‘What a day—what a day—what a day.’ Peter glowed at the very thought of it. In his imagination he could see her slender golden body as she splashed and tumbled in the creamy breakers, and feel again her gentle breath as her soft lips clung to his, her face upturned and patterned by the moonlight that filtered through the foliage of the trees in that silent enchanted forest. Then the glow faded as he recalled the aftermath.
When he had crept into bed that morning he had made up his mind to take Tania back to England and marry her. He had toyed with the idea first when they had been lazing on the sands after their bathe the previous afternoon. It had come to him from seeing then a new side to her nature—a fun-loving simplicity which had not been apparent in the artificial atmosphere of the restaurants—but he had dismissed it as impossible.
The thought of his enormous overbearing family had proved too much for him. The strait-laced Aunts, the rigid soldier Uncles, his old dragon of a Grandmother, would never receive Tania with anything but hostility. The connections which she claimed might or might not be valid they would say—the fact remained that she was a penniless Russian and that he had picked her up at some place in the Near East. If she had been some plain, dowdy little thing he knew that it was just possible he might have got away with it—but she was not. She was beautiful—too beautiful for them ever to believe her also good. That was the tragedy.
Although he had put the thought out of his head it had come again at dinner, then played with devilish persistency in his mind all through the hours that they remained together, and their night in the woods had set the seal upon it.
He would defy his family and take her home, away from this ghastly life of wage slave and semi-cocotte which was her portion. His mother would understand. He knew that, gentle, sweet-tempered, beautiful herself, he could count upon her to the limit. If his father did not like it he could lump it and the rest of the family could go to blazes. Tania was so gay, so tender, so marvellously lovely that to have her with him always would be worth any trouble that he might have to face, and at the close of their wonderful day together, when he parted from her in the dawn-lit street near her apartment he was convinced that never in his life again would he meet any girl so utterly desirable.
He had said nothing to her, only having finally made up his mind after he had left her. Back at the Pera he had undressed and tumbled into bed, slept for about three hours, and then suffered the most vivid, real, and terrible nightmare.
It seemed to him that a long line of ghostly figures stood swaying at the foot of his bed. They were staring down upon his recumbent form with unutterably cold contempt and disapproval on their faces. He knew them instantly for the astral bodies of his nearest relatives.
One of the tightly corseted aunts spoke first in grim disgust. Her voice was thin and unsubstantial but he heard it plainly.
“To think that he should have allowed himself to be taken in like this.”
Another answered “A Russian too they tell me. It is most distressing.”
The shade of a portly uncle, one of His Majesty’s Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms said heavily, although his voice came faint and attenuated to Peter’s ears: “Can’t you get hold of this trollop and buy her off, George? Cost you five hundred or a thousand, perhaps, but worth every penny of it.”
Peter’s father, the General, tall, frowning, grim, replied: “Buy her off! Cut him off you mean. And I’ll see he doesn’t get a shilling from his mother—the weak-minded young fool.”
The Bishop, another uncle, swayed forward. “No marriage which is based on lust can possibly bring happiness,” he declared severely.
“Plucked eyebrows!” murmured an aunt.
“Good-looking though, in a sort of foreign way,” remarked her husband. “I remember when I was in Vienna in ‘04 a man I knew there took me to a night club and introduced me …”
“Herbert!” rapped out the lady acidly. “If you have such dubious reminiscences kindly reserve them for your visits to your Club.”
“Talking of night clubs,” cut in Peter’s Uncle Max, the black sheep of the family; “Last year when I was on that cruise we called at Constantinople. I visited a place there named the Grandpère. There was a young woman in a box. I forget her name but she was one of the filles de maison—do anything for a five pound note you know—and this girl is most awfully like her.”
“TANIA VORONTZOFF,” cried the whole line in a horrid shout.
“Good Lord!” Uncle Max’s wraith almost swayed out of line with excitement. “That’s it—Tania—and by Jove she was hot stuff. But damn it, this must be the same girl. Look here we can’t let the boy marry a tart.”
“Cost you five hundred!”
“An insult to us all”
“He’ll not have a penny from me!”
“Blood red finger nails—Anyone could see …”
“Lust!”
“Cut him off!”
“Tart!”
“LUST!”
“TART!” came the appalling chorus of voices, curiously thin as though coming from a great distance, yet ringing with vicious menace and profound condemnation, while the ghostly line of figures swayed slowly back and forth like reeds in a gentle breeze.
Then the ghost of Peter’s grandmother administered the final coup de grace. In her thin high treble she said coldly: “I regret, but under no circumstances could I attend the wedding.”
At that he had woken, sweating, shivering, his fair hair wet and matted about his temples. The ghostly parade which had tortured him by their abuse of Tania and vile innuendoes had vanished—the light of full day was streaming through the curtains of his window. Further sleep had been out of the question but those thin bitter voices still sounded in his ears, and with black despair in his heart he knew that he dare not take Tania back to England with him.
As he sat now twelve hours later in the lounge of the Pera, he felt grim and despondent, knowing that within a few hours he must leave behind him this girl who had brought a mad exaltation and vibrant colour into his life beyond all others that he had ever met.
He glanced at the clock again. It was five to nine. The precious moments were flying. What could have happened to her he wondered anxiously, and then he saw her coming towards him, slender, pale-faced, her chin high, her shoulders thrown back, with the carriage of a Princess.
“Tania!” he exclaimed, hurrying forward to meet her. “I thought you were never coming. You’re looking awfully white. Is anything the matter? Why are you so late?”
“Mother,” she said with a sob in her voice. “She has had an attack—I could not get away before.” It was a lie, but she had to explain her distraught appearance somehow.
“Darling, I am sorry.” He took both her hands and pressed them. “You—you’ll want to go back at once then, you only came to tell me. It’s tragic that this should put paid to our last chance to be together. But of course I understand—If she’s really ill.”
Tania shook her head and smiled faintly. “No, she is better now and friends are looking after her—but I must be back by eleven. They cannot stay later.” Even as she was thinking how sweet it was of him to offer to forgo their evening so unselfishly her lie developed automatically. The perfect excuse to ensure him allowing her to leave him and be back on time.
“Thank God!—we’ve got two hours then anyway.” He spoke with incredible relief. “Listen, I’d booked a table at Therapia before I knew about this filthy business of having to go to Angora—and an electric launch to take us up there. We still have time to dine in the garden and spend half an hour on the water afterwards if we leave at once. Would you like that?”
.“I should love it,” she said softly as, with complete disregard for the people watching them, he drew her arm through his and led her from the lounge. “I am terribly upset though that our last evening together should be cut short like this.”
He patted her hand and then pressed it in his own. “ We’re lucky to have even these two hours rea
lly with your mother ill and that tailor’s dummy Tyndall-Williams at the Embassy. He wanted me to sleep there on a shakedown in his office to-night, and was huffy as blazes with me when I flatly refused.”
“Why did he wish that?” she asked although she already knew the answer to her question.
“Because he says this thing I’m taking to Angora is of the first importance, and I suppose he was afraid that if I went out to-night some lovely wicked spy would steal it from me. As though such things happened in these days. I’ve never heard such fantastic rot.”
Tania felt sick and ill as she climbed into the taxi which was to take them down to the pier where the motor launch was waiting. He was so sure of himself, so contemptuous of that possibility which she knew only too well to be a very real and present danger. She laughed shakily as he went on angrily:
“When I refused to dine and sleep, he wanted to keep the wretched thing in the safe at the Chancery, and make me get up half an hour earlier to call for it before I left. Look!” He produced it from his inside pocket. “It can’t even be an important despatch.”
“Oh, guard it carefully,” she urged spontaneously, leaning against him in the cab. The casual way in which he showed it to her filled her with dismay. But then of course he was a newcomer to this dangerous game and his absolute trust in her was pathetically apparent.
“You darling,” he laughed and pulled her to him, smothering her face with kisses. “Don’t worry. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself—and this.”
At the landing stage they boarded the powerful electric launch. Peter refused the services of the mechanic and having settled Tania on a pile of cushions in the stern took the controls himself. As he brought the lever over they shot out into the dark waters of the Bosphorus, and he turned the boat upstream.
She nestled down beside him, her head on his shoulder, striving to put out of her mind for a little while the terrible alternatives with which she was faced. The Eunuch had threatened—horrible things. Her mother had pleaded—and the prayers of the weak and helpless are doubly hard to resist; but she had decided nothing. All her life since she had left Russia as a small child, poverty, hardship, worry had been her lot. In recent years her better material circumstances had been more than offset by the hateful part she was compelled to play in the night life at the Grandpère. Only the Eunuch’s protection, given on account of her work for him, saved her from the necessity of taking some other man as her ‘protector’, a course which she knew only too well led finally to prostitution. And even as things were she was frequently compelled to submit to unpleasant familiarities, maudlin caresses, and loathsome pawings, in order to get sufficient material to satisfy the Eunuch’s requirements.
Then, without warning, this tall, fair, good-looking man had come into her grey and distasteful life. Treated her with sweet courtesy, charmed her imagination by his accounts of that sheltered and serene existence in the, to her, almost fabulously wealthy and powerful little island in the northern seas. Spoilt her for all other men in a few short days by his unfailing kindness and thought for her, by his chivalrous deference, as though, although he knew almost all the truth about her sordid life, he thought of her always as some beautiful princess. On top of all else she was physically attracted to him, and since that first night had felt the profound urge to give herself to him entirely. He had found his way to her mind by his lifting of her from the gutter to a pinnacle, to her heart by his gentle easy laughter, and to her body by his fevered response to her faintest caress. He loved her, genuinely, desperately, she had not a doubt, and she loved him, she had confessed it the previous night in those silent woods by utter abandonment to the divine fire that he lit in her veins. He trusted her implicitly. How then could she betray and ruin him.
They passed Ortakeuy where Swithin’s Tobacco Depot, unseen, and unknown to either of them, now lay dark and silent, Bebek, Rumeli Hissar, and so came to the steps at Therapia.
The great restaurant there, set in its lovely gardens, a favourite resort of the wealth and fashion of Constantinople, was brightly lighted. Many people had left the heat of the city this sultry August night to come out and dine on its luxuriously appointed terrace. A French Maître d’hotel bowed them to a table, ordered their dishes and chose their wine. Neither of them could raise sufficient interest to do other than accept his tactful promptings.
When the food came, they hardly ate, but sat staring at each other across the table, both wrapped in the tragedy of their own thoughts. Tania smoked incessantly. Peter drank glass after glass of genuine unquestionably French champagne from a magnum of Bollinger that he had ordered.
Half-way through the meal, he pushed his plate away. “Oh what’s the use!” he said abruptly. “We were fools to come here. We have little enough time as it is. Shall we cut out the rest of dinner and go back to the launch?”
Tania nodded dumbly, she could not have swallowed another thing. All she wanted was to feel his arms gripped tight around her once again. She shuddered violently at the frightful thought that then she would be compelled to make her choice.
“Are you cold, dearest?” he asked with immediate concern.
“No,” she assured him. “No, and if I were naked in a blizzard I would not be if I had you with me.”
“My sweet.” He grabbed her slim hand where it lay upon the damask tablecloth, and gripped it till it hurt. Then he released it suddenly, called for his bill, sat staring at her while they fetched it, paid it without regard to change and, as she stood up, shepherded her from the terrace, down through the garden heavy with the scent of roses.
Back in the launch once more he steered it downstream a little way and tied it up again beneath a sheltered bank.
“Now,” he said huskily. “Let’s make ourselves comfortable.”
“Why not put the cushions inside the cabin,” she suggested, “there is more room in there.”
Then she bit her thumb until her teeth dented its nail. Why had she said that, but even as she asked herself she knew. It was not that there was really much more room but it was pitch dark in there. Subconsciously her true purpose had prompted her and now she wanted to scream or weep hysterically.
With a few quick movements he arranged the pillows and a rug in the tiny cabin as she had suggested and, next moment, he seized her hand and drew her down beside him in the inky blackness.
She yielded without a murmur and felt herself half fainting in his embrace. Then she flung back her head, laced her arms about his neck and glued her mouth to his. A delicious trembling ran through all her limbs. She could feel his heart hammering beneath her breast as he pressed upon her. A passion of ecstasy thrilled through every nerve of her body.
This fiercely passionate onslaught was very different from their love making of the night before. Then he had been gentle, infinitely careful to give her emotions time to rise in concert with his own. But she preferred this almost brutal wooing and loved his rough handling of her. What did it matter if he crushed and hurt her. She was his to do what he would with in this glorious moment and tomorrow she would kiss every bruise that he had made upon the tender flesh of her arms and shoulders.
‘To-morrow!’ That was now an appalling thought. ‘He would be gone and she—where? In Istanbul, still the Eunuch’s pensioner for duties punctually performed, or under guard on her way to that devilish Kurd he had spoken of?’
‘No!’ Rather than face that she would kill herself—throw herself into the Bosphorus—that was the way out—put her mother. ‘How could she leave that poor frail old woman to die in misery alone?’
Great tears welled up into her eyes and trickled out, running downwards to her ears. He was sighing heavily now but still kissing her on the face and neck. All at once his lips came into contact with the salty dampness and he drew back:
“Darling! you’re crying! Have I hurt you? Oh, I’ve behaved like a great clumsy brute.”
“No,” she sobbed. “I have been loving every moment of it. It is not that.”<
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“What is it then?” he asked with quick concern.
“That you—you do not really love me—you cannot.” She knew her accusation to be untrue but a thought had come to her when they had been seated staring at each other across the dinner table and now it had returned with redoubled force. How, if he cared as much for her as he appeared to do could he bear to leave her to the life he knew she led? Had their positions been reversed it would never have occurred to her that she could possibly go away unless he came too.
“Tania!” he exclaimed. “I adore you—you know I do!”
“You say so,” she murmured bitterly. “But it is so easy for a man to say things like that. You have probably said the same thing to other girls in Berlin, and Brussels, and Warsaw. You may mean it now perhaps, and for a week or so you will miss me, but after that you will find someone else and I shall be forgotten.”
“I’ll never forget you—I swear it!” He bent to kiss her again but she turned her face away.
“If you love me how can you think to leave me. I will never go back to that horrible life at the Grandpère. I will kill myself.”
He groaned and raised himself a little. All his longing to have her with him always flooded back to him. He nearly—very nearly blurted out: ‘Tania come to England with me. I want you for my wife,’ but those grey shapes that he had seen in his nightmare seemed to be forming again, rising up out of the gently flowing waters and rearing their heads over the dark stern of the launch. Once more he heard their acid condemnation as clearly as if the shadows had spoken.
“An insult to us all!”
“He’ll not have a penny from me!”
“Blood-red finger nails!”
“Cut him off!”
“Lust!”
“Tart!”
Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead. He felt that he was suffocating in the hot sultry night and thrust a finger down his collar to ease his breathing, then he stammered miserably:
The Eunuch of Stamboul Page 30