The Purple Cloud Part 22

'Why, what a question! he who told me when I was hungly, and of the thing that was lipening outside the cellar, which would be so nice.'

'I see, I see. But in all that dingy place, and thick gloom, were you never at all afraid?'

'Aflaid! _I_! of what?'

'Of the unknown.'

'I do not understand you. How could I be _aflaid_? The known was the very opposite of tellible: it was merely hunger and dates, thirst and wine, the desire to lun and s.p.a.ce to lun in, the desire to sleep and sleep: there was nothing tellible in that: and the unknown was even less tellible than the known: for it was the nice thing that was lipening outside the cellar. I do not understand--'

'Ah, yes,' said I, 'you are a clever little being: but your continual fluttering about is fatal to all angling. Isn't it in your nature to keep still a minute? And with regard now to your habits in the cellar--?'

'_Another!_' she cried with happy laugh, and landed a young chub. And that afternoon she caught seven, and I none.

Another day I took her from the pitch to one of the kitchens in the village with some of the fish, till then always thrown away, and taught her cooking: for the only cooking-implement in the palace is the silver alcohol-lamp for coffee and chocolate. We both scrubbed the utensils, and boil and fry I taught her, and the making of a sauce from vinegar, bottled olives, and the tinned American b.u.t.ter from the _Speranza_, and the boiling of rice mixed with flour for ground-baiting our pitch. And she, at first astonished, was soon all deft housewifeliness, breathless officiousness, and behind my back, of her own intuitiveness, grated some dry almonds found there, and with them sprinkled the fried tench. And we ate them, sitting on the floor together: the first new food, I suppose, tasted by me for twenty-one years: nor did I find it disagreeable.

The next day she came up to the palace reading a book, which turned out to be a cookery-book in English, found at her yali; and a week later, she appeared, out of hours, presenting me a yellow-earthenware dish containing a mess of gorgeous colours--a boiled fish under red peppers, bits of saffron, a greenish sauce, and almonds: but I turned her away, and would have none of her, or her dish.

About a mile up to the west of the palace is a very old ruin in the deepest forest, I think of a mosque, though only three truncated internal pillars under ivy, and the weedy floor, with the courtyard and portal-steps remain, before it being a long avenue of cedars, gently descending from the steps, the path between the trees choked with long-gra.s.s and wild rye reaching to my middle. Here I saw one day a large disc of old bra.s.s, bossed in the middle, which may have been either a shield or part of an ancient cymbal, with concentric rings graven round it, from centre to circ.u.mference. The next day I brought some nails, a hammer, a saw, and a box of paints from the _Speranza_; and I painted the rings in different colours, cut down a slim lime-trunk, nailed the thin disc along its top, and planted it well, before the steps: for I said I would make a bull's-eye, and do rifle and revolver practice before it, from the avenue. And this the next evening I was doing at four hundred feet, startling the island, it seemed, with that unusual noise, when up she came peering with enquiring face: at which I was very angry, because my arm, long unused, was firing wide: but I was too proud to say anything, and let her look, and soon she understood, laughing every time I made a considerable miss, till at last I turned upon her saying: 'If you think it so easy, you may try.'

She had been wanting to try, for she came eagerly to the offer, and after I had opened and showed her the mechanism, the cartridges, and how to shoot, I put into her hands one of the _Speranza_ Colt's. She took her bottom-lip between her teeth, shut her left eye, vaulted out the revolver like an old shot to the level of her intense right eye, and sent a ball through the geometrical centre of the boss.

However, it was a fluke-shot, for I had the satisfaction of seeing her miss every one of the other five, except the last, which hit the black.

That, however, was three weeks since, and now my hitting record is forty per cent., and hers ninety-six--most extraordinary: so that it is clear that this creature is the _protegee_ of someone, and favouritism is in the world.

Her book of books is the Old Testament. Sometimes, at noon or afternoon, I may look abroad from the roof or galleries, and see a remote figure sitting on the sward under the shade of plane or black cypress: and I always know that the book she cons there is the Bible--like an old Rabbi. She has a pa.s.sion for stories: and there finds a store.

Three nights since when it was pretty late, and the moon very splendid, I saw her pa.s.sing homewards close to the lake, and shouted down to her, meaning to say 'Good-night'; but she thought that I had called her, and came: and sitting out on the top step we talked for hours, she without the yashmak.

We fell to talking about the Bible. And says she: 'What did Cain to Abel?'

'He knocked him over,' I replied, liking sometimes to use such idioms, with the double object of teaching and perplexing her.

'Over what?' says she.

'Over his heels,' said I.

'I do not complehend!'

'He killed him, then.'

'That I know. But how did Abel feel when he was killed? What is it to be _killed_?'

'Well,' said I, 'you have seen bones all around you, and the bones of your mother, and you can feel the bones in your fingers. Your fingers will become mere bone after you are dead, as die you must. Those bones which you see around you, are, of course, the bones of the men of whom we often speak: and the same thing happened to them which happens to a fish or a b.u.t.terfly when you catch them, and they lie all still.'

'And the men and the b.u.t.terfly feel the same after they are dead?'

'Precisely the same. They lie in a deep drowse, and dream a nonsense-dream.'

'That is not dleadful. I thought that it was much more dleadful. I should not mind dying.'

'Ah!... so much the better: for it is possible that you may have to die a great deal sooner than you think.'

'I should not mind. Why were men so vely aflaid to die?'

'Because they were all such shocking cowards.'

'Oh, not all! not all!'

(This girl, I know not with what motive, has now definitely set herself up against me as the defender of the dead race. With every chance she is at it.)

'Nearly all,' said I: 'tell me one who was not afraid--'

'There was Isaac,' says she: 'when Ablaham laid him on the wood to kill him, he did not jump up and lun to hide.'

'Isaac was a great exception,' said I: 'in the Bible and such books, you understand, you read of only the best sorts of people; but there were millions and millions of others--especially about the time of the poison-cloud--on a very much lower level--putrid wretches--covetous, false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes.'

This, for several minutes, she did not answer, sitting with her back half toward me, cracking almonds, continually striking one step with the ball of her outstretched foot. In the clarid gold of the platform I saw her fez and corals reflected as an elongated blotch of florid red. She turned and drank some wine from the great gold Jarvan goblet which I had brought from the temple of Boro Budor, her head quite covered in by it.

Then, the little hairs at her lip-corners still wet, says she:

'Vices and climes, climes and vices. Always the same. What were these climes and vices?'

'Robberies of a hundred sorts, murders of ten hundred--'

'But what made them _do_ them?'

'Their evil nature--their base souls.'

'But _you_ are one of them, _I_ am another: yet you and I live here together, and we do no vices and climes.'

Her astounding shrewdness! Right into the inmost heart of a matter does her simple wit seem to pierce!

'No,' I said, 'we do no vices and crimes, because we lack _motive_.

There is no danger that we should hate each other, for we have plenty to eat and drink, dates, wines, and thousands of things. (Our danger is rather the other way.) But _they_ hated and schemed, because they were very numerous, and there arose a question among them of dates and wine.'

'Was there not, then, enough land to grow dates and wine for all?'

'There was--yes: much more than enough, I fancy. But some got hold of a vast lot of it, and as the rest felt the pinch of scarcity, there arose, naturally, a pretty state of things--including the vices and crimes.'

'Ah, but then,' says she, 'it was not to their bad souls that the vices and climes were due, but only to this question of land. It is certain that if there had been no such question, there would have been no vices and climes, because you and I, who are just like them, do no vices and climes here, where there is no such question.'

The clear limelight of her intelligence! She wriggled on her seat in her effort of argument.