Under the Arch

I

EVERY now and then a big warm drop would splash down on me from the dome. It was right over me, the dome, irregularly pierced by translucent bull’s-eyes. From them a greenish light wavered through the haze of steam. It gave one a curious sensation of being out of the world, under the sea. A little imagination made mermen out of the figures about me, with their nude torsos tailing off into striped red towels. It amused me to wonder what my Puritan forbears would have made of such an underworld, and whether I owed it to their hard New England winters that the heat of the marble crept so deliciously through my nomad skin. That reminded me of some one in the Thousand and One Nights — not as we read them in our school days, but as Dr. J. C. Mardrus has translated them in sixteen big French volumes — who made a poem of that world, and keeps breaking out into an ecstatic ‘ 0 hammam! ’ It struck me that a Debussy could find an Après Midi d’ un Baigneur in the hollow echoes, just this side of music, that rippled and rumbled through the place — the differentkeyed splashings of water, the ring of metal bath-bowls, the duller clickclack of wooden clogs on marble, the rise and fall of voices, punctuated occasionally by the muffled slam of a door.

In an alcove near me a young man was singing. Every other phrase of his song began with ‘ Aman! A man! ’ which you must understand as meaning something between Alas! and Have mercy! I could see no more of him than a dark poll and a muscular brown shoulder, by reason of a panel of Byzantine sculpture that closed the end of the low marble dais on which he sat. The floor of his alcove, too, was inlaid with colored marble in a Byzantine pattern of interlaced garlands. Who knew out of what Greek church they came, long ago? And there a Turkish peasant — or so it pleased me to fancy him — sat singing one of those endless old unhappy love songs of Asia, knowing no more of Byzantines and their carvings than if his fathers had never knocked over a Byzantine empire. ‘Aman! Aman!' he sang, sending the strangest reverberations quivering up into the misty green twilight of the dome.

A moment later another young man, wrapped from his waist to his heels in the red towel of rigor, click-clacked across the marble floor, stepped out of his clogs on to the central platform where I lay, knelt beside me, and began to knead my wrists. He was rather a striking-looking young man, not so much because he was tall and well made, as because of two strangely sombre eyes he had, under heavy black brows and a low-growing thatch of black hair. There was something vaguely familiar about him, withal. And I noticed that his left arm was tattooed. But what I chiefly noticed was what he began to do to me. Turkish massage is very much like any other massage, except that it goes into refinements of torture which I have not suffered in Christendom. Starting as mildly as you please, it culminates by removing your vertebræ, one after another, turning them inside out, and replacing them with more or less care. When it is done with more care you feel as if you had just broken the bank at Monte Carlo and were about to take Cleopatra to wife. When it is done with less care you feel as if you had broken your neck — and sometimes you have. This particular bathman showed that he happened to be an expert in his art. So I let him do his worst, while I closed my eyes and drifted into a state of beatific semi-consciousness.

When this part of the complicated rite of the bath was at an end, my tellak clapped his hands as a signal thereof and led the way into one of the alcoves. There, setting me down on the hot marble step that ran around the three sides and squatting on his heels in front of me, he proceeded to put me through the humiliation of peeling. Heavens! Such rolls of grime as come off one under a bathman’s horsehair mitten! And we imagine that we are a cleanly race! The Turks do not share our good opinion of ourselves in that regard. They never wash so much as their own little finger in standing water. Consequently in a real Turkish bath there is no such thing as a tub or a pool. There are merely small marble basins set about the walls. Out of the one beside which I sat my bathman dipped a little water now and then with a brass bowl and sluiced away such portions of my anatomy as he had separated from me. Up to this time no word had passed between us. But at last he made an overture.

‘Eh, say,’ he invited me.

Now that we were forced to sit nose to nose, it seemed to me again that I knew him. Yet if it had been in a bath that I had seen him I surely would have remembered the tattoo on his arm. It was not an anchor or a heart or a butterfly or any other of the devices dearest to the artist in India ink. It looked like writing.

‘What shall I say ?’ I answered. ‘ What do you want to know ? ’

He stared at me for a moment with an intensity that my fatuous question did not deserve. Then, —

‘Are you from Austria?’ he asked.

It was a query, I must confess, that left me a little cold. I had expected something more in keeping with those melodramatic eyes. I wondered, too, why Turks so often take me for a German, and why I so distinctly fail to be flattered.

‘No,’ I promptly replied. ‘I come from much farther away — from America.’

‘Ah,’ said he, as if disappointed.

I am always seeing myself act the Fat Young Man to other people’s Will o’ the Mill, and am almost always saddened by their failure to play up to my cue. I can, however, play up to theirs.

‘Where is your country?’ I inquired, knowing perfectly well beforehand what he would answer.

‘I come from the Black Sea,’ he said, ‘from Castambol.’

‘ From Castambol ! ’ I exclaimed, beginning to cheer up again. I had not known beforehand what he would answer, after all; for I had known that he would answer Sivas. All bathmen do, with such tiresome unanimity that I have about given up that line of conversation. ‘I have heard that there is an old castle, there,’ I went on. ‘Is it true?’

‘ Yes. It is from the time of the Genoese.’ The Turks, despising their Greek subjects, attribute everything that antedates their own era to the Genoese. ‘But I have never seen it. I am not from the city. I am from a village outside.’

So far so good. But what next? Nothing is more tantalizing than the way people walk about the world full of the most interesting information and without any reason for keeping it in the dark, yet totally unable to impart it to any human being. That village near Castambol — I could make my fortune if I knew about it a tenth of what this black-browed bathman did. What surgery or magic, however, could get it out of him? I am not, alas, of those gifted personalities who turn inside out at will their most casual acquaintances. On the contrary, people I have known all my life daily become for me darker mysteries. So I felt doubtful about seeing the true inwardness of a Turkish village spread out before me by an inhabitant thereof. Still, he did finally volunteer something out of a clear sky.

‘In my country,’ he began, ‘there is a lake. And in the lake there is an island. And on the island there is a tree. And under the tree there is a hole. And down the hole stairs go, to a palace under the lake. And there a girl sits, a Christian girl with yellow hair, combing her hair with a golden comb. And she has a golden ball in her lap, and all around her are pearls and emeralds and I don’t know what.’

‘Oh!’ exclaimed I with ravishment. This truly was a bathman among bathmen. I had heard of lakes and islands and subterranean princesses before, but never from a serious-looking person rather taller than I. After all, we were getting on! ‘Have you ever been down the stairs?’ I inquired.

‘No. We are afraid. A man went once and he did not come back.’

‘Well, perhaps you would not have wanted to go back,’ I suggested.

But he only shrugged his shoulders. And there was the end of that! He should, of course, have gone on and told me a long and complicated story, which I would quickly have run home and written down and sent to America and got an enormous price for. Instead of which he began to scrape the under side of my upper arm so ferociously as to make me bawl out that I was n’t made of shoe leather. And I presently added, borrowing a leaf from his book, —

‘Eh, say.’

‘What is there to say?’ he replied.

‘ It is you who have things to say. You go, you come, you hear, you see, while we are always shut up. It is as if we were under the lake in my country. See how little light comes through the water!’

He pointed to the greeny bull’s-eyes in our own little dome. That rather pleased me, you know.

‘Then you did n’t go back! Only — where is the yellow-haired girl?’

‘Where?’ he assented. And silence fell heavily again between us.

‘What is that on your arm?’ I asked at last, thinking to try a new tack.

‘What should it be? It is nothing.’

‘Let me see,’ I insisted, taking hold of his arm to keep him from moving it.

The tattooing was in writing, but in a writing I could n’t make out — till I suddenly realized that although it was on a Turkish bathman’s arm it was in German script. Then I managed to read it. And what I read was ‘Ach, Lisa, ach !’

‘Ach, Lisa, ach!’ I repeated aloud, smiling at him in the knowing way of men with regard to women.

As for him, he pulled his arm away. It occurred to me to wonder if one took one’s bathman seriously, and I began to see where Austria came in. Still, I continued to smile my knowing smile. And I asked, —

‘Have you ever been Under the Arch?’

‘I went once,’ he replied gravely. ‘But that, is finished.’

But it seemed to me, from the way he looked, that something was not altogether finished. For me at least it was not, for I suddenly began to remember. What I remembered, primarily, was what I am always forgetting — that the world does n’t stand still, particularly in one’s teens.

‘ It is well that you tell no lies,’ I said, ‘for I have seen you Under the Arch.’

‘Then it was a long time ago.’

‘It was a long time ago. It was five or six years ago, when you were still a boy.’

He looked at me more strangely than he had looked at me yet. In his eyes it was as if something began to smoulder.

II

Flaring lights, slippery cobblestones, overhanging grapevines, a pervasive odor of mastic, a no less pervasive jingle of crank pianos, and scraps of every language under heaven, and vivid ladies picking their way on high heels between house-fronts that climb through the dark to some quiet star, or lounging, much touched up as to complexion and much cut down as to toilette, in open windows of the ground floor, not unready to pluck the cap off the head, the purse from the pocket or even the heart out of the body, of the men of every land and every sea who find their way Under the Arch in Galata — That is what suddenly came back to me

— that and the picture of a Turkish peasant boy, with a gay handkerchief knotted about his fez and colored tassels bobbing below the knees of his loose blue knickerbockers, who strolled down a certain garish lane with his hands in his pockets. He attracted my attention because Turks are comparatively few Under the Arch, being the only true Puritans left in the world, and because the eyes with which he stared at this and that, from under heavy black eyebrows, made such an intensity of darkness in the color of his handsome face, and because he was evidently so young. It was also evident that everything he saw was perfectly strange to him — as if he had wandered Under the Arch by chance. As I watched him he stopped and looked into a lighted window. The window belonged to a wineshop of a kind not uncommon Under the Arch. The clients were served by gaudy girls, whom it was not too difficult to induce to sit down and share a glass. In one corner a gypsy turned the handle of a lanterna

— the crank piano of the country. Near the window were sitting two women and a man — also a Turk, apparently. One of the women, catching sight of the boy outside, got up, went to the door, smiled at him, and beckoned. She was a creature in scarlet satin, with a mop of hair trailing over one eye. The boy blushed, half smiled in return, shifted his feet uneasily, but did not move. Then the creature, still smiling, went up to him, took his hand, pulled him after her into the wineshop, and sat him down beside her at an empty table.

I, who stood in the street and watched, found myself strangely affected. I am not much of a missionary. Otherwise I would hardly have been standing in that street. My temperament inclines me to believe with the Frenchman that to understand is to pardon. I also believe that there is too much meddling with other people’s affairs, and I am for letting a man hang himself with his own rope. Yet when it comes to a boy — ! Of one’s own youth one fancies that if one had known this or that, or if at a certain moment one set of accidents had turned up instead of another — Youth is so priceless a thing, it lasts so little time, such endless consequences hang on its ignorant decisions — But what, I asked myself, watching youth’s encounter through the lighted window, is one to do? One can’t put youth in a padlock. It is no use to snatch it by the hair of the head from experience. The bitterest experience is better than none. Is it, though? Still, if I marched in and pulled the boy out, what would prevent his marching back as soon as I disappeared ?

His encounter, I could see, was too embarrassing to be pleasant. His cheeks became the color of his companion’s dress and he did n’t know where to look or what to say. The creature continued to smile, patted his hand, ordered him a glass of mastic. He hesitated before taking a sip. Then he set down the glass so hurriedly that he tipped it over, coughing and wiping his eyes. At that everybody laughed. The creature laughed too. In a moment, however, she put her arm about him and whispered in his ear. She got up, and he got up. But all of a sudden he bolted out of the door.

III

It is curious, is it not, what things will stick in the memory of a refined, cultured, and liberally educated gentleman — as the women’s clubs put it — who cultivates a taste for letters and who would have liked to see himself a creator of memorable houses and gardens. If you are shocked, I can’t help it. Of course I am tempted to argue that the fault is life’s, not mine, — that makes so unending and so engrossing a spectacle, that prospers in the unkindest soil, that ironically loves to discover Under the Arch the simplicity, the directness, the impatience of ruse which sometimes fail in your guarded drawing-room. But argument never helps a story — particularly when it is a story like this one, that you must mostly tell yourself.

I looked at my bathman, then, in whose sombre eyes something began to smoulder. Yes, those must be the same eyes, and the same eyebrows. He had grown tall, though, and his young country color was gone. Had the bath boiled it out of him, or — what?

‘Then you have seen her ?’ he demanded.

Ach, Lisa, ach! For the moment a smile almost flickered out of me. I remembered how moved I had been, watching through the lighted window so long ago, and how relieved when he ran away. It had confirmed me anew in my policy of non-intervention. And he had gone back, naturally enough. And the scarlet creature had eaten him up after all. The Scarlet Creature, or The Bathman’s Romance! I could see it all. Life will be life, even Under the Arch. That was what had become of the golden hour of his youth. And all he had to show for it was the label on his arm — and the smouldering in his eyes. Ach, Lisa, ach!

‘Yes, I have seen her,’ I answered. ‘ I saw her come to the door, beckon to you, pull you in, give you something to drink, and whisper to you, and then I saw you run away. But you went back, eh ? ’

And I reproduced a remnant of my knowing smile. He, however, looked at me rather oddly.

‘That was not the one!’ he exclaimed at last, with abrupt contempt.

He turned away and began to prepare for the next stage in operations by making soapsuds with a tuft of raffia in a big copper bowl. I watched him with an access of curiosity which would make it appear that one may, after all, take one’s bathman seriously. Perhaps he felt the intensity of my silent questioning. Perhaps the accident of my having seen him before, of my having been a witness of that moment in his life, made a sort of bond between us. Perhaps the smouldering in him had never found vent. At all events he suddenly dropped his raffia and turned back to me.

‘What is it, effendim,’ he broke out, ‘that a woman does to a man? The world is full of them. Why will not one do as well as another? Why —’

He stopped. And from the way he looked at me I knew he did not see me. Presently he went on, in another tone.

‘You know, my effendim, what it is to be young. After I ran away that night I was ashamed. I heard men talk, they told me things, they laughed, they would not let me forget. How should I know anything? I was only sixteen. I had always lived in my village, in Anatolia. I had never thought of women or seen them. And suddenly to see them like that, with bare faces, bare arms, in clothes made to fit them, of silk and velvet — not such bags as our women wear! And the lights, and the music! I did n’t know there were such things in the world. It was like the palace under the lake in my country. So I went back. I went back to the same place, to show them I was not afraid. I sat down at a table and I ordered raki. The girl who had spoken to me before was there, sitting in a corner with a sailor. She remembered me and she laughed. “ There is my little Anatolian!” she said. “ Come here, little Anatolian!”’

He stopped again and pulled up the copper bowl, as if uncertain whether to go on with his story or to shampoo my head. I waited for his decision with a curious suspense.

‘Just then another girl came and sat down beside me,’ he finally said. ‘Effendim, she was the princess under the lake in my country. Her hair was like gold, as I had never seen hair before, and her eyes were so blue they frightened me. We say, you know, that people like that have the Evil Eye. I was frightened and my heart began to beat as if I had run from St. Sophia to the Taxim. At first she only looked at me and smiled, in such a way that I was both less frightened and more frightened. Then she began to talk to me. “Why did you order that raki?” she asked. “It is bad. Don’t drink it.” When she spoke I began to tremble. I always trembled when I heard her voice—to the last time.’ He paused an instant. ‘I could not say anything. I did not know what to say. She saw it and she went on talking to me. As my mother never spoke to me, effendim, she spoke to me. She told me I must n’t go again to such places. She asked me where I lived, what work I did, when I was going to my country. And at last she sent me away.’

I almost smiled again, remembering my own attitude on a certain occasion. But I could tell myself that I had no Evil Eye, and that in me the voice of intervention would never have made him tremble! It was curious, though, what a power he had, with so little of a story, to move me so much a second time. It was partly the intensity of his tone and of his sombre look. It was also the curiosities within curiosities he set alight — about the world he lived in, about his strange lost princess. I must say he did very little to satisfy them.

‘ When she sent me away that night,’ he went on, ‘she thought it was finished. But it only began. Every night I went back and watched in the street until I found her again. And after that, for three years, I saw her nearly every day; but not as you think. She never would let me come to her house. I always saw her in wineshops, in coffeehouses, in the street. She made me go to school, too, and she paid for it. I can read, effendim, because of her. She could read too, and she could write, and she could sing, and she could play — your piano, our lute. She knew everything. But she did n’t know how to keep me from becoming mad. I thought of nothing else but her. I wanted to take her away from Galata. In the three years, you see, I became a man. But she would not listen. She said she was too old, she said she was too bad, she said she loved me too much, she said she could never live in Anatolia or I in Europe. How do I know what she said,’ he broke off, ‘or where she is now? Akh, Lisa! Akh!’

My eye followed his to the inscription pricked on his arm. It became more and more evident that the story, such as it was, was one which you have to tell yourself. There was enough obvious interplay in it of East and West, of blue eyes and black, of innocence and — must I say corruption? — the eternal lure of the contrary. And one could more or less make out the case of the dark-browed young peasant lover. But what of the obscure courtesan, cast out from her own land into that place of all vulgarity and disaster, who had become for him a princess of fairy lore?

‘She wrote it there,’ he said. ‘She always told me I did n’t know how to say anything else! She wrote it there the last time I saw her — the first time I went to her house. At last I made her open the door to me. And I begged her as I had never begged her to go away with me. “ Akh,Lisa! ” I said. “ Akh, I can’t go on like this. I can’t work in the day. I can’t sleep at night. All the time I see your eyes. They make a fire in my heart.” She smiled a little, as she knew how to smile, then wrote this on my arm with a needle. And then —’

Another bathman came into the alcove, followed by an old gentleman who sat down opposite me. My bathman stirred his copper bowl again and then put me past all power of sight or speech by pouring soapsuds over my head. Across the vaulted room the bather in the Byzantine alcove was singing his melancholy old love-song of Asia. ‘Aman! Aman!’ he sang, making strange reverberations quiver up into the dome.