The Purple Cloud

by M. P. Shiel

By the time we reached the Speranza, the rain suddenly stopped: I went down to my cabin to change my clothes, and had to shut the door in her face to keep her out. When I opened it, she was there, and she followed me to the windlass, when I went to set the anchor-engine going. I intended, I suppose, to take her to Imbros, where she might live in one of the broken-down houses of the village. But when the anchor was not yet half up, I stopped the engine, and let the chain run again. For I said, '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 nothing for 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 into the boat, and when she followed, I rowed her back all the way past Foundoucli and the Tophana quay to where one turns into the Golden Horn by St. Sophia, around the mouth of the Horn being a vast semicircle of charred wreckage, carried out by the river-currents. I went up the steps on the Galata side before one comes to where the barge-bridge was. When she had followed me on to the embankment, I walked up one of those rising streets, very encumbered now with stone-débris and ashes, but still marked by some standing black wall-fragments, it being now not far from night, but the air as clear and washed as the translucency of a great purple diamond with the rain and the afterglow of the sun, and all the 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 and wine-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 to the quay. She was after me, but being taken by surprise, I suppose, was distanced a little at first. However, by the time I could scurry myself down into the boat, she was so near, that she only saved herself from the water by a balancing stoppage at the brink, as I pushed off. I then set out to get back to the ship, muttering: 'You can have Turkey, if you like, and I will keep the rest of the world.'

I rowed sea-ward, my face toward her, but steadily averted, for I would not look her way to see what she was doing. However, as I turned the point of the quay, where the open sea washes quite rough and loud, to go northward and disappear from her, I heard a babbling cry—the first sound which she had uttered. I did look then: and she was still quite near 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 wild strangeness, of my own voice, addressing on this earth another human soul?

There she stood, whimpering like an abandoned dog after me. I turned the boat, rowed, came to the first steps, landed, and struck her two stinging slaps, one on each cheek. While she cowered, surprised no doubt, I took her by the hand, led her back to the boat, landed on the Stamboul side, and set off, still leading her, my object being to find some sort of possible edifice near by, not hopelessly burned, in which to leave her: for in all Galata there was plainly none, and Pera, I thought, was too far to walk to. But it would have been better if I had gone to Pera, for we had to walk quite three miles from Seraglio Point all along the city battlements to the Seven-towers, she picking her bare-footed way after me through the great Sahara of charred stuff, and night now well arrived, and the moon a-drift in the heaven, making the desolate lonesomeness of the ruins tenfold desolate, so that my heart smote me then with bitterness and remorse, and I had a vision of myself that night which I will not put down on paper. At last, however, pretty late in the evening, I spied a large mansion with green lattice-work façade, and shaknisier, and terrace-roof, which had been hidden from me by the arcades of a bazaar, a vast open space at about the centre of Stamboul, one of the largest of the bazaars, I should think, in the middle of which stood the mansion, probably the home of pasha or vizier: for it had a very distinguished look in that place. It seemed very little hurt, though the vegetation that had apparently choked the great open space was singed to a black fluff, among which lay thousands of calcined bones of man, horse, ass, and camel, for all was distinct in the bright, yet so pensive and forlorn, moonlight, which was that Eastern moonlight of pure astral mystery which illumines Persepolis, and Babylon, 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 a hundred luxuries still good. There was an outer wall, but the foliage over it had been singed away, and the gate all charred. It gave way at a push from my palm. The girl was close behind me. I next threw open a little green lattice-door in the façade under the shaknisier, and entered. Here it was dark, and the moment that she, too, was within, I slipped out quickly, slammed the door in her face, and hooked it upon her by a little hook over the latch.

I now walked some yards beyond the court, then stopped, listening for her expected cry: but all was still: five minutes—ten—I waited: but no sound. I then continued my morose and melancholy way, hollow with hunger, intending to start that night for Imbros.

But this time I had hardly advanced twenty steps, when I heard a frail and strangled cry, apparently in mid-air behind me, and glancing, saw the creature lying at the gateway, a white thing in black stubble-ashes. She had evidently jumped, well outward, from a small casement of lattice on a level with the little shaknisier grating, through which once peeped bright eyes, thirty feet aloft.