Paul Patoff | Page 3

it. As for stories, I have plenty of them. I, Paul
Griggs, have seen a variety of sights, and I have a good memory. There
is the south-east wind again. I was speaking 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