University of Virginia Library

4. IV.

My confidential interviews with Job began to take
rather an unpleasant coloring. The forty pounds I
had paid for Maimuna's liberty, with the premium to
Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to
disguise my new companion, and the addition of a
third person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather
drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little
for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and
made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop,
instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at
Madame Josepino's. He submitted with the same
resignation to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus,
and several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking
nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully
with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat
of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem
or Mecca. so only I was content. But the morality of
the thing!

“What will you do with this beautiful girl when
you get to Rome? how will you dispose of her in
Paris? how will your friends receive a female, already
arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have
travelled with you two or three years on the continent?
how will you provide for her? how educate her? how
rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of compassion,
when she has become irrevocably attached to
you?”

We were pulling up to the Symplegades while my
plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions,
and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom
of the caique, gazing into my face with eyes that
seemed as if they would search my very soul for the
cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in
her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt
excluded from the conversation amounted in her all-expressive
features to a look of anguish that made it
seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in
words, why I was vexed; but she gathered from Job's
tone that there was reproof in what he said, and
flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious
face, she gently stole her hand under the cloak to
mine, and laid the back of it softly in my palm. There
was a delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that
started a tear into my eye; and as I smiled through it,
and drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her forehead.
I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely
creature should choose to eat of my bread, it should
be free to her in all honor and kindness, and, if need
were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my
life, the wrong and misconstruction of the world.
As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept
through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my good
angel had taken me into favor. Job began to fumble
for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot forth merrily
into the Black sea.

“My dearest chum!” said I, as we sat round our
brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the
Symplegades, “you see yourself here at the outermost
limit of your travels.”

His mouth was full, but as soon as he could conveniently
swallow, he responded with the appropriate
sigh.

“Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you
and your spectacled and respectable mother; but
nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth's
circumference, extending due east from this paper of
cold meat, remain to you untravelled!”

Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently
asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the
sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with
our boundless wishes.

“Do you not envy him?” he asked enthusiastically.

“Yes; for nature pays his travelling expenses, and
I would our common mother were as considerate to
me! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond,
posting at that courier speed?”

“And Shiraz, and Isaphan, and the valley of Cashmere!
To think how that stupid bird will fly over
them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom
Moore, have written on the lands that his shadow may
glide throught, will return, as wise as he went, to
Marmora! To compound natures with him were a
nice arrangement, now!”

“You would be better looking, my dear Job!”

“How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slingsby! But
really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and
il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with
all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into
breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under
you, and, instead of coat and unmentionables to be put
off and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a
self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers, brushed
and washed in the common course of nature by wind
and rain—no valet to be paid and drilled—no dressing-case
to be supplied and left behind—no tooth-brushes
to be mislaid—no tight boots—no corns—no passports
nor host-horses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I
find this `mortal coil' a very inferior and inconvenient
apparatus!”

“If you mean your own, I quite agree with you.”

“I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value
yourself on knowing what is due from one highly-civilized
individual to another, should indulge in these
very disagreeable reflections!”

Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument,
but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without
ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always
taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my
neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and
put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her
clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added
visibly to my friend's mortification. A compunctious
visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should
scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all,
but a kind severity.

“Do you know, Job,” said I (anxious to restore his
self-complacency without a direct apology for my rudeness),
“do you know there is a very deep human truth
hidden in the familiar story of `Beauty and the Beast?'
I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of
hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness,
there is no face which, after a month's intercourse,
does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in
other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual)
for the admiration it excites. The plainest features
become handsome unaware when associated only with
kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when
linked with ill-humor or caprice. People should re

member this when selecting a face which they are to
see every morning across the breakfast-table for the remainder
of their natural lives.”

Job was appeased by the indirect compliment contained
in this speech; and, gathering up our kibaubs,
we descended to the caique, and pulling around the
easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to
the orient, and took the first step westward with the
smile of conciliation on our lips.

We were soon in the strong current of the Bosphorus,
and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia,
by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the
west for our return. It was a golden path homeward.
The east looked cold behind; and the welcome of
our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those purpling
clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling
horizon—below that departed sun—lay the fresh and
free land of our inheritance. The light of the world
seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day
had declined, were countries of memory—ours, of
hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawning
gloriously on ours.

On ordinary occasions, Job would have given me a
stave of “Hail Columbia!” after such a burst of patriotism.
The cloud was on his soul, however.

“We have turned to go back,” he said, in a kind of
musing bitterness, “and see what we are leaving behind!
In this fairy-shaped boat you are gliding like a
dream down the Bosphorus. The curving shore of
Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure-loving
inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a
life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ramble
on the edge of these calm waters with their kinsmen
and children. Is there a picture in the world
more beautiful than that palace-lined shore? Is there
a city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it
terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills,
simpler or better people, to live among, than these?
Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, is a `working-day'
land. There is no idleness there! The sweat is
ever on the brow, the `serpent of care' never loosened
about the heart! I confess myself a worshipper of
leisure: I would let no moment of my golden youth
go by unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungodlike,
and unworthy of the immortal spirit, that should walk
unchained through the world. I love these idle orientals.
Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their
flowing and ungirded habiliments, are signs most expressive
of their joy in life. Look around, and see
how on every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance;
how every hill-side is shelved into those green platforms,
[11] so expressive of their habits of enjoyment!
Rich or poor, their pleasures are the same. The
open air, freedom to roam, a caique at the water-side,
and a sairgah on the hill—these are their means of
happiness, and they are within the reach of all; they
are nearer Utopia than we, my dear Philip! We shall
be more like Turks than Christians in paradise!”

“Inglorious Job!”

“Why? Because I love idleness? Are there
braver people in the world than the Turks? Are
there people more capable of the romance of heroism?
Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of
idleness. All extremes are natural and easy; and the
most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in
war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sultan
Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle?
Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the
boldest measures in history. There is the most perfect
orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty
by Hafiz:—

Perhaps nothing would be so contradictory as the true
analysis of the character of what is called an indolent
man. With all the tastes I have just professed, my
strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for example,
was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my
steps. `Onward! onward!' is the perpetual cry of
my heart. I could pass my life in going from land to
land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy
will be old to us; France, Germany, can scarce lure
the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we
have; and England, though we have not seen it, is so
familiar to us from its universality that it will not seem,
even on a first visit, a strange country. We have satiety
before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate
to go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a
guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia.”

“Will you go with him, Maimuna?”

“Signor, no!”

I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader; for I
never get to the end. The truth is, that in these rambling
papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as
they should be written in a romance, but as they occurred
in my travels: I write what I remember. There
are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled up
sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes with
idleness or love; and, to please myself, I must unweave
the thread as it was woven. It is strange how,
in the memory of a traveller, the most wayside and unimportant
things are the best remembered. You may
have stood in the Parthenon, and, looking back upon
it through the distance of years, a chance word of the
companion who happened to be with you, or the attitude
of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up
more vividly to the recollection than the immortal
sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy
in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander
from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on
something we have discovered ourselves. The child
in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayer-book,
and “the child is father of the man.” If I indulge
in the same perversity in story-telling, dear
reader—if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I
digress to some trifling vein of speculation—if, at the
close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral
vain—I plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to
truth and nature. Life—real life—is made up of half-finished
romance. The most interesting procession of
events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the
ridiculous and the trifling, and at the end, oftenest left
imperfect. Who ever saw, off the stage, a five-act
tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax?