“Not even for Jimmy!” she thought. “I must be myself. I cannot be otherwise. I must live perilously. To live in any other way for me would be death.”
And the line in “The Kasidah” which Dion had pondered over came to her, and she thought of the “death that walks in form of life.”
As the carriage went upon the bridge she looked across to Stamboul, and was faced by the Mosque of the Valideh. So familiar to her was the sight of its facade, of its cupolas and minarets, that she seldom now even thought of it when she crossed the bridge; but to-day, perhaps because she was unusually strung up, was restive and almost horribly alert, she gazed at it and was intensely conscious of it. She had once said to Dion that Stamboul was the City of the Unknown God, and now suddenly she felt that she was nearing His altars. A strange, perverse desire to pray came to her; to go up into one of the mosques of this mysterious city which she loved, and to pray for her release from Dion Leith.
She smiled faintly as this idea came into her mind. The Unknown God had surely made her as she was, had made her a huntress. Well, then, surely she had the right to pray to Him to give her a free course for her temperament.
“Santa Sophia!” she called to the coachman.
He cracked his whip and drove furiously on to Stamboul. In less than a quarter of an hour he pulled up his horses before the vast Church of Santa Sophia.
Mrs. Clarke sat still in the carriage for a moment looking up at the ugly towering walls, covered with red and white stripes. Her face was haggard in the sunshine, and her pale lips were set together in a hard line. A beggar with twisted stumps instead of arms whined a petition to her, but she neither saw him nor heard him. As she stared at the walls on which the sun blazed she was wondering about her future. The love of life was desperately strong within her that day. The longing for new experiences tormented her physically. She felt as if she could not wait, could not be patient any more. If Dion to-night refused again to give her her freedom she must do something desperate. She must get away secretly and hide herself from him, take a boat to Greece or Rumania, or slip into the Orient express and vanish over the tracks of Europe.
But first she must go into the church and pray to the Unknown God.
She got out of the carriage. The beggar thrust one of his diseased stumps in front of her face. She turned on him with a malignant look, and the whining petition died on his lips. Then she made her way to the Porta Basilica and passed into the church. But as its great spaces opened out before her a thought, childishly superstitious, came to her, and she turned abruptly, went out, made her way to the beggar who had worried her, gave him a coin and said something kind to him. His almost soprano voice, raised in clamorous benediction, followed her as she returned to the church, moving slowly with horrible loose slippers protecting its floor from her Christian feet. She always laughed in her mind when she wore those slippers and thought of what she was. This sanctuary of the unknown God must, it seemed, be protected from her because she was a Christian!
There were a good many people in the church, but it looked almost empty because of its immense size. She knew it very well, better perhaps than she knew any other sacred building, and she cared for it very much. She was fond of mosques, delighting in their airy simplicity, in their casual holiness which seemed to say to her, “Worship in me if you will. If you will not, never mind; dream in me with open eyes, or, if you prefer it, go to sleep in a corner of me. When you wake you can mutter a prayer, or not, just as you please.”