The Moonlit Way: A Novel

“I spik to Von-der-Goltz Pasha,” said Ferez; and he slipped through the palms and orange trees and vanished.

For half an hour the Count d’Eblis stood there, motionless in the moonlight.

She came about that time, on the arm of Ferez Bey, her father’s friend of many years.

And Ferez left her there in the creamy Turkish moonlight on the flowering terrace, alone with the Count d’Eblis.

When Ferez came again, long after midnight, with Excellenz on one arm and the proud and happy Adolf Gerhardt on the other, the whole cycle of a little drama had been played to a conclusion between those two shadowy figures under the flowering almonds on the terrace – between this slender, dark-eyed girl and this big, bulky, heavy-visaged man of the world.

And the man had been beaten and the girl had laid down every term. And the compact was this: that she was to be launched in Paris; she was merely to borrow any sum needed, with privilege to acquit the debt within the year; that, if she ever came to care for this man sufficiently, she was to become only one species of masculine property – a legal wife.

And to every condition – and finally even to the last, the man had bowed his heavy, burning head.

“D’Eblis!” began Gerhardt, almost stammering in his joy and pride. “His highness tells me that I am to have an order – an Imperial d-decoration – ”

D’Eblis stared at him out of unseeing eyes; Nihla laughed outright, alas, too early wise and not even troubling her lovely head to wonder why a decoration had been asked for this burly, bushy-bearded man from nowhere.

But within his sinuous, twisted soul Ferez writhed exultingly, and patted Gerhardt on the arm, and patted d’Eblis, too – dared even to squirm visibly closer to Excellenz, like a fawning dog that fears too much to venture contact in his wriggling demonstrations.

“You take with you our pretty wonder-child to Paris to be launched, I hear,” remarked Excellenz, most affably, to d’Eblis. And to Nihla: “And upon a yacht fit for an emperor, I understand. Ach! Such a going forth is only heard of in the Arabian Nights. Eh 13 bien, ma petite, go West, conquer, and reign! It is a prophecy!”

And Nihla threw back her head and laughed her full-throated laughter under the Turkish moon.

Later, Ferez, walking with the Ambassador, replied humbly to the curt question:

“Yes, I have become his jackal. But always at the orders of Excellenz.”

Later still, aboard the Mirage, Ferez stood alone by the after-rail, staring with ratty eyes at the blackness beyond the New Bridge.

“Oh, God, be merciful!” he whispered. He had often said it on the eve of crime. Even an Eurasian rat has emotions. And Ferez had been in love with Nihla many years, and was selling her now at a price – selling her and Adolf Gerhardt and the Count d’Eblis and France – all he had to barter – for he had sold his soul too long ago to remember even what he got for it.

The silence seemed more intense for the sounds that made it audible. From, the unlighted cities on the seven hills came an unbroken howling of dogs; transparent waves of the limpid Bosphorus slapped the vessel’s sides, making a mellow and ceaseless clatter. Far away beyond Galata Quay, in the inner reek of unseen Stamboul, the notes of a Turkish flute stole out across the darkness, where some Tzigane – some unseen wretch in rags – was playing the melancholy song of Mourad. And, mournfully responsive to the reedy complaint of a homeless wanderer from a nation without a home, the homeless dogs of Islam wailed their miserere under the Prophet’s moon.

The tragic wolf-song wavered from hill to hill; from the Fields of the Dead to the Seven Towers, from 14 Kassim to Tophane, seeming to swell into one dreadful, endless plaint:

“My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

“And me!” muttered Ferez, shivering in the windy vapours from the Black Sea, which already dampened his face with their creeping summer chill.

“Ferez!”

He turned slowly. Swathed in a white wool bernous, Nihla stood there in the foggy moonlight.

“Why?” she enquired, without preliminaries and with the unfeigned curiosity of a child.

He did not pretend to misunderstand her in French:

“Thou knowest, Nihla. I have never touched thy heart. I could do nothing for thee – ”

“Except to sell me,” she smiled, interrupting him in English, without the slightest trace of accent.

But Ferez preferred the refuge of French:

“Except to launch thee and make possible thy career,” he corrected her very gently.

“I thought you were in love with me?”

“I have loved thee, Nihla, since thy childhood.”

“Is there anything on earth or in paradise, Ferez, that you would not sell for a price?”

“I tell thee – ”

“Zut! I know thee, Ferez!” she mocked him, slipping easily into French. “What was my price? Who pays thee, Colonel Ferez? This big, shambling, world-wearied Count, who is, nevertheless, afraid of me? Did he pay thee? Or was it this rich American, Gerhardt? Or was it Von-der-Goltz? Or Excellenz?”

“Nihla! Thou knowest me – ”

Her clear, untroubled laughter checked him:

“I know you, Ferez. That is why I ask. That is why I shall have no reply from you. Only my wits can ever answer me any questions.”

She stood laughing at him, swathed in her white wool, looming like some mocking spectre in the misty moonlight of the after-deck.

“Oh, Ferez,” she said in her sweet, malicious voice, “there was a curse on Midas, too! You play at high finance; you sell what you never had to sell, and you are paid for it. All your life you have been busy selling, re-selling, bargaining, betraying, seeking always gain where only loss is possible – loss of all that justifies a man in daring to stand alive before the God that made him!.. And yet – that which you call love – that shadowy emotion which you have also sold to-night – I think you really feel for me… Yes, I believe it… But it, too, has its price… What was that price, Ferez?”

“Believe me, Nihla – ”

“Oh, Ferez, you ask too much! No! Let me tell you, then. The price was paid by that American, who is not one but a German.”

“That is absurd!”

“Why the Red Eagle, then? And the friendship of Excellenz? What is he then, this Gerhardt, but a millionaire? Why is nobility so gracious then? What does Gerhardt give for his Red Eagle? – for the politeness of Excellenz? – for the crooked smile of a Bavarian Baroness and the lifted lorgnette of Austria? What does he give for me? Who buys me after all? Enver? Talaat? Hilmi? Who sells me? Excellenz? Von-der-Goltz? You? And who pays for me? Gerhardt, who takes his profit in Red Eagles and offers me to d’Eblis for something in exchange to please Excellenz – and you? And what, at the end of the bargaining, does d’Eblis pay for me – pay through Gerhardt to you, and through you to Excellenz, and through Excellenz to the Kaiser Wilhelm II – ”

Ferez, showing his teeth, came close to her and spoke very softly:

“See how white is the moonlight off Seraglio Point, my Nihla!.. It is no whiter than those loveliest ones who lie fathoms deep below these little silver waves… Each with her bowstring snug about her snowy neck… As fair and young, as warm and fresh and sweet as thou, my Nihla.”

He smiled at her; and if the smile stiffened an instant on her lips, the next instant her light, dauntless laughter mocked him.

“For a price,” she said, “you would sell even Life to that old miser, Death! Then listen what you have done, little smiling, whining jackal of his Excellency! I go to Paris and to my career, certain of my happy destiny, sure of myself! For my opportunity I pay if I choose – pay what I choose – when and where it suits me to pay! – ”

She slipped into French with a little laugh:

“Now go and lick thy fingers of whatever crumbs have stuck there. The Count d’Eblis is doubtless licking his. Good appetite, my Ferez! Lick away lustily, for God does not temper the jackal’s appetite to his opportunities!”

Ferez let his level gaze rest on her in silence.

“Well, trafficker in Eagles, dealer in love, vendor of youth, merchant of souls, what strikes you silent?”