The Veiled Lady | Page 3

finished rolling his cigarette, looked
at me blandly--it is astonishing how sweet a smile can overspread the
face of a Turk when he is granting you a favor or signing the death
warrant of an infidel--clapped his hands, summoning an attendant who
came in on all fours, and whispered an order in the left ear of the
almost prostrate man. This done, the Pasha rose from his seat,
straightened his shoulders (no handsomer men the world over than
these high-class Turks), shook my hand warmly, gave me the Turkish
salute--heart, mouth, and forehead touched with the tips of flying
fingers--and bowed me out.
Once through the flat leather curtain that hid the exit door of the

Pasha's office, and into the bare corridor, I led Joe to a corner out of the
hearing of the ever-present spy, and, nailing him to the wall,
propounded this query:
"What did the High-Pan-Jam say, Joe?"
Hornstog raised his shoulders level with his ears, fanned out his fingers,
crooked his elbows, and in his best conglomerate answered:
"He say, effendi, that a guard of ein men, Yusuf, his name--I know
him--he is in the Secret Service-- oh, we will have no trouble with
him--" Here Joe chafed his thumb and forefinger with the movement of
a paying teller counting a roll. "He come every morning to Galata
Bridge for you me. He say, too, if any trouble while you paint I go
him-- ah, effendi, it is only Joe Hornstog can do these things. The
Pasha, he know me--all good Turk-men know me. Where we paint now,
subito? In the plaza, or in the patio of the Valedee, like last year?"
"Neither. We go first to the Mosque of Suleiman. I want the view
through the gate of the court-yard, with the mosque in the background.
Best place is below the cafe. Pick up those traps and come along."
Thus it was that on this particular summer afternoon Joe and I found
ourselves on the shadow side of a wall up a crooked, break-neck street
paved with rocks, each as big as a dress-suit case, from which I got a
full view of the wonderful mosque tossing its splendors into the still air,
its cresting of minarets so much frozen spray against the blue.
The little comedy--or shall I say tragedy?--began a few minutes after I
had opened my easel--I sitting crouched in the shadow, my elbow
touching the plastered wall. Only Joe and I were present. Yusuf, the
guard, a skinny, half-fed Turk in fez and European dress, had as usual
betaken himself to the cafe fronting the same sidewalk on which I sat,
but half a block away; far enough to be out of hearing, but near enough
to miss my presence should I decamp suddenly without notifying him.
There he drank some fifty cups of coffee, each one the size of a thimble,
and smoked as many cigarettes, their burned stubs locating his seat
under the cafe awning as clearly as peanut-shells mark a boy's at the
circus. I, of course, paid for both.
So absorbed was I in my work--the mosque never was so beautiful as
on that day--I gave no thought to the fact that in my eagerness to hide
my canvas from the prying sun I had really backed myself into a small
wooden gate, its lintel level with the sidewalk --a dry, dusty,

sun-blistered gate, without lock or hasp on the outside, and evidently
long closed. Even then I would not have noticed it, had not my ears
caught the sound of a voice--two voices, in fact--low, gurgling
voices--as if a fountain had just been turned on, spattering the leaves
about it. Then my eye lighted, not only on the gate, but upon a seam or
split in the wood, half-way up its height, showing where a panel was
sometimes pushed back, perhaps for surer identification, before the
inside wooden beam would be loosened.
So potent was the spell of the mosque's witchery that the next instant I
should have forgotten both door and panel had not Joe touched the toe
of my boot with his own--he was sitting close to me--and in
explanation lifted his eyebrow a hair's breadth, his eyes fixed on the
slowly sliding panel--sliding noiselessly, an inch at a time. Only then
did my mind act.
What I saw was first a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms,
then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a gossamer
thin as a spider's web, and last--and these I shall never forget --a pair of
eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and which gazed into mine
with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one sometimes sees on the
face of a summer moon when it bursts through a