In the Wilderness

BOOK IV — THE UNKNOWN GOD

CHAPTER I

In June of the following year two young Englishmen, who were making a swift tour of the near East, were sitting one evening in a public garden at Pera. The west wind, which had been blowing all day, had gone down with the coming of night. The air was deliciously warm, but not sultry. The travelers had dined well, but not too well, and were ready to be happy, and to see in others the reflection of their own contented holiday mood. It was delightful to be “on the loose,” without responsibilities, and with a visit to Brusa to look forward to in the immediate future. They sat under the stars, sipped their coffee, listened to the absurd music played by a fifth-rate band in a garishly-lighted kiosk, and watched with interest the coming and going of the crowd of Turks and Perotes, with whom mingled from time to time foreign sailors from ships lying off the entrance to the Golden Horn and a few tourists from the hotels of Pera. Just behind them sat their guide, a thin and eager Levantine, half-Greek and half-Armenian, who, for some inscrutable reason, declared that his name was John.

There was little romance in this garden set in the midst of the noisy European quarter of Constantinople. The music was vulgar; Greek waiters with dissipated faces ran to and fro carrying syrups and liqueurs; corpulent Turks sat heavily over glasses of lager beer; overdressed young men of enigmatic appearance, with oily thick hair, shifty eyes, and hands covered with cheap rings, swaggered about smoking cigarettes and talking in loud, ostentatious voices. Some women were there, fat and garish for the most part, liberally powdered and painted, and crowned with hats at which Paris would have stared almost in fear. There were also children, dark, even swarthy, with bold eyes, shrill voices, immodest bearing, who looked as if they had long since received the ugly freedom of the streets, and learned lessons no children ought to know.

Presently the band stopped playing and there was a general movement of the crowd. People got up from the little tables and began to disperse. “John” leaned forward to his employers, and in a quick and rattling voice informed them that a “fust-rate” variety entertainment was about to take place in another part of the garden. Would they come to see it? There would be beautiful women, very fine girls such as can only be gazed on in Constantinople, taking part in the “show.”

The young men agreed to “have a look at it,” and followed John to a place where many round tables and chairs were set out before a ramshackle wooden barrack of a theatre, under the shade of some pepper trees, through whose tresses the stars peeped at a throng and a performance which must surely have surprised them.

The band, or a portion of it, was again at work, playing an inane melody, and upon the small stage two remarkably well-developed and aquiline-featured women of mature age, dressed as very young children in white socks, short skirts which displayed frilled drawers, and muslin bonnets adorned with floating blue and pink ribbons, swayed to and fro and joined their cracked voices in a duet, the French words of which seemed to exhale a sort of fade obscenity. While they swayed and jigged heavily, showing their muscular legs to the staring audience, they gazed eagerly about, seeking an admiration from which they might draw profit when their infantile task was over. Presently they retired, running skittishly, taking small leaps into the air, and aimlessly blowing kisses to the night.

“Very fine girls!” murmured John to his young patrons. “They make much money in Pera.”

One of the young men shrugged his shoulders with a smile.

“Get us two Turkish coffees, John!” he said. Then he turned to his companion. “I say, Ellis, have you noticed an English feller—at least I take him to be English—who’s sitting over there close to the stage, sideways to us?”

“No; where is he?” asked his companion.

“You see that old Turk with the double chin?”

“Rather.”

“Just beyond him, sitting with a guide who’s evidently Greek.”

“I’ve got him.”

“Watch him. I never saw such a face.”

A blowzy young woman, in orange color and green, with short tinsel-covered skirts, bounded wearily on to the stage, smiling, and began to sing:

Ellis looked across at the man to whom his attention had been drawn. This man was seated by a little table on which were a siphon, a bottle of iced water, and a tall tumbler nearly half-full of a yellow liquid. He was smoking a large dark-colored cigar which he now and then took from his mouth with a hand that was very thin and very brown. His face was dark and browned by the sun, but looked startlingly haggard, as if it were pale or even yellowish under the sunburn. About the eyes there were large wrinkles, spraying downwards over the cheek bones and invading the cheeks. He wore a mustache, and was well-dressed in a tweed suit. But his low collar was not very fresh, and his tie was arranged in a slovenly fashion and let his collar stud be seen. He sat with his legs crossed, staring at the grimacing woman on the stage with a sort of horribly icy intentness. The expression about his lips and eyes was more than bitter; it showed a frozen fierceness.

On the other side of the table was seated a lean, meager guide, obviously one of those Greeks who haunt the quays of Constantinople on the look out for arriving travelers. Now and then this Greek leaned forward and, with a sort of servile and anxious intelligence, spoke to his companion. He received no reply. The other man went on smoking and staring at the boite de surprises as if he were alone. And somehow he seemed actually to be alone, encompassed by a frightful solitude.

“A tragic face, isn’t it?” said the man who had first spoken.

“By Jove it is!” returned the officer. “I wonder that woman can go on singing so close to it.”

“Probably she hasn’t seen him. How many years do you give him?”

“Thirty-eight or forty.”

“He isn’t out for pleasure, that’s certain.”

“Pleasure! One would suppose he’d been keeping house with Medusa and—the deuce, she’s seen him!”

At this moment the singer looked towards the stranger, quavered, faltered, nearly broke down, then, as if with an effort, raised her voice more shrilly and defiantly, exaggerated her meaningless gestures and looked away. A moment later she finished her song and turned to strut off the stage. As she did so she shot a sort of fascinated glance at the dark man. He took his cigar from his mouth and puffed the smoke towards her, probably without knowing that he did so. With a startled jerk she bounded into the wings.

At this moment John returned with two cups of coffee.

“You know everything, John. Tell us who that man over there is,” said Ellis, indicating the stranger.

John sent a devouring glance past the old Turk’s double chin, a glance which, as it were, swallowed at one gulp the dark man, his guide, the siphon, the water-bottle and the glass partially full of the yellow liquid.

“I dunno him. He is noo.”

“Is he English?”

“Sure!” returned John, almost with a sound of contempt.

He never made a mistake about any man’s nationality, could even tell a Spanish Jew from a Portuguese Jew on a dark night at ten yards’ distance.

“I tell you who he is later. I know the guide, a damned fool and a rogue of a Greek that has been in prison. He robs all his people what take him.”

“You needn’t bother,” said Ellis curtly.

“Of course not. Shut up, John, and don’t run down your brothers in crime.”

“That man my brother!”

John upraised two filthy ringed hands.

“That dirty skunk my brother! That son of—”

“That’ll do, John! Be quiet.”

“To-morrow I till you all about the gentleman. Here is another fine girl! I know her very well.”

A languid lady, with a face painted as white as a wall, large scarlet lips, eyes ringed with bluish black, and a gleaming and trailing black gown which clung closely to her long and snake-like body, writhed on to the stage, looking carefully sinister.

The dark man swallowed his drink, got up and made his way to the exit from the garden. He passed close to the two young men, followed by his Greek, at whom John cast a glance of scowling contempt, mingled, however, with very definite inquiry.

“By Jove! He’s almost spoilt my evening,” said Ellis. “But we made a mistake, Vernon. He isn’t anything like forty.”

“No; more like thirty under a cloud.”

“By the look of things I should guess there are plenty of people under a cloud in Pera. But that English feller stands out even here. This girl is certainly a first-class wriggler, if she’s nothing else.”

They did not mention the stranger again that night. But John had not forgotten him, and when he arrived at their hotel next day he at once opened his capacious mouth and let out the following information:

“The gentleman’s name is Denton, his other name is Mervyn, he is three days in Constantinople, he lives in Hughes’s Hotel in Pera, a very poor house where chic people they never goes, he is out all day and always walkin’, he will not take a carriage, and he is never tired, Nicholas Gounaris—the Greek guide—he is droppin’ but the gentleman he does not mind, he only sayin’ if you cannot walk find me another guide what can, every night he is out, too, and he is goin’ to Stamboul when it is dark, he is afraid of nothin’ and goin’ where travelers they never go, one night Gounaris he had to show the traveler—”

But at this point Ellis shut John up.

“That’ll do,” he observed. “You’re a diligent rascal, John. One must say that. But we aren’t a couple of spies, and we don’t want to hear any more about that feller.”

And John, without bearing any malice, went off to complete his arrangements for the journey to Brusa.

Two days later, Mrs. Clarke, who was at Buyukderer in a villa she had taken for the summer months, but who had come into Constantinople to do some shopping, saw “Mervyn Denton” in a side street close to the British Embassy. Those distressed eyes of hers were very observant. There were many people in the street, and “Denton,” who was alone, was several yards away from her, and was walking with his back towards her; but she immediately recognized him, quickened her steps till she was close to him, and then said:

“Dion Leith!”

Dion heard the husky voice and turned round. He did not say anything, but he took off the soft hat he was wearing. Mrs. Clarke stared at him with the unself-conscious directness which was characteristic of her. She saw Dion for the first time since the tragedy which had changed his life, but she had written to him more than once. Her last letter had come from Buyukderer. He had answered it, but he had not told her where he was, had not even hinted to her that he might come to Constantinople. Nevertheless, she did not now show any surprise. She just looked at him steadily, absorbed all the change in him swiftly, and addressed herself to the new man who stood there before her.

“Come with me to the Hotel de Paris. I’m spending the night there, and go back to-morrow to Buyukderer. I had something to do in town.”

She had not given him her hand, and he did not attempt to take it. He put on his hat, turned and walked at her side. Neither of them spoke a word until they had come into the uproar of the Grande Rue, which surrounded them with a hideous privacy. Then Mrs. Clarke said;

“Where are you staying?”

“At Hughes’s Hotel.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It’s in Brusa Street. It’s cheap.”

“And horrible,” she thought.

But she did not say so.

“I have only been here three days,” Dion added.

“Do you remember that I once said to you I knew you would come back to Constantinople?”

For a moment his face was distorted. When she saw that she looked away gravely, at the glittering shops and at the Perotes who were passing by with the slow and lounging walk which they affect in the Grande Rue. Presently she heard him say:

“You were right. It was all arranged. It was all planned out. Even then I believe I knew it would be so, that I should come back here.”

“Why have you come?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, and his voice, which had been hard and fierce, became suddenly dull.

“He really believes that,” she thought.

“Here is the hotel,” she said. “I’m all alone. Jimmy has been out, but has had to go back to Eton. I wish you had seen him.”

“Oh no!” said Dion, almost passionately.

They went up in a lift, worked by a Montenegrin boy with a big round forehead, to her sitting-room on the second floor. It was large, bare and clean, with white walls and awnings at the windows. She rang the bell. A Corsican waiter came and she ordered tea. The roar of the street noises penetrated into the shadowy room through the open windows, and came to Dion like heat. He remembered the silence of Claridge’s. Suddenly his head began to swim. It seemed to him that his life, all of it that he had lived till that moment, was spinning round him, and that, as it spun, it gave out a deafening noise and glittered. He sat down on a chair which was close to a small table, laid his arms on the table, and hid his face against them. Still the deafening noise continued. The sum of it was surely made up of the uproar of the Grand Rue with the uproar of his spinning life added to it. He saw yellow balls ringed with pale blue rapidly receding from his shut eyes.

Mrs. Clarke looked at him for a moment; then she went into the adjoining bedroom and shut the door behind her. She did not come back till the waiter knocked and told her that tea was ready. Then she opened the door. She had taken off her hat and gloves, and looked very white and cool, and very composed.

Dion was standing near the windows. The waiter, who had enormously thick mustaches, and who evidently shaved in the evening instead of in the morning, was going out at the farther door. He shut it rather loudly.

“Every one makes a noise in Pera. It’s de rigueur,” said Mrs. Clarke, coming to the tea-table.

“Do you know,” said Dion, “I used to think you looked punished?”

“Punished—I!”

There was a sudden defiance in her voice which he had never heard in it before. He came up to the table.

“Yes. In London I used to think you had a punished look and even a haunted look. Wasn’t that ridiculous? I didn’t know then what it meant to be punished, or to be haunted. I hadn’t enough imagination to know, not nearly enough. But some one or something’s seen to it that I shall know all about punishment and haunting. So I shall never be absurd about you again.”

After a pause she said:

“I wonder why you thought that about me?”

“I don’t know. It just came into my head.”

“Well, sit down and let us have our tea.”

Dion sat down mechanically, and Mrs. Clarke poured out the tea.

“I wish it was Buyukderer,” she said.

“Oh, I like the uproar.”

“No, you don’t—you don’t. Pera is spurious, and all its voices are spurious voices. To-morrow morning, before I go back, you and I will go to Eyub.”

“To the dust and the silence and the cypresses—O God!” said Dion.

He got up from his chair. He was beginning to tremble. Was it coming upon him at last then, the utter breakdown which through all these months he had—somehow—kept at a distance? Determined not to shake, he exerted his will violently, till he felt as if he were with dreadful difficulty holding, keeping together, a multitude of living, struggling things, which were trying to get away out of his grasp. And these living things were the multitudinous parts of the whole which was himself.

All that now was had been foreshadowed. There had been writing on the wall.

“I am grateful to you for several things. I’m not going to give you the list now. Some day, perhaps, I shall tell you what they are . . . among the cypresses of Eyub.”

She had said that to him in London, and her voice had been fatalistic as she spoke; and in the street that same day, on his way home, the voice of the boy crying the last horror had sounded to him like a voice from the sea, a strange and sad cry lifted up between Europe and Asia. And now——

“How did you know?” he said. “How did you know that we should be here together some day?”

“Sit down. You must sit down.”

She put her languid and imperative hand on his wrist, and he sat down. He took her hand and put it against his forehead for a moment. But that was no use. For her hand seemed to add fever to his fever.

“I have seen you standing amongst graves in the shadow of cypress trees,” he said. “In England I saw you like that. But—how did you know?”

“Drink your tea. Don’t hurry. We’ve got such a long time.”

“I have. I have all the days and nights—every hour of them—at my own disposal. I’m the freest man on earth, I suppose. No work, no ties.”

“You’ve given up everything?”

“Oh, of course. That is, the things that were still left to me to give up. They didn’t mean much.”

“Eat something,” she said, in a casual voice, pushing a plate of delicious little cakes towards him.

“Thank you.”

He took one and ate. He regained self-control, but he knew that at any moment, if anything unusual happened, or if he dared to think, or to talk, seriously about the horror of his life, he would probably go down with a crash into an abyss in which all of his manhood, every scrap of his personal dignity, would be utterly lost. And still almost blindly he held on to certain things in the blackness which encompassed him. He still wished to play the man, and though in bitterness he had tried sometimes to sink down in degradation, his body—or so it had seemed to him—had resisted the will of the injured soul, which had said to it, “Go down into the dirt; seek satisfaction there. Your sanity and your purity of life have availed you nothing. From them you have had no reward. Then seek the rewards of the other life. Thousands of men enjoy them. Join that crowd, and put all the anemic absurdities of so-called goodness behind you.”

He had almost come to hate the state he conceived of as goodness; yet the other thing, its opposite, evil, he instinctively rebelled against and even almost feared. The habit of a life-time was not to be broken in a day, or even in many days. Often he had thought of himself as walking in nothingness, because he rejected evil.

Goodness had ruthlessly cast him out; and so far he had made no other friend, had taken no other comrade to his bruised and bleeding heart.

Mrs. Clarke began to talk to him quietly. She talked abut herself, and he knew that she did this not because of egoism, but because delicately she wished to give him a full opportunity for recovery. She had seen just where he was, and she had understood his recoil from the abyss. Now she wished, perhaps, to help him to draw back farther from it, to draw back so far that he would no longer see it or be aware of it.

So she talked of herself, of her life at Buyukderer in the summer, and in Pera in the autumn and spring.

“I don’t go out to Buyukderer till the middle of May,” she said, “and I come back into town at the end of September.”

“You manage to stand Pera for some months every year?” said Dion, listening at first with difficulty, and because he was making a determined effort.

“Yes. An Englishwoman—even a woman like me—can’t live in Stamboul. And Pera, odious as it is, is in Constantinople, in the city which has a spell, though you mayn’t feel it yet.”

She was silent for a moment, and they heard the roar from the Grande Rue, that street which is surely the noisiest in all Europe. Hearing it, Dion thought of the silence of the Precincts at Welsley. That sweet silence had cast him out. Hell must be full of roaring noises and of intense activities. Then Mrs. Clarke went on talking. There was something very feminine and gently enticing in her voice, which resembled no other voice ever heard by Dion. He felt kindness at the back of her talk, the wish to alleviate his misery if only for a moment, to do what she could for him. She could do nothing, of course. Nevertheless he began to feel grateful to her. She was surely unlike other women, incapable of bearing a grudge. For he had not been very “nice” to her in the days when he was happy and she was in difficulties. At this moment he vaguely exaggerated his lack of “niceness,” and perhaps also her pardoning temperament. In truth, he was desperately in need of a touch from the magic wand of sympathy. Believing, or even perhaps knowing, that to the incurably wounded man palliatives are of no lasting avail, he had deliberately fled from them, and gone among those who had no reason to bother about him. But now he was grateful.

“Go on talking,” he said once, when she stopped speaking. And she continued talking about her life. She said nothing more about Jimmy.

The Corsican waiter came and took away the tea things noisily. Her spell was broken. For a moment Dion felt dazed.

He got up.

“I ought to go,” he said.

“Must you?”

“Must!—Oh no! My time is my own, and always will be, I suppose.”

“You have thrown up everything?”

“What else could I do? The man who killed his own son! How could I stay in London, go among business men who knew me, talk about investments to clients? Suppose you had killed Jimmy!”

There was a long silence. Then he said:

“I’ve given up my name. I call myself Mervyn Denton. I saw the name in a novel I opened on a railway bookstall.”

She got up and came near to him quietly.

“This is all wrong,” she said.

“What is?”

“All you are doing, the way you are taking it all.”

“What other way is there of taking such a thing?”

“Will you come with me to Eyub to-morrow?”

“It was written long ago that I am to go there with you. I’m quite sure of that.”

“I’ll tell you what I mean there to-morrow.”

She looked towards the window.

“It’s like the roar of hell,” he said.

And he went away.

That night Mrs. Clarke dined alone downstairs in the restaurant. The cooking at the Hotel de Paris was famous, and attracted many men from the Embassies. Presently Cyril Vane, one of the secretaries at the British Embassy, came in to dine. He had with him a young Turkish gentleman, who was called away by an agent from the Palace in the middle of dinner. Vane, thus left alone, presently got up and came to Mrs. Clarke’s table.

“May I sit down and talk to you for a little?” he said, with a manner that testified to their intimacy. “My guest has deserted me.”

“Yes, do. Tell the waiter to bring the rest of your dinner here.”

“But I have finished.”

“Light your cigar then.”

“If you don’t mind.”

They talked for a few minutes about the things of every day and the little world they both lived in on the Bosporus; then Mrs. Clarke said:

“I met a friend from England unexpectedly to-day.”

“Did you?”

“A man called Dion Leith.”

“Dion Leith?” repeated Vane.

He looked at her earnestly.

“Now wait a moment!”

His large, cool blue eyes became meditative.

“It’s on the edge of my mind who that is, and yet I can’t remember. I don’t know him, but I’m sure I know of him.”

“He fought in the South African War.”

Suddenly Vane leaned forward. He was frowning.

“I’ve got it! He fought, came back with the D.C.M., and only a few days afterwards killed his only child, a son, out shooting. I remember the whole thing now, the inquest at which he was entirely exonerated and the rumors about his wife. She’s a beautiful woman, they say.”

“Very beautiful.”

“She took it very badly, didn’t she?”

“What do you mean by very badly?”

“Didn’t she bear very hard on him?”

“She couldn’t endure to see him, or to have him near her. Is that very wonderful?”

“You stand up for her then?”

“She was first and foremost a mother.”

“Do you know,” Vane said rather dryly, “you are the only woman I never hear speak against other women. But when the whole thing was an accident?”

“We can’t always be quite fair, or quite reasonable, when a terrible shock comes to us.”

“It’s a problem, a terrible problem of the affections,” Vane said. “Had she loved her husband? Do you know?”

“I know that he loved her very much,” said Mrs. Clarke. “He is here under an assumed name.”

Vane looked openly surprised and even, for a moment, rather disdainful.

“But then——” He paused.

“Why did I give him away?”

“Well—yes.”

“Because I wish to force him to face things fully and squarely. It’s his only chance.”

“Won’t he be angry?”

“But I don’t mind that.”

“You’ve had a reason in telling me,” said Vane quietly. “What is it?”

“Come up to my sitting-room. We’ll have coffee there.”

“Willingly. I feel your spell even when you’re weaving it for another man’s sake.”

Mrs. Clarke did not reject the compliment. She only looked at Vane, and said:

“Come.”

CHAPTER II

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.