by M. P. Shiel
but Heaven is where two or three are gathered together. Itmay be so: I do not know, nor care. But I know that after twenty yearsof solitude on a planet the human soul is more enamoured of solitudethan of life, shrinking like a tender nerve from the rough intrusion ofAnother into the secret realm of Self: and hence, perhaps, thebitterness with which solitary castes, Brahmins, patricians,aristocracies, always resisted any attempt to invade theirslowly-acquired domain of privileges. Also, it may be true, it may, itmay, that after twenty years of solitary selfishness, a man becomes,without suspecting it--not at all noticing the slow stages--a real andtrue beast, a horrible, hideous beast, mad, prowling, like that King ofBabylon, his nails like birds' claws, and his hair like eagles'feathers, with instincts all inflamed and fierce, delighting indarkness and crime for their own sake. I do not know, nor care: but Iknow that, as I drew the cangiar, the basest and the slyest of all thedevils was whispering me, tongue in cheek: 'Kill, kill--and be merry.'
With excruciating slowness, like a crawling glacier, tender as a nerveof the touching leaves, I moved, I stole, obliquely toward her throughthe wall of bush, the knife behind my back. Once only there was arestraint, a check: I felt myself held back: I had to stop: for one ofthe 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 ofsucceeding that I first noticed the state of the sky, a strip of which Icould see across the rivulet: a minute or so before it had been prettyclear, but now was busy with hurrying clouds. It was a sinistermuttering of thunder which had made me glance upward.
When my eyes returned to the sitting figure, she was looking foolishlyabout the sky with an expression which almost proved that she had neverbefore heard that sound of thunder, or at least had no idea what itcould bode. My fixed regard lost not one of her movements, while inch byinch, not breathing, careful as the poise of a balance, I crawled. Andsuddenly, with a rush, I was out in the open, running her down....
She leapt: perhaps two, perhaps three, paces she fled: then stock stillshe stood--within some four yards of me--with panting nostrils, withenquiring face.
I saw it all in one instant, and in one instant all was over. I had notchecked the impetus of my run at her stoppage, and I was on the point ofreaching her with uplifted knife, when I was suddenly checked andsmitten by a stupendous violence: a flash of blinding light, attractedby the steel which I held, struck tingling through my frame, and at thesame time the most passionate crash of thunder that ever shocked a poorhuman 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 nolonger hide themselves from me, and their close contact is toointolerably rough and vigorous for a poor mortal man. During, I shouldthink, three or four minutes, I lay so astounded under that bullying cryof wrath, that I could not move a finger. When at last I did sit up, thegirl was standing near me, with a sort of smile, holding out to me thecangiar in a pouring rain.
I took it from her, and my doddering fingers dropped it into thestream.
* * * * *
Pour, pour came the rain, raining as it can in this place, not long, buta deluge while it lasts, dripping in thick-liquidity, like a profusesweat, 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 wasbeing 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 GoldenHorn, where there is a flat grassy ground somewhere between the valleyof Kassim and Charkoi, with horror I saw that _protegee_ of Heaven, orof someone, not ten yards behind, following me like a mechanical figure,it being now near three in the afternoon, and the rain drenching methrough, and I tired and hungry, and from all the ruins ofConstantinople not one whiff of smoke ascending.
I trudged on wearily till I came to the quay of Foundoucli, and thezaptia boat; and there she was with me still, her hair nothing but athin drowned string down her back.
* * * * *
Not only can she not speak to me in any language that I know: but shecan 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 swearit. She came into the boat with me, and sat astern, clinging for dearlife to the gunwale by her finger-nails, and I paddled the eight hundredyards to the _Speranza_, and she came up to the deck after me. When shesaw 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 littlefear. She smiled like a child, and on the ship touched this and that, asif each were a living thing.
It was only here and there that one could see the ivory-brown colour ofher skin: the rest was covered with dirt, like old bottles long lying incellars.
By the time we reached the _Speranza_, the rain suddenly stopped: I wentdown to my cabin to change my clothes, and had to shut the door in herface to keep her out. When I opened it, she was there, and she followedme to the windlass, when I went to set the anchor-engine going. Iintended, I suppose, to take her to Imbros, where she might live in oneof the broken-down houses of the village. But when the anchor was notyet half up, I stopped the engine, and let the chain run again. For Isaid, '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 nothingfor 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 intothe boat, and when she followed, I rowed her back all the way pastFoundoucli and the Tophana quay to where one turns into the Golden Hornby St. Sophia, around the mouth of the Horn being a vast semicircle ofcharred wreckage, carried out by the river-currents. I went up the stepson the Galata side before one comes to where the barge-bridge was. Whenshe had followed me on to the embankment, I walked up one of thoserising streets, very encumbered now with stone-_debris_ and ashes, butstill marked by some standing black wall-fragments, it being now not farfrom night, but the air as clear and washed as the translucency of agreat purple diamond with the rain and the afterglow of the sun, and allthe 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 andwine-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 tothe quay. She was after me, but being taken by surprise, I suppose, wasdistanced a little at first. However, by the time I could scurry myselfdown into the boat, she was so near, that she only saved herself fromthe water by a balancing stoppage at the brink, as I pushed off. I thenset out to get back to the ship, muttering: 'You can have Turkey, if youlike, and I will keep the rest of the world.'
I rowed sea-ward, my face toward her, but steadily averted, for I wouldnot look her way to see what she was doing. However, as I turned thepoint of the quay, where the open sea washes quite rough and loud, to gonorthward and disappear from her, I heard a babbling cry--the firstsound which she had uttered. I did look then: and she was still quitenear 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 wildstrangeness, of my own voice, addressing on this earth another humansoul?
There she stood, whimpering like an abandoned dog after me. I turned theboat, rowed, came to the first steps, landed, and struck her twostinging slaps, one on each cheek. While she cowered, surprised nodoubt, I took her by the hand, led her back to the boat, landed on theStamboul side, and set off, still leading her, my object being to findsome sort of possible edifice near by, not hopelessly burned, in whichto leave her: for in all Galata there was plainly none, and Pera, Ithought, was too far to walk to. But it would have been better if I hadgone to Pera, for we had to walk quite three miles from Seraglio Pointal
l along the city battlements to the Seven-towers, she picking herbare-footed way after me through the great Sahara of charred stuff, andnight now well arrived, and the moon a-drift in the heaven, making thedesolate lonesomeness of the ruins tenfold desolate, so that my heartsmote me then with bitterness and remorse, and I had a vision of myselfthat night which I will not put down on paper. At last, however, prettylate in the evening, I spied a large mansion with green lattice-workfacade, and shaknisier, and terrace-roof, which had been hidden from meby the arcades of a bazaar, a vast open space at about the centre ofStamboul, one of the largest of the bazaars, I should think, in themiddle of which stood the mansion, probably the home of pasha or vizier:for it had a very distinguished look in that place. It seemed verylittle hurt, though the vegetation that had apparently choked the greatopen space was singed to a black fluff, among which lay thousands ofcalcined bones of man, horse, ass, and camel, for all was distinct inthe bright, yet so
