The Purple Cloud

where rioting wild vine buried her ingloom: but I had not been peeping through the bushes a minute, when shestarted up and looked wildly about, her quick consciousness, I imagine,detecting a presence: though I think that I managed to get away unseen.She keeps her face very dirty: all about her mouth was dry-stained witha polychrome of grape, _murs_, and other coloured juices, likeslobbering _gamins_ of old. I could also see that her nose and cheeksare now sprinkled with little freckles.

  Four days since I saw her a third time, and then found that theprimitive instinct to represent the world in pictures has been workingin her: for she was drawing. It was down in the middle one of the threeeast-and-west village streets, for thither I had strolled towardevening, and coming out upon the street from between an old wall and ahouse, saw her quite near. I pulled up short--and peered. She was lyingon her face all among grasses, a piece of yellow board before her, andin her fingers a chalk-splinter: and very intently she drew, hertongue-tip travelling along her short upper-lip from side to side,regularly as a pendulum, her fez tipped far back, and the left footswinging upward from the knee. She had drawn her yali at the top, andnow, as I could see by peering well forward, was drawing underneath thepalace--from memory, for where she lay it is all hidden: yet the palaceit was, for there were the waving lines meant for the steps, the twoslanting pillars, the slanting battlements of the outer court, andbefore the portal, with turban reaching above the roof, and my twowhisks of beard sweeping below the knees--myself.

  Something spurred me, and I could not resist shouting a sudden "Hi!"whereupon she scrambled like a spring-bok to her feet, I pointing to thedrawing, smiling.

  This creature has a way of mincing her pressed lips, while she shakesthe head, intensely cooing a fond laugh: and so she did then.

  "You are a clever little wretch, you know," said I, she cocking her eye,trying to divine my meaning with vague smile.

  'Oh, yes, a clever little wretch,' I went on in a gruff voice, 'cleveras a serpent, no doubt: for in the first case it was the Black who usedthe serpent, but now it is the White. But it will not do, you know. Doyou know what you are to me, you? You are my Eve!--a little fool, alittle piebald frog like you. But it will not do at all, at all! A nicerace it would be with you for mother, and me for father, wouldn'tit?--half-criminal like the father, half-idiot like the mother: justlike the last, in short. They used to say, in fact, that the offspringof a brother and sister was always weak-headed: and from such a wedlockcertainly came the human race, so no wonder it was what it was: and soit would have to be again now. Well no--unless we have the children, andcut their throats at birth: and _you_ would not like that at all, Iknow, and, on the whole, it would not work, for the White would bestriking a poor man dead with His lightning, if I attempted that. No,then: the modern Adam is some eight to twenty thousand years wiser thanthe first--you see? less instinctive, more rational. The first disobeyedby commission: I shall disobey by omission: only his disobedience was asin, mine is a heroism. I have not been a particularly ideal sort ofbeast so far, you know: but in me, Adam Jeffson--I swear it--the humanrace shall at last attain a true nobility, the nobility ofself-extinction. I shall turn out trumps: I shall prove myself strongerthan Tendency, World-Genius, Providence, Currents of Fate, White Power,Black Power, or whatever is the name for it. No more Clodaghs, LucreziaBorgias, Semiramises, Pompadours, Irish Landlords, Hundred-Years'Wars--you see?'

  She kept her left eye obliquely cocked like a little fool, wondering, nodoubt, what I was saying.

  'And talking of Clodagh,' I went on, 'I shall call you that henceforth,to keep me reminded. So that is your name--not Eve--but Clodagh, who wasa Poisoner, you see? She poisoned a poor man who trusted her: and thatis your name now--not Eve, but Clodagh--to remind me, you most dangerouslittle speckled viper! And in order that I may no more see your foolishlittle pretty face, I decree that, for the future, you wear a _yashmak_to cover up your lips, which, I can see, were meant to be seductive,though dirty; and you can leave the blue eyes, and the littlewhite-skinned freckled nose uncovered, if you like, they beingcommonplace enough. Meantime, if you care to see how to draw a palace--Iwill show you.'

  Before I stretched my hand, she was presenting the board--so that shehad guessed something of my meaning! But some hard tone in my talk hadwounded her, for she presented it looking very glum, her under-lippushing a little obliquely out, very pathetically, I must say, as alwayswhen she is just ready to cry.

  In a few strokes I drew the palace, and herself standing at the portalbetween the pillars: and now great was her satisfaction, for she pointedto the sketched figure, and to herself, interrogatively: and when Inodded 'yes,' she went cooing her fond murmurous laugh, with pressedand mincing lips: and it is clear that, in spite of my beatings, she isin no way afraid of me.

  Before I could move away, I felt some rain-drops, and down in someseconds rushed a shower. I looked, saw that the sky was rapidlydarkening, and ran into the nearest of the little cubical houses,leaving her glancing sideways upward, with the quaintest artlessness ofinterest in the downpour: for she is not yet quite familiarised with theoperations of nature, and seems to regard them with a certain amiableinquisitive seriousness, as though they were living beings, comrades asgood as herself. She presently joined me, but even then stretched herhand out to feel the drops.

  Now there came a thunder-clap, the wind was rising, and rain spatteringabout me: for the panes of these houses, made, I believe, of papersaturated in almond-oil, have long disappeared, and rains, penetratingby roof and rare window, splash the bones of men. I gathered up myskirts to run toward other shelter, but she was before me, saying in herstrange experimental voice that word of hers: "_Come_."

  She ran in advance, and I, with the outer robe over my head, followed,urging flinching way against the whipped rain-wash. She took the way bythe stone horse-pond, through an alley to the left between two blindwalls, then down a steep path through wood to the rock-steps, and up weran, and along the hill, to her yali, which is a mile nearer the villagethan the palace, though by the time we pelted into its dry shelter wewere wet to the skin.

  Sudden darkness had come, but she quickly found some matches, lit one,looking at it with a certain meditative air, and applied it to a candleand to a bronze Western lamp on the table, which I had taught her to oiland light. Near a Western fire-place was a Turkish mangal, like onewhich she had seen me light to warm bath-waters in Constantinople, andwhen I pointed to it, she ran to the kitchen, returned with some choppedwood, and very cleverly lit it. And there for several hours I sat thatnight, reading (the first time for many years): it was a book by thepoet Milton, found in a glazed book-case on the other side of thefire-place: and most strange, most novel, I found those august wordsabout warring angels that night, while the storm raved: for this man hadevidently taken no end of pains with his book, and done it gallantlywell, too, making the thing hum: and I could not conceive why he shouldhave been at that trouble--unless it were for the same reason that Ibuilt the palace, because some spark bites a man, and he would belike--but that is all vanity, and delusion.

  Well, there is a rage in the storms of late years which reallytranscends bounds; I do not remember if I have noted it in these sheetsbefore: but I never could have conceived a turbulence so huge. Hourafter hour I sat there that night, smoking a chibouque, reading, andlistening to the batteries and lamentations of that haunted air,shrinking from it, fearing even for the _Speranza_ by her quay in thesequestered harbour, and for the palace-pillars. But what astonished mewas that girl: for, after sitting on the ottoman to my left some time,she fell sideways asleep, not the least fear about her, though I shouldhave thought that nervousness at such a turmoil would be so natural toher: and whence she has this light confidence in the world into whichshe has so abruptly come I do not know, for it is as though someoneinspired her with the mood of nonchalance, saying: 'Be of good cheer,and care not a pin about anything: for God is God.'

  I heard the ocean swing hoarse like heavy ordnance against the cliffsbelow, where the
y meet the outer surface of the southern of the twoclaws of land that form the harbour: and the thought came into my mind:'If now I taught her to speak, to read, I could sometimes make her reada book to me.'

  The winds seemed wilfully struggling for the house to snatch and wing itaway into the drear Eternities of the night: and I could not but heavethe sigh: 'Alas for us two poor waifs and castaways of our race, littlebits of flotsam and seaweed-hair cast up here a moment, ah me, on thisshore of the Ages, soon to be dragged back, O turgid Eternity, into thyabysmal gorge; and upon what strand--who shall say?--shall she next beflung, and I, divided then perhaps by all the stretch of thetrillion-distanced astral gulf?' And such a pity, and a wringing of theheart, seemed in things, that a tear fell from my eyes that ominousmidnight.

  She started up at a gust of more appalling volume, rubbing her eyes,with dishevelled hair (it must have