Stamboul nights

Front matter

STAMBOUL ifj

NIGHTS n \A' I G !-I T

CORNELL

Introduction

BY JOHN MACY

AN INTRODUCTION to this book is a bit of impertinence for which Mr. Dwight and the reader and I will hold the publisher responsible. A new edition of "Hamlet" seems to require a biography of the putative author and an explanation of what the play probably does not mean. But Mr. Dwight has not been long enough in the company of the immortals to merit that sort of treatment. Perhaps in three centuries, when another layer of civilization and romance has settled upon the ancient city which he seems to know down through all the stratifications of the past, a critic will write a learned essay about him and will identify, incorrectly, the arch under which one of these tales happened to happen. Then Mr. Dwight's spirit, with its oriental indifference to time, may exchange a wink with Homer, Shakespeare, and his other friends. For the moment the publisher and I have him at a disadvantage and we postpone him for a couple of pages in the hope that we may be promoting his transitory earthly

X INTRODUCTION

fortune. The gods have taken charge of his literary future.

If there has to be an introduction to "Stamboul Nights," I am proud to be the one chosen to sit before Mr. Dwight's tent and beat the drum. The tent is not large, and the audience does not completely fill it. From the crowd that swarms toward the great three-ring circus only a few are to be deflected to our more modest and more mysterious performance. Yet our select audience will, I dare predict, be renewed year in and year out and in time will amount to a goodly company. Those who once fall under the spell of this delicate and quiet magician will come again and bring their most intimate friends.

It was a friend who enticed me into the tent long before I was hired as a professional beater and barker. Raymond Crosby, the artist, gave me a copy of "Stamboul Nights" inscribed in a fine hand, the words in parentheses in a still finer hand: "To J. M. with the cordial regards of (an admirer of) THE AUTHOR." It is by such whimsical means, in this case nicely in harmony with the sly moods of the author, that the news of a fine achievement sometimes comes to us more effectively than through the public pronoimcements of critics. They utter so many judgments on so many matters that our hardened ears are often unheeding. The private whispered rumour spreads

INTRODUCTION xi

and prevails, especially when it is accompanied by a gift copy of a book! I could not always afford to send the book, but I have done my best to hint quietly to the discerning that "Stamboul Nights" is on the way to becoming a classic. You see, I am already speaking in a confidential low voice and have forgotten my drum.

For an increasing number of readers Constantinople, already ^^sited or never to be seen with other eyes than those of the imagination, will be the Stamboul of Mr. Dwight. He has captured by the peaceful stratagem of art the city which has suffered so many violent invasions, and has made it his own with a title more secure than any known to soliders, diplomats, and commercial exploiters. Nobody, Turk, European, or American, will wish to oust him or will envy him his rich possession except with the generous envy which is aroused in us by a man who can write. He took the city by letting the city take him. How he did it is a secret that cannot be analyzed. Undoubtedly Stamboul is gorgeous material. But gorgeous material does not make gorgeous writing unless there is a sensitive literary fellow loafing about and transmuting it into words. Mr. Dwight says that from a certain terrace one looks down upon the "most romantic scene in the world." That is such an assertion as a writer of bare expository prose might make. Mr. Dwight proves it.

xii INTRODUCTION

He conveys the romance from the Bosphorus to a page printed in America. When that miracle occurs there is an addition to the pages that are hterature.

Mr. Dwight says that he was not bom with the gift of invention, that he tells the tale .as it was told to him. That innocent mendacity is an old trick, true only in that it lacks originality! It will deceive no sophisticated reader; it no longer has the effect of cajoling our credulity, of making us more willing to believe that a story must be so because, forsooth, the author did not make it up. Shakespeare did not invent most of his plots. Boccaccio stole what he hked and in turn was liberally pillaged by later pirates. We are interested only as scholars, not as readers of fiction, in the authorship of "Arabian Nights' Entertainments." I put Mr. Dwight in the best company, and I thereby accuse him of having rediscovered and applied in his own fashion methods of story-telling which are as aged as Stamboul.

The retelling of a story, whether it is traditional or is pieced together from the experience of a halfarticulate vagabond casually encountered, requires the finest skill, the most perfect command of the art of narrative. It is not simply a matter of pouring old wine into bottles of new and original shape. The liquor itself imdergoes chemical changes and acquires flavour and perfume that it did not have

INTRODUCTION xiii

before. Like all masters of narrative Mr. Dwight is best, of course, when he seems not to invent. That is rule number one in any useless handbook on How to Write Fiction. The tale in which I find the least of his peculiar genius is the title stoiy in another of his books, "The Emperor of Elam." It is a good story, full of colour, character, narrative excitement, and was jiistly selected as one of the "Best Short Stories of 1917." But that is the trouble with it ; it is a war story ; it ends with a bang and has "punch." In short, it sounds made up, made with a kind of artifice in which many other spinners of jrarns can easily rival Mr. Dwight. The sort of artifice in which he excels is subtle, a delight to the curious and ironic mind, and perhaps baffling, even imtating, to the mind that can receive only the obvious and demands that everything be made plain. This writer needs a reader who can i-ead, who enjoys mystifications that are never explained. Take the last story in this volume. You will find yourself thinking about that chest for days and days, but you shall never know what is in it. It would be easier to find the answer to "The Lady or the Tiger." The nightingale sings, and that is the only possible ending. For it is not an ending; the song will go on forever. Or look in the other volume of which I have spoken (you wiJ] wish to i-ead that, too) at a stoiy called "The Emerald of Tamerlane." If you xiv INTRODUCTION

choose, you may know where that emerald is, you may carry it in your pocket, you may give it away, but you may never sell it. Mr. Dwight's jewels are enchanted stones, which have had a long history in a land of amulets and talismans. And he does strange things with them. The strangest thing he does is to give them a new charm. And it is new and the more surprising because these precious gems have witnessed many things under the sun and reflected every phase of human character. It is the charm of American himiour added to the old humour of the Orient. To make the light of the present play in and out through the light of the past — in what other modem fiction do you find just that kind of wizardry?

THE SCRIBE TO A POSSIBLE READER

"Yes," said Sir Thomas, speaking of a fashionable Tiovel, "it certainly does seem strange: hut the novelist was right. Such things do happen."

"But my dear sir," I burst out, in the rudest manner, "Oiink what life really is^ust think what Iiappens! Why people suddenly swell up, turn dark purple; hang themselves on meat hooks; they are drowned in horseponds, run over by butchers' carts, burnt alive and cooked like mutton chops!"

Of the following stories five have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, three in Scribner's Magazine, and one each in Appleton's Magazine, the English Review, Harper's Weekly, Mc- Clure's Ma^azinf, and Putnam's Monthly. To the courtesy of the editors and publishers of these periodicals I am indebted for permission to tell my tales a second time — although I may add that not one of the tales is told identically as it was the first time. I am also under obligations to Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons for kindly allowing me to use again an illustration and a Turkish seal already published by them. The sketch entitled "Mehmish" has for excellent reasons been despised and rejected of aU editors. For no better reason than that it hap-

THE SCRIBE TO A POSSIBLE READER

pens to be true, however, and because it is in its way characteristic, I keep it in the company of its more fortunate contemporaries.

The teller of the stories has inherited enough Puritanism to believe in the uses of adversity, while resei^ng judgment on the sweetness thereof, and he raises no outcry against the discouragements through which his somewhat exotic fictions have slowly made their way into print. But he would be less than human if something in him did not warm toward those among the arbiters of destiny who first granted him a hearing. Let him, then, express particular gratitude to Mr. E. ^ L. Burlingame, who accepted for Scribner's Magazine the earliest of these stories, "For the Faith" — of which others had earher reading; to Miss Willa Sibert Gather, who as editor of McClure's Magazine puffed up an obscure heart with pride by commissioning Frank Brangwyn to paint a picture for "Mill Valley"; and to Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, who found room in the Atlantic Monthly for a thrice-rejected "Leopard of the Sea" — who even found kind words for a scribe xmused enough to such sounds to be childishly heartened by them. I cannot help feeling grateful, either, to a publisher so venturesome as to bring out a volume of short stories by an unknown writer. And I wish I might acknowledge the many debts I owe

THE SCRIBE TO A POSSIBLE READER

in the way of material. No good faiiy, alas, dropped the gift of invention into my cradle, and not one of these stories could really be called mine. Several of them I put on paper almost exactly as they were told me. More of them were pieced together out of odd bits of experience and gossip. The seed of one was contained in a paragraph of the Matin which I read one morning in Paris. And another may be found, in miniature, in Stendhal's "De rAmour." To that comprehending Frenchman, unhappily, it was never given to peruse '"When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' hTe. . . ."!

xvu

STAMBOUL NIGHTS

STAMBOUL NIGHTS

Power over the waters hath Allah given to the unbeliever, but over the land to the faithful.

— Turkish Proverb.

AFTER it was quite dark, a man who strolled by happened to catch sight of my camera. He stopped and began to examine it. I discreetly lit a cigarette in order to show him that the camera had a proprietor. He continued his inspection, as much as to show me that he had known I was there. Then he took out his tobacco box, rolled a cigarette with deliberation, came up to me, saluted me politely, and lighted his cigarette from mine. It is the custom of the country, you know. Nobody has any matches. I suppose somebody did once, but since then everybody has gone on taking the sacred fire from everybody else.

Having made the second salutation of usage, the stranger showed no haste to be off. Indeed, after standing a moment, he sat down on an other stone near me — not so near as the Greek had done. From that, and from his silence, and from a certain easy awkwardness about him, I guessed he was a Turk.

"Do you make postcards?" he asked at last.

"No," I said, "I am just taking a picture,"

"Ah, you have a whim."

"Yes," I assented, "I have a whim." And I smiled to myself in the dark at the pleasant idiom.

"Why do you take pictures now, when it is dark?" pursued my companion. "There is a very pretty view from here in the daytime, but can your machine see it at night?"

I did not mind his inquisitiveness. There was nothing eager or insistent about it. It was simple and natural, and there was a quality in it that I often feel in the Turks, of being able to take the preliminaries of life for granted. The man was evidently not of the higher classes, but neither was he of the lowest. I could make out that he wore European clothes and no collar.

"I want to get the lights of Ramazan," I explained to him. "I took one picture at sunset, so as to get the shape of Yeni Jami and the way the Golden Horn lies behind it, and afterward I shall take another on the same plate, for the lights."

"Ah!" he uttered, as if perfectly comprehending my whim. And after a pause he added : "They must make a great feast at Yeni Jami to-night. They have not hghted one lamp yet."

It was true. The minarets of St. Sophia, the Suleimanieh, all the other great mosques that ride the crest of Stamboul, already wore their necklaces of gold beads, while mysterious pendants began to twinkle between them. We watched one spark after another spell "0 Mohammed !" above the dome of St. Sophia, and a golden flower grew out of the dark between the minarets of Baiezid.

"Do you come from far?" suddenly asked my companion.

"Yes," I said, "from America."

"From America," he repeated. I could see by his tone that the name did not suggest very much to him. "I have been to many countries, but I have not been to America. How many days does it take to go ?"

"Eh," I replied, "if you pay very much and go half the way by train you can do it in eight or nine days. If you go all the way by steamer it takes about three weeks."

"Then it is not so far as Yemen," remarked my companion.

"Oh, have you been to Yemen?" I asked in turn. "I have been to many countries too, but I have never been to Yemen."

"I never would have gone if I had known. But now they go most of the way by train."

"Didn't you hke the sea?" I ventured.

"Fire is for the brazier and water is for the cup," returned my companion somewhat enigmatically.

A flicker came out against one of the dark lances of Yeni Jami, and then three small lamps — which were glass cups of oil with a floating wick — dropped into place one above another. Presently three more appeared beside them, and three more, until the lower gallery of the minaret was set off with its triple circlet of light. There was an interval, during which one could imagine a turbaned person picking his way up a corkscrew stair of stone, and the second gallery put on a similar ornament. I was wondering whether the turbaned person would have to climb all the way down to the ground and up into the other minaret, when lights began to flicker there too. But what I really wondered was what my companion meant by his odd proverb.

"Have you been much on the sea?" I asked, hoping to find out.

"Eh, my father was a stoker on the Leopard of the Sea, and when I was thirteen or fourteen

I went on board too. The captain took a fancy to me, and when I grew up they made me a Heutenant. But we only went outside once: that time we went to Yemen."

"Oh !" I exclaimed; beginning to be interested in my man and resolving to seize him by the leg if he got up from his stone. "What sort of a ship was the Leopard of the Sea?"

"Didn't you ever hear of her?" he asked in surprise. I didn't answer and he went on : "She was not a battleship, if that is what you mean. They called her a cruiser. She was an old steamer they bought in Europe. Sometimes she carried soldiers to the Dardanelles, 'but most of the time she lay in the Golden Horn."

"How did she happen to go to Yemen?"

The experience of a lengthening career has taught me that information may sometimes be obtained by asking for it, and this time my strategy was successful.

"It was an idea of Sultan Hamid. One night, late late, an aide-de-camp from the Palace came on board with an officer in chains, and said that he was to be taken at once to Yemen. Ten minutes later another aide-de-camp came to say good-bye to the officer, from the Sultan, and to give him his promotion as general, and to make him a present of five hundred pounds. They said he was a Circassian prince and that he had been plotting. It was a lie. But Sultan Hamid believed it. And how was he to know that you cannot start for Yemen like that, in ten minutes? It was not his trade. It was ours ; but none of us was on board, and we had no coal, and no food, and nothing, and the people from the Palace said we must be gone before morning. So sailors came to wake us up — as many of us as they could find — and there was great calamity. And we did start before morning. We got a tug to pull us, and we went around to Kiichiik Chekmejeh, in the Marmora, and there we stayed till we were ready to start. It took us three or four weeks. The machine was old and broken, and we had to get an Englishman to mend it. And the Leopard of the Sea had been lying so long in the harbour that no one could find her bottom. It was all grown with bushes and trees, like a garden. And what mussels grew in the garden! And what pilaf they made ! We picked oiT all we could, and we ate them ourselves till we were sick of them, and we sold the rest. The mussels of the Leopard of the Sea were famous in Constantinople. Afterward we were sorry we had sold the mussels though. When at last we started for Yemen each one of us had ten loaves of bread and some olives and cheese. We didn't know how long we would be on the way. At the end of three days we had only just passed the Dardanelles and the cheese and olives were gone. A day or two later the bread was gone too, though we were still far from Yemen."

"How about water?" I asked.

"Water we had, thanks to God! We had a machine for making the water of the sea sweet. It was only food we didn't have. We had to stop at an island and get some."

"What island was it ?" pursued I, in curiosity, wondering how far the Leopard of the Sea got on ten loaves of bread a man.

"How should I know? It was an island in the White Sea." By which he meant not our \^'Tiite Sea but the Mediterranean. "I didn't ask the name. Greeks lived on it. The governor of course was a Turk. We were very sorry when we left it. The sea began to show himself after that. Until then we had not known him."

"Were you sick?"

The darkness hid on my face the grin without which this question may not be asked.

"My soul! Who is not sick when the mnd blows on the sea — unless he is accustomed ? We were not accustomed. How should we be ? We had never put our noses outside the Dardanelles. It was worst for the captain and me, because we had to stay on deck and steer whether we were sick or not. But we got accustomed by and by. And the captain taught me a httle about the machine which points its finger at the Great Bear, and about the papers wherein are written all the lands and islands of the earth. And after two or three weeks we found Egypt. It seemed to me a miracle. When I saw it lying white and flat on the edge of the sea and the captain said it was Egypt, I said to myself: How do we know that it is Egypt ? It may be Persia. It may be England. But it was Egypt, thanks to God! And if it had not been for the Circassian I don't know what we would have done.

"He was a very good man. The aide-decamp who brought him from the Palace said that he was to be kept shut up in a small room and that he was to eat nothing but bread and water. But we were all shut up and none of us had anything but bread and water, and not always that. And so the captain very soon let the Circassian do what he liked. And when we got to Egypt the Circassian bought food and coal for us, out of the money the Sultan had given him. For we had none. We had spent all we had at Kiichiik Chekmejeh and at the island. Then we went on, through the river that goes into the Arabian Sea. We had orders to take the Circassian to Jiddeh; but at Suez they brought us a telegram telling us to go on without stopping to Hodeida, and afterward to bring the Circassian back to Jiddeh. At Hodeida, however, we found another telegram which said that we were to go on to Basra, for some soldiers."

"To Basra!" I exclaimed.

I began to feel hopelessly choked up with questions. I wanted to know more about the Circassian. I wanted to know more about the captain. I wanted to know more about everything. The man whom chance had brought for a moment to a stone beside me had an Odyssey in him, if one could only get at it.

"To Basra, ya!" he said before I could stop him. "And a time we had getting to Basra — more than two months. It was so hot we could not sleep at night, and again we had nothing to eat. And worst of all, the machine that made the water of the sea sweet got a hole in it, we used it so much, and after that the water was only partly sweet. And it was so bad we tried to find water on the land, and one night we went too near and sat." By which the mate of the Leopard of the Sea meant that they ran aground.

"We sat for two weeks, trj'ing to get away. It was good that the wind did not blow in that time. In the end I don't know whether more water came into the sea or what happened, bui all of a sudden we found that we could move. Then another calamity came on our heads. Although we had been sitting for two weeks we had been burning coal most of the time, trying to get away. So before we got to Basra no coal was left. The Circassian had bought more than we needed to get to Jiddeh or even to Hodeida, but we never expected to go any farther. So we spent all our time finding wood for the machine. We burned up all the doors, all the chairs, all the tables, all the boats. We cut down walls in the ship, we tore up decks. And then we only just got into the river of Basra.

"At Basra how good it was to put our feet on the earth! And if you knew what a country that is — hot, flat, dirty! They speak Arabic too, which none of us could understand but the Circassian. And thieves! We had already burned up most of the ship, but they would have stolen the rest if we had let them. So although we had come to land we still had no peace. And twelve hundred soldiers were waiting for us and expected to be taken away immediately. They had been in Arabia seven years, poor things, although when they went the government promised that they should stay only three. There had been three thousand of them in the beginning. More than half of them had died, not from bullets but from the sun of that country and its poisonous air. And not one of them had been paid or had had a new uniform in seven years. You would have wept to see them — how ragged and thin they were, and how they begged us to pay them and take them away.

"How could we take them away or pay them ? We had not been paid ourselves for four or five months, and we had no food or water or coal, and nobody would give us any. We went to the governor, we went to the general, we went to everybody; but not a para could we get. The Circassian still had a little money, most of which we used in telegraphing to Constantinople. And still no money came. We had to sell our watches, our clothes, anything we had left. One day we even sold two windows — you know the little round windows in the wall of a ship ? A fat Arab wanfed them for his house. W^hat could we do? We had to live. We couldn't find any others to take their places and so we nailed kerosene tins over the holes — one inside and one outside. They looked verj" funny, like blind eyes. They were at the bow, one on each side."

My companion paused a moment, as if musing over the blind eyes of the Leopard of the Sea. Then he rolled himself another cigarette.

I noticed for the first time that the minarets of Yeni Jami were fully alight, and that other lights were beginning to hang in the darkness between them.

"In the end it was the Circassian again who got us away from Basra. He gave the captain the last money he had and told him to telegraph to Sultan Hamid and say five hundred pounds must be sent to us immediately or we would go to Europe and set the Circassian free. How was Sultan Hamid in his palace to know that we had no coal and could not go to Europe if we wanted to ? But the next day the governor came to the captain with five hundred pounds and a decoration, which he pinned on his coat with much speech, and invited him not to let the dangerous Circassian go. The dangerous Circassian was there listening with the others, and the governor liked to speak with him more than with any of us, because he was an effendi and knew all the people of the Palace. The governor after all, poor man, was no better than an exile himself.

"So at last we started back to Jiddeh, with money in our pockets and bread in the cupboard and coal in the machine. The captain took care to put a lot in the place where the windows had been that he sold, to keep the tin tight against the wall of the ship. We got along very well that time. \Ve reached Jiddeh in forty-five days. Before we got there the captain told the Circassian that he would not give him to the governor but that he would give another man, one of the soldiers, and say it was the Circassian, and bring the Circassian back to Egypt and let him go. But the Circassian would not allow him. He said it was not just that another man should be punished in his place, and that they would find it out in Constantinople and punish the captain and the governor and there would be many calamities. Even when the cap-_ tain wept and kissed his feet, the Circassian would not allow him. You see they had lived together for so many months and had suffered so much together that they had become friends. Ah, he was a very good man. Because he was a good man (Jod rewarded him, as you will see."

I did not see at once, however, for my companion stopped again. And when he went on it was not to give me any essential light on the history of the mysterious Circassian.

"I told you about the soldiers we brought from Basra, who had been in Arabia seven yeai-s and who had never been paid. They were so glad to leave Basfa' that they made little noise about their money, and the general promised them that they would get it in Jiddeh. But when they heard the story of the Circassian, how he telegraphed to Sultan Hamid and got money for us, they said it was a shame that he didn't get money for them too: they had gone seven years without a para. And when the general of Jiddeh told them that they would be paid in Constantinople they made much noise. They would not believe that the general had no money, and they brought the Circassian into it again and said he must telegraph to Sultan Hamid. They could not understand! It was only when the general threatened to keep them in Yemen and send the Leopard of the Sea home without them that they were quiet.