Page:Scribners Vol 37-1905.djvu/90

His Beatitude

By H. G. Dwight

Illustrations by Sydney Adamson

I

iftings of the three continents—and even of the younger three—pour across that rough-planked highway of the Golden Horn. Every shade of complexion, from the onyx of the Soudan to the ivory of Arkhangelsk, is there. The fez of the Turk and of his hundred subject tribes, the turbans of Arab, Koord, Hindu and Afghan, the kalpak of the Persian, the lambskins of Circassian and Muscovite, the dangling gear of the Georgian, the blue tassel of the Albanian, the red-and-gold cap and the black of Croat and Montenegrin, the conventional Derby of the European, are but the more frequent among the head-dresses. A thousand varieties of costume and accoutrement proclaim that here the peoples of the earth seethe together immiscible. Since first there were to make a trade of their eves it has been so. When shall it not be so?

There is an extraordinary fascination in that fluid panorama. And it has this distinction among pleasures, that it is of the least expensive procurement. For a pedestrian the toll is ten paras—something like one cent. Or if you chance to lack the use of a limb or the sight of an eye you may cross for nothing. Such is the delicacy of Oriental sentiment. The toll-keepers also are fortunately not too curious as to what constitutes an infirmity. Coppers they doubtless take from many who do not see what an orgy of color, what an exhibition of anatomy, what a museum of the comparative, is their tumble-down draw-bridge. Races, creeds, hierarchies pass there, cast all in the same human mould, crowded into one narrow thoroughfare, but in origin and sympathy as distant as the east is from the west.

The real fascination, however, is when after the types you begin to distinguish individuals. To have observed a certain person going in certain directions at certain times, is to feel a leap of curiosity when you find him at the wrong end or out of his hour. Where does he come from? Where does he go? Why does he seem to notice nothing or everything? Elsewhere these questions might not take you far. But here there is no knowing whither they may lead. For since history began, this meeting of the waters has been the very Rialto of adventure. Mohammedan or Christian, high or low, dark or light, frank or furtive, men have somewhere left beaten tracks to come to this caldron of the world. And questioning the faces as they pass, a sense begins to press upon you of vague and secret purposes, of the romance and tragedy here symbolized.

II

Were mine a high and moving tale, I might announce my hero by saying that on a certain August morning a man of striking appearance was seen to make his way down that crowded street of Galata which opens to the Bridge. As it is, I can only point out that such an announcement would apply with equal exactness to several hundred individuals, and that while one of them did happen to be concerned with the present narrative, he would have been the last to catch a curious eve. He was merely a well-dressed and well-made young Greek, with that mobile comeliness which in many of the modern Byzantines is so curiously reminiscent of an Attic ancestor. That he was a person of the better sort was evident from his gold-tipped cigarette holder, from the portentous length of his little-finger nail, and from the modish cane which he swung in palpable ease of heart. But for the frivolity of the word I might say that he tripped along, so light-footed was the gait with which he passed the white-smocked toll-keeper and essayed the heaving passage of the Bridge. Presently, however, he stayed his steps, to approach one of the pedlers who stood along the railing. And in the extremely unattractive assortment of

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