The Towers of Trebizond (18 page)

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Hagia Sophia stands alone above the sea, derelict and deserted, with a tall bell tower standing near it, and I found it usually shut, except at the times when they were doing something inside it with the ladders and buckets and planks. I did not mind, because it was the outside, and particularly the south front, that I liked to look at and to paint. I would try and make out the figures on the frieze, and could do this most easily when sitting on the camel, and there were various Genesis creatures, such as Adam and Eve and the serpent, very toughly carved among trees and fruit and animals. It took me some time to make out the Greek inscription, which was about saving me from my sins, and I hesitated to say this prayer, as I did not really want to be saved from my sins, not for the time being, it would make things too difficult and too sad. I was getting into a stage when I was not quite sure what sin was, I was in a kind of fog, drifting about without clues, and this is liable to happen when you go on and on doing something, it makes a confused sort of twilight in which everything is blurred, and the next thing you know you might be stealing or anything, because right and wrong have become things you do not look at, you are afraid to, and it seems better to live in a blur. Then come the times when you wake suddenly up, and the fog breaks, and right and wrong loom through it, sharp and clear like peaks of rock, and you are on the wrong peak and know that, unless you can manage to leave it now, you may be marooned there for life and ever after. Then, as you don't leave it, the mist swirls round again, and hides the other peak, and you turn your back on it and try to forget it and succeed.

Another thing you learn about sin, it is not one deed more than another, though the Church may call some of them mortal and others not, but even the worst ones are only the result of one choice after another and part of a chain, not things by themselves, and adultery, say, is chained with stealing sweets when you are a child, or taking another child's toys, or the largest piece of cake, or letting someone else be thought to have broken something you have broken yourself, or breaking promises and telling secrets, it is all one thing and you are tied up with that chain till you break it, and the Church calls it not being in a state of grace, which means that you can get no help, so it is a vicious circle, and the odds are that you never get free. And, while I am on sin, I have often thought that it is a most strange thing that this important part of human life, the struggle that almost every one has about good and evil, cannot now be talked of without embarrassment, unless of course one is in church. It goes on just the same as it always has, for as T. S. Eliot points out,

The world turns and the world changes
,

But one thing does not change
.

In all of my years
,
one thing does not change
.

However you disguise
it,
this thing does not change
,

The perpetual struggle of good and evil
.

But now you cannot talk about it when it is your own struggle, you cannot say to your friends that you would like to be good, they would think you were going Buchmanite, or Grahamite, or something else that you would not at all care to be thought. Once people used to talk about being good and being bad, they wrote about it in letters to their friends, and conversed about it freely; the Greeks did this, and the Romans, and then, after life took a Christian turn, people did it more than ever, and all through the Middle Ages they did it, and through the Renaissance, and drama was full of it, and heaven and hell seemed for ever round the corner, with people struggling on the borderlines and never knowing which way it was going to turn out, and in which of these two states they would be spending their immortality, and this led to a lot of conversation about it all, and it was extremely interesting and exciting. And they went on talking about their conflicts all through the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and James Boswell, who of course was even more interested in his own character and behaviour than most people are, wrote to his friends, "My great object is to attain a proper conduct in life. How sad will it be if I turn out no better than I am!" and the baronet he wrote this to did not probably think it peculiar, and Dr. Johnson thought it very right and proper, though some people like Horace Walpole naturally found Boswell a strange being, and when he had to meet him Horace "made as dry answers as an unbribed oracle." But they went on like this through most of the nineteenth century, even when they were not evangelicals or tractarians or anything like that, and nineteenth century novels are full of such interesting conversations, and the Victorian agnostics wrote to one another about it continually, it was one of their favourite topics, for the weaker they got on religion the stronger they got on morals, which used to be the case more then than now.

I am not sure when all this died out, but it has now become very dead. I do not remember that when I was at Cambridge we talked much about such things, they were thought rather
CICCU
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, and shunned, though we talked about everything else, such as religion, love, people, psycho-analysis, books, art, places, cooking, cars, food, sex, and all that. And still we talk about all these other things, but not about being good or bad. You can say you would like to be a good writer, or painter, or architect, or swimmer, or carpenter, or cook, or actor, or climber, or talker, or even, I suppose, a good husband or wife, but not that you would like to be a good person, which is a desire you can only mention to a clergyman, whose shop it is, and who must not object or make dry answers like an unbribed oracle, but must listen and try to assist you in your vain ambition.

Having spent a little time looking at Hagia Sophia again, and making a drawing of the tiled apses, I rode down to the shore, and along it to the quays, where I liked to watch the cargoes being unloaded from the ships. I used to spend a lot of time doing this. I always hoped to see a ship come in loaded with beautiful Circassian slaves, who would then be sold on the quays, though I knew that I could never afford one of these. But I waited in vain, and presently I rode along the shore road to the western ravine, which is very deep and woody and cool, and I rode up it by the stream that runs through it among bracken and oleanders and moss and toadstools, where the camel and I like to sit and rest on hot afternoons. We came out through the town looking for the mosques and churches and bazaars which were on Charles's plan but not usually to be found, owing to Charles's plan being partly drawn from an older one in another book, still, some were there, and some had left bits, now parts of houses or shops, and it was an interesting search. I called at the Post Office for letters, and there were many for aunt Dot and a few for Father Chantry-Pigg, and two for me, one from Vere and one from Halide. I opened Halide's first, to see if she had any news. She also sent some London newspapers which she had bought in Istanbul. She had called at the British Embassy and told them about the disappearance of our friends.

"I did not say," she wrote, "that it seemed to have been voluntary. No, I told them that it was probably a kidnapping, one of those cases of dragging people over the frontier into Soviet territory and then seizing them and holding them captive. There have been many such cases. The Embassy does not know what they do with their captives. Perhaps they make them work, or make them talk, who knows?" I thought, it would be very easy to make aunt Dot talk, any one could do that at any time. Perhaps she was now sitting talking gaily away, fed with vodka and caviare and paid with roubles, giving the news from the west, from Turkey, from London, from everywhere. I hoped so. I always think that countries should share their news and gossip in a neighbourly way, and not practise apartheid and secrecy, for that is not the way to be friends. Father Chantry-Pigg, with his strong anti-Soviet prejudices, might not be so conversational as aunt Dot, indeed, he never was, still, he could tell them something about the Anglican Church, though what they would really want to know was how our football teams were shaping this year, and what were the prospects of Arsenal being annihilated by the Dynamos, and, though neither of the two would really know much about this, no doubt they could think up some views.

"So," Halide went on, "the Embassy are making enquiries, and are telling the Soviet Embassy that they take a grave view. Of course the Press has got hold of it, you will see that it is in these papers that I send. If any reporters try to ask you questions, as they do already to me, say nothing of Dot's letter, the disappearance must appear to be altogether involuntary, or else they will simply join the great army of those who have Chosen the Curtain, and their government will do no more for them, and, however greatly I grieve over their action, I could not wish for this."

I opened the papers. There were four Sunday ones and the
Church Times.
Of the Sunday ones, two were meant for the upper and upper middle classes, one for the lower middle, and one for the barely literate. One of the upper-class papers had a paragraph on an inner page, recording the disappearance a few days ago of two British travellers in Turkey, Mrs. ffoulkes-Corbett and the Rev. the Hon. Hugh Chantry-Pigg, the well-known and lately retired vicar of St. Gregory's Church, Westminster, who had been exploring the ground for an Anglican mission to Turkey. It seemed that they had gone into the prohibited frontier zone near Cildir in Turkish Armenia, and had vanished, though their camel, a white Arabian, had returned to the small lake where they had been camping with friends. My name was mentioned, also Halide's. The
Church Times
had rather more, on account of the Anglo-Catholic Mission Society, and Father Chantry-Pigg being such a well-known priest. The two popular papers had a great deal more, and particularly the quite illiterate one, which had a splash on its front page saying,

TWO MORE BRITISH BEHIND CURTAIN

CLERGYMAN AND WIDOW VANISH

WAS IT PREMEDITATED, OR SOVIET

FRONTIER GRAB?

TURKISH WOMAN DOCTOR SAYS NO CLUE

GRAVE VIEW OF EMBASSY

WIDOW KNEW MACLEANS

Beneath these headlines there were two columns of personal gossip about both of them, but particularly about Father Chantry-Pigg, clergymen being even more News than widows. Owing to their advancing years, there was not much to be made out of the Romance angle, but there was quite a lot about St. Gregory's and its ways, picked up from the congregation, from the new vicar and the curates, and from the People's Churchwarden, who was very proud of St. Gregory's and its extreme tradition and reputation, which, he boasted, outdid all the other extreme London churches.

"Pretty close to Catholicism, I suppose?" the reporter had asked him.

"We are a completely Catholic church," the People's Warden had told him, and this reply had, it seemed, so fogged the poor reporter's mind that he had written no more about St. Gregory's, but left his readers to make what they could of it, while he turned to the widow's white camel and her acquaintance with the Maclean family. I too was mentioned, as waiting for news beside the Black Sea, in company with my aunt's camel, to which I was devoted.

Having read all this, I turned back to the upper class papers, read the book reviews, and then saw a full-page article signed David Langley, and it was called "The Lure of Trebizond". So I read it, and saw that it was exactly the same as part of Charles's manuscript that I had; it was about two thousand words long, and would be followed by others on Sundays to come. There was a piece above it about David, and how he and Charles had been travelling in Turkey together, but unfortunately, Mr. Dagenham had been killed by a shark, and these articles by Mr. Langley were instalments of a book he was writing, which would be published next year.

As the manuscript I had was all in Charles's handwriting, and full of Charles's corrections and insertions, I saw that there was no excuse for David's perfidy. I wondered if I would tell him that I knew about it, when we met next. Also, if I should send Charles's manuscript to his family, as I had meant to do. I decided that I would probably do both these things, to avenge poor Charles. Perhaps I should meet David somewhere in Turkey, and tell him I had this manuscript. If I wanted to blackmail him, for money to get about Turkey, it would seem a very good way, and, as I mentioned above, I was becoming pretty hazy about right and wrong, so I might come to that in the end.

I was not sure whether I was surprised at David or not. I did not know him well enough to be sure. But I thought that what he was doing was definitely worse than adultery, and that he was not in a state of grace any more than I was. Only, as David was not a Christian, being in a state of grace did not arise, as this dilemma only worries Christians, though non-Christians too know about right and wrong, and do both, as Christians do, but perhaps few of them notice it so much. I wondered if David despised his own perfidious conduct, and how much. And if ever he would feel that he must own to it. Perhaps when I met him I would know. Meanwhile, poor Charles was deprived of the credit of his book, but I did not suppose that this was bothering Charles much now, unless it was part of his purgatory to know how mean David had been. However, I remembered that he had really known this before, and it was the sort of thing he had been telling me about when I was half asleep in the Çanakkale café garden by the Hellespont. It seemed that David had a mean character, even meaner than most characters. One thing I thought was that most of David's friends would be surprised when they read his articles, because they were much better written, and written more in Charles's style, than most of what David wrote, and I wondered if people would guess. And I thought, live and let live, and that it wasn't my business to say anything, and that David would probably be exposed in the end anyhow, like most of the people who have committed literary frauds. Though it may be that the ones who have been exposed are the only ones we know about, and perhaps a great deal of what we read was really written by some one else who has died and left his manuscripts in drawers, and this is a very interesting thought.