at her intimately, and his look
said:
“Why do you trouble about me?”
They went down, got into the caique, and were taken by the turmoil of
the Golden Horn. Among the innumerable caiques, the steamboats, the
craft of all kinds, they went out into the strong sunshine, guarded
on the one hand by the crowding, discolored houses of Galata rising to
Pera, on the other hand by the wooden dwellings and the enormous mosques
of Stamboul. The voices of life pursued them over the water and they sat
in silence side by side. Dion made no social attempt to entertain his
companion. Had she not just said to him that long ago they had gone
beyond all the silly little things that worry the fools? In the midst
of the fierce activity and the riot of noise which marks out the
Golden Horn from all other water-ways, they traveled towards emptiness,
silence, the desolation on the hill near the sacred place of the Turks,
where each new Sultan is girded with the sword of Osman, and where the
standard-bearer of the Prophet sleeps in the tomb that was seen in a
vision.
In the strong heat of noon they left the caique and walked slowly
towards the hill which rises to the north-east, where the dark towers of
the cypresses watch over the innumerable graves. Mrs. Clarke had put up
a sun umbrella. Her face was protected by a thin white veil. She wore a
linen dress, pale gray in color, with white lines on it, and long
loose gloves of suede. She looked extraordinarily thin. Her unshining,
curiously colorless hair was partly covered by a small hat of burnt
straw, turned sharply and decisively up on the left side and trimmed
with a broad riband of old gold. Dion remembered that he had thought of
her once as a vision seen in water. Now he was with her in the staring
definite clearness of a land dried by the heats of summer and giving to
them its dust. And she was at home in this aridity. In the dust he was
aware of the definiteness of her. Since the blackness had overtaken him
people had meant to him less than shadows gliding on a wall mean to a
joyous man. Often he had observed them, even sharply and with a sort of
obstinate persistence; he had been trying to force them to become real
to him. Invariably he had failed in his effort. Mrs. Clarke was real to
him as she walked in silence beside him, between the handsome railed-in
mausoleums which line the empty roads from the water’s edge almost to
the mosque of the Conqueror. A banal phrase came to his lips, “You are
in your element here.” But he held it back, remembering that they walked
in the midst of dust.
Leaving the mosque they ascended the hill and passed the Tekkeh of the
dancing dervishes. All around them were the Turkish graves with their
leaning headstones, or their headstones fallen and lying prone in the
light flaky earth above the smoldering corpses of the dead. Here and
there tight bunches of flowers were placed upon the graves. Gaunt
shadows from old cypresses fell over some of them, defining the
sunlight. Below was the narrowing sea, the shallow north-west arm of the
Golden Horn, which stretches to Kiathareh, where are the sweet waters of
Europe, and to Kiahat Haneh.
“We’ll sit here,” said Mrs. Clarke presently.
And she sat down, with the folding ease almost of an Oriental, on the
warm earth, and leaned against the fissured trunk of a cypress.
Casually she had seemed to choose the resting-place, but she had chosen
it well. More times than she could count she had come to that exact
place, had leaned against that cypress and looked down the Golden
Horn to the divided city, one-half of which she loved as she loved few
things, one-half of which she endured for the sake of the other.
“From here,” she said to Dion, “I can feel Stamboul.”
He had lain down near to her sideways and rested his cheek on his hand.
The lower half of his body was in sunshine, but the cypress threw its
shadow over his head and shoulders. As Mrs. Clarke spoke he looked
down the Golden Horn to the Turkish city, and his eyes were held by
the minarets of its mosques. Seldom had he looked at a minaret without
thinking of prayer. He thought of prayer now, and then of his dead
child, of the woman he had called wife, and of the end of his happiness.
The thought came to him:
“I was kept safe in the midst of the dangers of war for a reason; and
that reason was that I might go back to England and kill my son.”
And yet every day men went up into these minarets and called upon other
men to bow themselves and pray.
God is great. . . .
In the sunlit silence of the vast cemetery the wheels of Dion’s life
seemed for a moment to cease from revolving.
God is great--great in His power to inflict misery upon men. And so pray
to Him! Mount upon the minarets, go up high, till you are taken by the
blue, till, at evening, you are nearer to the stars than other men,
and pray to Him and proclaim His glory. For He is the repository of the
power to cover you with misery as with a garment, and to lay you even
with the dust. Pray then--pray! Unless the garment is upon you, unless
the dust is already about you!
Dion lay on the warm earth and looked at the distant minarets, and
smiled at the self-seeking slave-instinct in men, which men sought to
glorify, to elevate into a virtue.
“Why are you smiling?” said a husky voice above.
He did not look up, but he answered:
“Because I was looking at those towers of prayer.”
“The minarets.”
She was silent for a few minutes; after a while she said:
“You remember the first time you met me?”
“Of course.”
“I was in difficulties then. They culminated in the scandal of my
divorce case. Tell me, how did you think I faced all that trouble?”
“With marvelous courage.”
“In what other way can thoroughbred people face an enemy? Suppose I had
lost instead of won, suppose Jimmy had been taken from me, do you think
it would have broken me?”
“I can’t imagine anything breaking you,” said Dion. “But I don’t believe
you ever pray.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“I believe the people who pray are the potential cowards.”
“Do you pray?”
“Not now. That’s why I was smiling when I looked at the minarets. But I
don’t make a virtue of it. I have nothing to pray for.”
“Well then, if you have put away prayer, that means you are going to
rely on yourself.”
“What for?”
“For all the sustaining you will need in the future. The people commonly
called good think of God as something outside themselves to which they
can apply in moments of fear, necessity and sorrow. If you have really
got beyond that conception you must rely on yourself, find in yourself
all you need.”
“But I need nothing--you don’t understand.”
“You nearly told me yesterday.”
“Perhaps if you hadn’t gone out of the room I should have been obliged
to tell you, but not because I wished to.”
“I understood that. That is why I went out of the room and left you
alone.”
For the first time Dion looked up at her. She had lifted her veil, and
her haggard, refined face was turned towards him.
“Thank you,” he said.
At that moment he liked her as he had never liked her in the past.
“Can you tell me now because you wish to?”
“Here among the graves?”
“Yes.”
Again he looked at the distant minarets lifted towards the blue near the
way of the sea. But he said nothing. She shut her sun umbrella, laid it
on the ground beside her, pulled off her gloves and spread them out on
her knees slowly. She seemed to be hesitating; for she looked down and
for a moment she knitted her brows. Then she said;
“Tell me why you came to Constantinople.”
“I couldn’t.”
“If I hadn’t met you in the street by chance, would you have come to see
me?”
“I don’t think I should.”
“And yet it was I who willed you to come here.”
Dion did not seem surprised. There was something remote in him which
perhaps could not draw near to such a simple commonplace feeling in that
moment. He had gone out a long way, a very long way, from the simple
ordinary emotions which come upon, or beset, normal men living normal
lives.
“Did you?” he asked. “Why?”
“I thought I could do something for you. I began last night.”
“What?”
“Doing something for you. I told an acquaintance of mine called Vane,
who is attached to the British Embassy, that you were here.”
A fierce flush came into Dion’s face.
“I said you would probably come out to Buyukderer,” she continued, “and
that I wanted to bring you to the summer Embassy and to introduce you to
the Ambassador and Lady Ingleton.”
Dion sat up and pressed his hands palm downwards on the ground.
“I shall not go. How could you say that I was here? You know I had
dropped my own name.”
“I gave it back to you deliberately.”
“I think that was very brutal of you,” he said, in a low voice, tense
with anger.
“You wanted to be very kind to me when I was in great difficulties.
Circumstances got rather in the way. That doesn’t matter. The intention
was there, though you were too chivalrous to go very far in action.”
“Chivalrous to whom?”
“To her.”
His face went pale under its sunburn.
“What are you doing?” he said, in a low voice that was almost terrible.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Into the way you must walk in. Dion--“--even in calling him by
his Christian name for the first time her voice sounded quite
impersonal--“you’ve done nothing wrong. You have nothing, absolutely
nothing, to be ashamed of. Kismet! We have to yield to fate. If you
slink through the rest of your years on earth, if you get rid of your
name and hide yourself away, you will be just a coward. But you aren’t
a coward, and you are not going to act like one. You must accept your
fate. You must take it right into your heart bravely and proudly, or, if
you can’t do that, stoically. I should.”
“If you had killed Jimmy?”
She was silent.
“If you had killed Jimmy?” he repeated, in a hard voice.
“I should never hide myself. I should always face things.”
“You haven’t had the blow I have had. I know I am not in fault. I know I
have nothing to blame myself for. I wasn’t even careless with my gun. If
I had been I could never have forgiven myself. But I wasn’t.”
“It was the pony. I know. I read the account of the inquest. You were
absolutely exonerated.”
“Yes. The coroner and the jury expressed their deep sympathy with me,”
he said, with intense bitterness. “They realized how--how I loved my
little boy. But the woman I loved more even than my boy, whom I had
loved for ever since I first saw her--well, she didn’t feel at all as
the coroner and the jury did.”
“Where is she? I hear now and then from Beatrice Daventry, but she never
mentions her sister.”
“She is in Liverpool doing religious work, I believe. She has given
herself to religion.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“People give themselves to God, don’t they, sometimes?”
“Do they?” said Mrs. Clarke, with her curious grave directness, which
seemed untouched by irony.
“It seems a way out of--things. But she always had a tendency that way.”
“Towards the religious life?”
“Yes. She always cared for God a great deal more than she cared for me.
She cared for God and for Robin, and she seemed to be just beginning to
care for me when I deprived her of Robin. Since then she has hated me.”
He spoke quietly, sternly. All the emotion of which she had been
conscious on the previous afternoon had left him.
“I didn’t succeed in making her love me!” he continued. “I thought I
had gained a good deal in South Africa. When I came back I felt I was
starting again, and that I should carry things through. Robin felt the
difference in me directly. He would have got to care for me very much,
and I could have done a great deal for him when he had got older. But
God didn’t see things that way. He had planned it all out differently.
When I was with her in Greece, one day I tore down a branch of wild
olive and stripped the leaves from it. She saw me do it, and it
distressed her very much. She had been dreaming over a child, and my
action shattered her dream, I suppose. Women have dreams men can’t quite
understand--about children. She forgave me for that almost directly.
She knew I would never have done anything to make her unhappy even for
a moment, if I had thought. Now I have broken her life to pieces, and
there’s no question of forgiveness. If there were, I should not speak of
her to you. We are absolutely parted forever. She would take the hand of
the most dreadful criminal rather than my hand. She has a horror of me.
I’m the thing that’s killed her child.”
He looked down at the dilapidated graves, and then at the lonely water
which seemed trying to hide itself away in the recesses of the bare
land.
“That’s how it is. Robin forgave me. He was alive for a moment--after,
and I saw by his eyes he understood. Yes, he understood--he understood!”
Suddenly his body began to shake and his arms jerked convulsively.
Instinctively, but quite quietly, Mrs. Clarke put out her hand as if she
were going to lay hold of his right arm.
“No--don’t!” he said. “Yesterday your hand made me worse.”
She withdrew her hand. Her face did not change. She seemed wholly
unconscious of any rudeness on his part.
“Let’s move--let’s walk!” he said.
He sprang up. When he was on his feet he regained control of his body.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” he said. “I’m not ill.”
“My friend, it will have to come,” she said, getting up too.
“What?”
But she did not reply.
“I’ve never been like this till now,” he added vaguely.
She knew why, but she did not tell him. She was a woman who knew how to
wait.
They wandered away through that cemetery above the Golden Horn, among
the cypresses and the leaning and fallen tombstones. Now and then they
saw veiled women pausing beside the graves with flowers in their hands,
or fading among the cypress trunks into sunlit spaces beyond. Now and
then they saw a man praying. Once they came to a tomb where children
were sitting in a circle chanting the Koran with a sound like the sound
of bees.
Before they went down to the Turkish cafe, which is close to the holy
mosque, they stood for a long while together on the hillside, looking
at distant Stamboul. The cupolas of the many mosques and the tall and
speary minarets gave their Eastern message--that message which, even to
Protestant men from the lands of the West, is as the thrilling sound of
a still, small voice. And the voice will not be gainsaid; it whispers,
“In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West.”
“Why do you care for Stamboul so much?” Dion asked his companion. “I
think you are utterly without religion. I may be wrong, but I think you
are. And Stamboul is full of calls to prayer and of places for men to
worship in.”
“Oh, there is something,” she answered. “There is the Unknown God.”
“The Unknown God?” he repeated, with a sort of still bitterness.
“And His city is Stamboul--for me. When the _muezzin_ calls I bow myself
in ignorance. What _He_ is, I don’t know. All I know is that men cannot
explain Him to me, or teach me anything about Him. But Stamboul has
lures for me. It is not only the city of many prayers, it is also the
city of many forgetfulnesses. The old sages said, ‘Eat not thy heart
nor mourn the buried Past.’ Stay here for a time, and learn to obey that
command. Perhaps, eventually, Stamboul will help you.”
“Nothing can help me,” he answered.
They went down the hill by the Tekkeh of the Dancing Dervishes.
* * * * *
Mrs. Clarke did not go back to her villa at Buyukderer that day. It was
already late in the afternoon when her caique touched the wharf at the
foot of the Galata bridge.
“I shall stay another night at the hotel,” she said to Dion. “Will you
drive up with me?”
He assented. When they reached the hotel he said:
“May I come in for a few minutes?”
“Of course.”
When they were in the dim, rather bare room with the white walls,
between which the fierce noises from the Grande Rue found a home, he
said:
“I feel before I leave I must speak about what you did last night, the
message you gave to Vane of our Embassy. I dare say you are right
and that I ought to face things. But no one can judge for a man in my
situation, a man who’s had everything cut from under him. I haven’t
ended it. That proves I’ve got a remnant of something--you needn’t call
it strength--left in me. Since you’ve told my name, I’ll take it back.
Perhaps it was cowardly to give it up. I believe it was. Robin might
think so, if he knew. And he may know things. But I can’t meet casual
people.”
“I’m afraid I did what I did partly for myself,” she said, taking off
her little hat and laying it, with her gloves, on a table.
“For yourself? Why?”
“I’ll explain to-morrow. I shall see you before I go. Come for me at
ten, will you, and we’ll drive to Stamboul. I’ll tell you there.”
“Please tell me now, if you’re not tired after being out all day.”
“I’m never tired.”
“Once Mrs. Chetwinde told me that you were made of iron.”
Mrs. Clarke sent him a curious keen glance of intense and almost lambent
inquiry, but he did not notice it. The strong interest that notices
things was absent from him. Would it ever be in him again?
“I suppose I have a great deal of stamina,” she said casually. “Well,
sit down, and I’ll try to explain.”
She lit a cigarette and sat on a divan in the far corner of the large
room, between one of the windows and the door which led into the
bedroom. Dion sat down, facing her and the noise from the Grande Rue. He
wondered for a moment why she had chosen a place so close to the window.
“I had a double reason for doing what I did,” she said. “One part
unselfish, the other not. I’ll be very frank. I willed that you should
come here.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to see you. I wanted to help you. You don’t think I, or any
one, can do that. You think everything is over for you--”
“I know it is,” he interrupted, in a voice which sounded cold and dull
and final.
“You think that. Any man like you, in your situation, would think that.
Let us leave it for the moment. I wished you to come here, and willed
you to come here. For some reason you have come. You didn’t let me know
you were here, but, by chance as it seems, we met. I don’t mean to lose
sight of you. I intend that you shall come either to Buyukderer, or to
some place on the Bosporus not far off that’s endurable in the summer,
and that you shall stay there for a time.”
“Why?”
“I want to find out if I can be of any good to you.”
“You can’t. I don’t even know why you wish to. But you can’t.”
“We’ll leave that,” she said, with inflexible composure. “I don’t much
care what you think about it. I shan’t be governed, or affected even,
by that. The point is, I mean you to come. How are you to come,
surreptitiously or openly, sneaking in by-ways, your real name
concealed, or treading the highway, your real name known? For your own
sake it must be openly and with your own name, and for my sake too. You
need to face your great tragedy, to stand right up to it. It’s your only
chance. A man is always pursued by what he runs away from; he can always
make a friend of what he stands up to.”
“A friend?”
His voice broke in with the most piercing and bitter irony through the
many noises in the room--sounds of cries, of carriage wheels, of horses’
hoofs ringing on an uneven pavement, of iron shutters being pulled
violently down over shop fronts, of soldiers marching, of distant bugles
calling, of guitars and mandolins accompanying a Neapolitan song.
“Yes, a friend,” said the husky and inflexible, but very feminine voice,
which resembled no other voice of woman that he had ever heard. “So much
for my thought of you. And now for my thought of myself. I am a woman
who has faced a great scandal and come out of it the winner. I
was horribly attacked, and I succeeded in what the papers call
reestablishing my reputation. You and I know very well what that means.
I know by personal experience, you by the behavior of your own wife.”
Dion moved abruptly like a man in physical pain, but Mrs. Clarke
continued:
“I don’t ask you to forgive me for hurting you. You and I must be frank
with each other, or we can be of no use to each other. After what has
happened many women might be inclined to avoid me as your wife did.
Fortunately I have so many friends who believe in me that I am in a
fairly strong position. I don’t want to weaken that position on account
of Jimmy. Now, if you came to Buyukderer under an assumed name, I
couldn’t introduce you to any one, or explain you without telling lies.
Gossip runs along the shores of the Bosporus like fire along a hayrick.
How can I be seen perpetually with a man whom I never introduce to any
of my friends, who isn’t known at his own Embassy? Both for your own
sake and for mine we must be frank about the whole thing.”
“But I never said I should come to Buyukderer,” he said.
And there was a sort of dull, lifeless obstinacy in his voice.
“You have come to Constantinople and you will come to Buyukderer,” she
replied quietly.
He looked at her across the room. The light was beginning to fade, but
still the awnings were drawn down beyond the windows, darkening
the large bare room. He saw her as a study in gray and white, with
colorless, unshining hair, a body so thin and flexible that it was
difficult to believe it contained nerves like a network of steel and
muscles capable of prolonged endurance, a face that was haggard in its
white beauty, eyes that looked enormous and fixed in the twilight. The
whole aspect of her was melancholy and determined, beautiful and yet
almost tragic. He felt upon him the listless yet imperative grasp which
he had first known in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, the grasp which
resembled Stamboul’s.
“I suppose I shall go to Buyukderer,” he said slowly. “But I don’t know
why you wish it.”
“I have always liked you.”
“Yes, I think you have.”
“I don’t care to see a man such as you are destroyed by a good woman.”
He got up.
“No one is destroying me,” he said, with a dull and hopeless defiance.
“Dion, don’t misunderstand me. It wouldn’t be strange if you thought I
bore your wife a grudge because she didn’t care about knowing me. But,
honestly, I am indifferent to a great many things that most women fuss
about. I quite understood her reluctance. Directly I saw her I knew that
she had ideals, and that she expected all those who were intimately in
her life to live up to them. Instead of accepting the world as it has
been created, such women must go one better than the Creator (if there
is one), and invent an imaginary world. Now I shouldn’t be at home in
an imaginary world. I’m not good enough for that, and don’t want to be.
Your wife is very good, but she lives for herself, for her own virtues
and the peace and happiness she gets out of them.”
“She lived for Robin,” he interrupted.
“Robin was a part of herself,” Mrs. Clarke said dryly. “Women like that
don’t know how to love as lovers, because they care for the virtues in
men rather than for the men themselves. They are robed in ideals, and
they are in mortal fear of a speck of dust falling on the robe. The dust
of my scandal was upon me, so your wife avoided me. That I was innocent
didn’t matter. I had been mixed up with something ugly. Your chivalry
was instinctively on the side of justice. Her virtue inclined to the
other side. Her virtue is destructive.”
He was silent.
“Now it has driven you out like a scapegoat into the wilderness!”
“No, no!” he muttered, without conviction.
“But don’t let it destroy you. I would rather deliberately destroy
myself than let any one destroy me. In the one case there’s strength of
a kind, in the other there’s no strength at all. I speak very plainly,
but I’m not a woman full of ideals. I accept the world just as it is,
men just as they are. If a speck of dust alights on me, I don’t think
myself hopelessly befouled; and if some one I loved made a slip, I
should only think that it is human to err and that it’s humanity I
love.”
“Humanity!” he repeated, looking down. “Ah!” He sighed deeply.
He raised his head.
“And if some one you loved killed your Jimmy?”
“As you----?”
“Yes--yes?”
“I should love him all the more because of the misery added to him,” she
said firmly. “There’s only one thing a really great love can’t forgive.”
“What is it?”
“The deliberate desire and intention to hurt it and degrade it.”
“I never had that.”
“No.”
“Then--then you think she never loved me at all?”
But Mrs. Clarke did not answer that question.
The daylight was rapidly failing. She seemed almost to be fading away in
the dimness and in the noises of evening which rose from the Grande Rue.
Yet something of her remained and was very definite, so definite that
even Dion, broken on the wheel and indifferent to casual influences
as few men are ever indifferent, felt it almost powerfully--the
concentration of her will, the unyielding determination of her mind,
active and intense behind the pale mask of her physical body.
He turned away and went to the window farthest from her. He leaned out
to the Grande Rue. Above his head was the sloping awning. It seemed to
him to serve as a sounding-board to the fierce noises of the mongrel
city.
“Start again!”
Surely among the voices of the city now filling his ears there was a
husky voice which had said that.
Had Mrs. Clarke spoken?
“Start again.”
But not on the familiar road! To do that would be impossible. If there
were indeed any new life for him it must be an utterly different life
from any he had known.
He had tried the straight life of unselfishness, purity, fidelity and
devotion--devotion to a woman and also to a manly ideal. That life had
convulsively rejected him. Had he still within him sufficient energy of
any kind to lay hold on a new life?
For a moment he saw before him under the awning Robin’s eyes as they had
been when his little son was dying in his arms.
He drew back from the street. The sitting-room was empty, but the door
between it and the bedroom was open. No doubt Mrs. Clarke had gone in
there to put away her hat. As he looked at the door the Russian maid,
whom he had seen at Park Side, Knightsbridge, came from the inner room.
“Madame hopes Monsieur will call to see her to-morrow before she starts
to Buyukderer,” she said, with her strong foreign accent.
“Thank you,” said Dion.
As he went out the maid shut the bedroom door.