She felt it almost overwhelmingly when, on the first night of her arrival at Varna, she stood on the ricketty wooden verandah of the half-ruined house which had been found for her, looking out over the long line of inland lakes that in the past month had gained from the intruders whose white tents showed everywhere the dismal name of "Lake of Death." A white miasma rose from it, hiding the level green fields which in the sunset had glowed purple-red with the meadow saffron. Everything had gone smoothly. The old hakim Achmet had gripped on the hope of money, and Marrion Paul, who had remained on board the steamer until all negotiations had been made, had simply stepped into the dinghy in her Turkish dress and been carried with due privacy to the house chosen for her. Mercifully, the ship's surgeon--who was delighted at his importance as entrepreneur--had been impressed by Marrion's appearance, and, arguing therefrom the length of her purse, had fixed on a villa which had once belonged to a pasha of some sort. It stood high among cypresses on the Devna road, but, by a steep descent, was close to the worse slums of the town.
So, as Marrion stood, trying to realise her position, it seemed impossible, unreal that she should be within touch of Marmaduke--if he were still there--if he were not dead. An indefinable sense of tragedy impending--tragedy that was not all grief, but which, by very excess of joy, of glory, of intensity, transcended the normal and so became almost fearful, seemed to hang round her. She ate the Turkish supper provided for her by the large fat shrill-voiced woman she found in charge; she lay down in the Turkish quilt arranged for her on a wooden bed and tried to leave all questionings for the morrow; but she could not sleep. The cry of the muezzin from a minaret hard by divided the night into set portions. She lay and listened to it.
"Al-sul-lah to khair un mun nun nu."
She knew what it meant--"Prayer is better than sleep." But she seemed unable to do either the one or the other.
Mercifully, again, the night was not long. Far away over the sea in the east the dawn began to break golden. It lit up the scarped hills above the woody slopes and slowly, like a white curtain, the mists of the valley lifted, showing the shiny levels of the inland lakes. Below her, at her feet, beyond the vine pergola set with purpling bunches of grapes that jutted against the blue distance, lay the town, a packed mass of red-tiled roofs and shingled outhouses, incoherent, barely cognisable. There lay her work; not over yonder where, like little heaps of lime, the white bell-tents outlined every hill.
Hark, the world was waking! From every side sounded the réveillé, echoing and re-echoing among the hills.
How many men had died that night whose ears would never more hear the call to duty! Was Marmaduke one of them?
Yes, the shadow of death lay on everything; but at least they were together in it.
[VI]
But even that poignant question as to whether Marmaduke lived or did not live lost its arresting power before what she saw when, guided by the hakim Achmet, she threaded the maze of lanes and alleys which still formed the real Varna. The quays, it is true, had been widened and glorified. Along them gay restaurants and cafés chantants were to be found, filled with reckless soldiers and still more reckless courtesans. A wide street had been hacked through tenement houses and lined with tawdry shops which catered for all and every luxury that can give a moment's pleasure to idle men. And there were plenty of them here, waiting, waiting still for that expedition of one hundred thousand soldiers to the Crimea, of which for months past the English papers had been full. Outwardly, therefore, so far as a fringe of welcome and a passage through it to the hills beyond went, Varna was what folk boasted it had become, a cosmopolitan town; but within, down by the back wharves and the sodden sea-alleys, round by the crushed-in closes and stifling courts, it was old, rotten, kept from utter putrefaction by the hot sun which, while it bred flies, dried up the muck of many men. The hakim's hospital was in the wide courtyard of a mosque, one of the few air-holes left to the seething city; and Marrion Paul never forgot her first sight of the sunlit square set round with the dead and dying. The stench was unspeakable, and as she stooped over the first patient she saw that the sheet which covered him was alive with vermin. Achmet himself, a hunchback with a high-featured, intolerant face, seemed to think that sitting in the middle of the courtyard reciting his beads and exhorting the inmates to have patience and trust in God, was the best treatment he could offer. Mayhap it was, since half the forms that lay moaning on the stones were doomed to death. That night, when Marrion returned to her cypress-set villa, the first thing she did was to cut off her beautiful hair close to her head, and as she laid the great tresses away she thought once more of Marmaduke. She must find out about him when she had time, but that day and the next she had her work cut out for her. "Maryam Effendi" they had already learnt to call her, and old Achmet, with a daily stipend of so many piastres, was content to let her have her way. But there were other places besides the mosque hospital where some fifty men groaned and died, or groaned and got better, that were surcharged with misery and death. Hovels where babies tugged vainly at their dead mother's breasts and old women sat starving silently. It was among these that after a day or two Maryam Effendi was busiest. She settled to her work bravely, increasing her stock of Turkish rapidly and gaining for herself sufficient friends and aid to enable her to enlarge her sphere of usefulness. One of these was big fat "Heart's Darling," as her solitary servant was called, who, transferring domestic duties to an unspeakable drudge she produced, took up the duties of interpreter on the strength of some slight knowledge of French.