The Purple Cloud
Page 45
pensive and forlorn, moonlight, which was thatEastern moonlight of pure astral mystery which illumines Persepolis, andBabylon, 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 ahundred luxuries still good. There was an outer wall, but the foliageover it had been singed away, and the gate all charred. It gave way at apush from my palm. The girl was close behind me. I next threw open alittle green lattice-door in the facade under the shaknisier, andentered. Here it was dark, and the moment that she, too, was within, Islipped out quickly, slammed the door in her face, and hooked it uponher by a little hook over the latch.
I now walked some yards beyond the court, then stopped, listening forher expected cry: but all was still: five minutes--ten--I waited: but nosound. I then continued my morose and melancholy way, hollow withhunger, intending to start that night for Imbros.
But this time I had hardly advanced twenty steps, when I heard a frailand strangled cry, apparently in mid-air behind me, and glancing, sawthe creature lying at the gateway, a white thing in black stubble-ashes.She had evidently jumped, well outward, from a small casement of latticeon a level with the little shaknisier grating, through which once peepedbright eyes, thirty feet aloft.
I hardly believe that she was conscious of any danger in jumping, forall the laws of life are new to her, and, having sought and found theopening, she may have merely come with blind instinctiveness after me,taking the first way open to her. I walked back, pulled at her arm, andfound that she could not stand. Her face was screwed with silentpain--she did not moan. Her left foot, I could see, was bleeding: and bythe wounded ankle I took her, and dragged her so through the ashesacross the narrow court, and tossed her like a little dog with all myforce 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 confusionof lights among great numbers of pale-tinted pillars, rose and azure,with verd-antique, olive, and Portoro marble, and serpentine. Themansion was large, I having to traverse quite a desert of embroideredbrocade-hangings, slender columns, and Broussa silks, till I saw astair-case doorway behind a Smyrna _portiere_, went up, and wanderedsome time in a house of gilt-barred windows, with very little furniture,but palatial spaces, solitary huge pieces of _faience_ of inestimableage, and arms, my footfalls quite stifled in the Persian carpeting. Ipassed through a covered-in hanging-gallery, with one window-gratingoverlooking an inner court, and by this entered the harem, whichdeclared itself by a greater luxury, bric-a-bracerie, and profusion ofmanner. Here, descending a short curved stair behind a _portiere_, Icame into a marble-paved sort of larder, in which was an old negress inblue dress, her hair still adhering, and an infinite supply ofsweetmeats, French preserved foods, sherbets, wines, and so on. I put anumber of things into a pannier, went up again, found some of thoseexquisite pale cigarettes which drunken in the hollow of an emerald,also a jewelled two-yard-long chibouque, and tembaki: and with alldescended by another stair, and laid them on the steps of a littleraised 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 thekiosk-step, ate and passed the night, smoking for several hours in astate 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 thewhole court, climbing even the four-square arcade of Moorish archesround the open space, under one of which I had deposited a long lanternof crimson silk: for here no breath of the fire had come. About two inmorning I fell to sleep, a deeper peace of shadow now reigning where solong 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: forall the night, sleeping and waking, the thing which had happened filledmy brain, growing from one depth of incredibility to a deeper, so thatat last I arrived at a sort of certainty that it could be nothing but adrunken dream: but as I opened my eyes afresh, the deep-cuttingrealisation of that impossibility smote like a pang of lightning-strokethrough my being: and I said: 'I will go again to the far Orient, andforget': and I started out from the court, not knowing what had becomeof her during the night, till, having reached the outer chamber, with awild start I saw her lying there at the door in the very spot where Ihad flung her, asleep sideways, head on arm ... Softly, softly, I steptover her, got out, and went running at a cautious clandestine trot. Themorning was in high _fete_, most fresh and pure, and to breathe was tobe young, and to see such a sunlight lighten even upon ruin so vast wasto be blithe. After running two hundred yards to one of the great brokenbazaar-portals, I looked back to see if I was followed: but all thatspace was desolately empty. I then walked on past the arch, on which agreen oblong, once inscribed, as usual, with some text in gilthieroglyphs, is still discernible; and, emerging, saw the great panoramaof destruction, a few vast standing walls, with hollow Oriental windowsframing 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 thenorthern horizon Pera with the steep upper-half of the Iani-Chirchastreet still there, and on the height the European houses, and allbetween blackness, stones, a rolling landscape of ravine, like the hillypack-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 itsforests, and the blithe blue sea, with the widening semicircle offloating _debris_, looking like brown foul scum at some points,congested before the bridgeless Golden Horn: for I stood pretty high inthe centre of Stamboul somewhere in the region of the Suleimanieh, or ofSultan-Selim, as I judged, with immense purviews into abstract distancesand mirage. And to me it seemed too vast, too lonesome, and afteradvancing a few hundred yards beyond the bazaar, I turned again.
* * * * *
I found the girl still asleep at the house-door, and stirring her withmy foot, woke her. She leapt up with a start of surprise, and aremarkable sinuous agility, and gazed an astounded moment at me, till,separating reality from dream and habit, she realised me: butimmediately subsided to the floor again, being in evident pain. I pulledher up, and made her limp after me through several halls to the innercourt, and the well, where I set her upon the weedy margin, took herfoot in my lap, examined it, drew water, washed it, and bandaged it witha 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 wasfinished, put a mass of truffled _foie gras_ on a plate, brushed throughthe thicket to the well, and gave it her. She took it, but lookedfoolish, not eating. I then, with my forefinger, put a little into hermouth, whereupon she set hungrily to eat it all. I also gave her someginger-bread, a handful of bonbons, some Krishnu wine, and someanisette.
I then started out afresh, gruffly bidding her stay there, and left hersitting on the well, her hair falling down the opening, she peeringafter me through the bushes. But I had not half reached the ogivalbazaar-portal, when looking anxiously back, I saw that she was limpingafter me. So that this creature tracks me in the manner of a nutshellfollowing about in the wake of a ship.
I turned back with her to the house, for it was necessary that I shouldplan some further method of eluding her. That was five days ago, andhere I have stayed: for the house and court are sufficiently agreeable,and form a museum of real _objets d'art_. It is settled, however, thatto-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 soapin luke-warm rose-water in the silver cistern of the harem-bath, w
hichis a circular marbled apartment with a fountain and the complicatedceilings of these houses, and frescoes, and gilt texts of the Koran onthe walls, and pale rose-silk hangings. On the divan I had heaped anumber of selected garments, and having shewed her how to towel herself,I made her step into a pair of the trousers called _shintiyan_ made ofyellow-striped white-silk; this, by a running string, I tied looselyround the upper part of her hips; then, drawing up the bottoms to herknees, tied them there, so that their voluminous baggy folds,overhanging still to the ankles, have rather the look of a skirt; overthis I put upon her a blue-striped chiffon chemise, or quamis, reachinga little below the hips; I then put on a short jacket or vest of scarletsatin, thickly embroidered in gold and precious stones, reachingsomewhat below the waist, and pretty tight-fitting; and, making her lieon the couch, I put upon her little feet little yellow baboosh-slippers,then anklets, on her fingers rings, round her neck a necklace ofsequins, finally dyeing her nails, which I