Paul Patoff | Page 3

of love, a moment ago,--there is a story of the wind falling in love. There is a garden of roses far away to the east, where a maiden lies asleep; the roses have no thorns in that garden, and they grow softly about her and make a pillow for her fair head. A blustering wind came once and nearly waked her, but she was so beautiful that he fell deep in love; and he turned into the softest breeze that ever fanned a woman's cheek in summer, for fear lest he should trouble her sleep. There was a poor woman in rags, in the streets of London, on that March night, but she could not soften the heart of the cruel blast for all her shivering and praying; for she was very poor and wretched, and never was beautiful, even when she was young.
That is a short tale, and it has no moral application, for it is too common a truth. If people would only act directly on things instead of expecting the morality of their cant phrases to act for them, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to pay their bills, and to save their souls into the bargain, what a vast deal of good would be done, and what an incalculable amount of foolish talk would be spared! But there is a diplomatic spirit abroad in our day, and it is necessary to enter into polite relations with a drowning man before it is possible to pull him out of the water.
But the story, you say,--where is it? Forgive me. I am rusty and ponderous at the start, like an old dredger that has stuck too long in the mud. Let me move a little and swing out with the tide till I am in clearer waters, and I will promise to bring up something pretty from the bottom of the sea for you to look at. I would not have you see any of the blackness that lies in the stagnant harbor.
I will tell you the story of Paul Patoff. I played a small part in it myself last summer, and so, in a certain way, it is a tale of my own experience. I say a tale, because it is emphatically a tale, and nothing else. I might almost call it a yarn, though the word would look strangely on a printed title-page. We are vain in our generation; we fancy we have discovered something new under the sun, and we give the name "novel" to the things we write. I will not insult literature by honoring this story with any such high-sounding designation. A great many of the things I am going to tell you were told to me, so that I shall have some difficulty in putting the whole together in a connected shape, and I must begin by asking your indulgence if I transgress all sorts of rules, and if I do not succeed in getting the interesting points into the places assigned to them by the traditional laws of art. I tell what happened, and I do not pretend to tell any more.

I.
If places could speak, they would describe people far better than people can describe places. No two men agree together in giving an account of a country, of natural scenery, or of a city; and though we may read the most accurate descriptions of a place, and vividly picture to ourselves what we have never seen, yet, when we are at last upon the spot, we realize that we have known nothing about it, and we loudly blame the author, whose word-painting is so palpably false. People will always think of places as being full of poetry if they are in love, as being beautiful if they are well, hideous if they are ill, wearisome if they are bored, and gay if they are making money.
Constantinople and the Bosphorus are no exceptions to this general rule. People who live there are sometimes well and sometimes ill, sometimes rich and sometimes poor, sometimes in love with themselves and sometimes in love with each other. A grave Persian carpet merchant sits smoking on the quay of Buyukdere. He sees them all go by, from the gay French secretary of embassy, puffing at a cigarette as he hurries from one visit to the next, to the neat and military German diplomat, landing from his steam launch on his return from the palace; from the devil-may-care English youth in white flannel to the graceful Turkish adjutant on his beautiful Arab horse; from the dark-eyed Armenian lady, walking slowly by the water's edge, to the terrifically arrayed little Greek dandy, with a spotted waistcoat and a thunder-and-lightning tie. He sees them all: the Levantine with the weak and cunning face, the swarthy Kurdish