Pistis Sophia

“ The allusion quoted above from Origen to gates opening of their own accord seems to refer to one of its episodes, and Tertullian, in the treatise in which he says he is exposing the original tenets of the sect [613] , uses many expressions that he can hardly have borrowed from any other source. Thus, he speaks of Sophia “breaking away from her spouse [614] ” which is the expression used by Pistis Sophia in her first Metanoia and is in no way applicable to the Valentinian Sophia of Irenaeus or Hippolytus. ”

“ Four years ago, in the Restaurant Sylvain, the ingenuous and ignorant Sophia had shyly sat in awe of the resplendent courtesan, with her haughty stare, her large, easy gestures, and her imperturbable contempt for the man who was paying. And now Sophia knew that she, Sophia, knew all that was to be known about human nature. She had not merely youth, beauty, and virtue, but knowledge--knowledge enough to reconcile her to her own misery. She had a vigorous, clear mind, and a clean conscience. She could look any one in the face, and judge every one too as a woman of the world. ”

“ It should have been built in a day, like a fairy-palace, to pleasure you. And Pierre, Pierre is just the man—sober and steady, and full of the divine fire. I remember his laying his hand on his heart one night after one of those evenings, those dear evenings, we spent together at Monte Carlo, and saying: “I adore the Princess! None plays so finely as she!”’
Sophia was charmed with his readiness to take her idea up.
‘At last, and at last!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Petros, my soul is sick for roulette!’
‘Poor dear Sophia,’ said he, ‘and I am afraid you find me grown very dull. ”

“ Sophia, flustered and softened, her heart beating quick with a delicious emotion, half hope, half fear, sat down on the chair by the door and gazed at them.
He was more to her now, while she sat in his room and looked at these things, than he had ever been; and though the moment was at hand when his reception of her must tell her all, her distrust of him had never been less. If he did not love her with the love she pictured, why had he chosen her? He whose career promised so much, who under the cloak of frivolity pursued aims so high, amid perils so real. He must love her! He must love her! ”

“ Go, Sophia, go!
From then on she was alone.
What am I? What is a woman alone?
Not a queen or an empress, not a wife or a mother, not a daughter, not a nun. Not mistress, now that Michael and Manfred had each sent her away. Not courtesan or even harlot.
Crossing the Bosporus to Asia Minor, she had survived. She did not care to remember the means by which she survived. Of all of them, the least dishonorable was theft.
She let herself be used, and she could be very useful. She found her way to the Byzantine general Michael Paleologos, who wanted to take Constantinople back from the Franks. ”

“ There were days when Sophia was the old Sophia—the forbidding, difficult, waspish, and even hedgehog Sophia. But there were other days on which Sophia seemed to be drawing joy and gaiety and goodwill from some secret source, from some fount whose nature and origin none could divine. It was on these days that the uneasiness of Mrs. Baines waxed. She had the wildest suspicions; she was almost capable of accusing Sophia of carrying on a clandestine correspondence; she saw Sophia and Gerald Scales deeply and wickedly in love ”

“ We have to wait, so let us do so like reasonable men. I have no patience with prophets—there is no such thing as prophecy; the whole world is one calculation. You have not calculated; you only prophesy. I never prophesy; but I am not without a mathematical gift.’
‘You are not tied by the ankle to the steps of a throne,’ retorted Petros. ‘You do not know Sophia as I know her, and, what is more, you have only a thousand pounds in this precious club.’
Malakopf had not told, and did not intend to tell, Petros about his further investment, and he replied:
‘You are wholly wrong, my dear Prince. ”

“ As Malakopf had suggested, the two conspirators saw somewhat less of each other for the next week or two, and more than once Sophia thought—and, to do her justice, hoped—that Petros must have taken her word of warning to heart. But his nauseating little tendernesses and solicitudes for her were not diminished, and she found him infinitely disgusting. He was acting a part, of that she was well assured, for he was not, she knew, a man to whom caresses are habitual, and their day had long since been over between them. ”

“ And now, the menacing Gerald Scales having reappeared, Sophia's form lay mysterious and affrightening on the sofa; and she and Lily Holl, a girl whom she had not met till that day, were staring at Sophia side by side, intimately sharing the same alarm. Constance rose to the crisis. She no longer had Sophia's energy and decisive peremptoriness to depend on, and the Baines in her was awakened. All her daily troubles sank away to their proper scale of unimportance. Neither the young woman nor the old one knew what to do. ”

“ But the reappearance of Gerald Scales! That involved the possibility of consequences which could not even be named, so afflictive was the mere prospect to them. Constance was speechless, and she saw that Sophia was also speechless.
Of course the event had been bound to happen. People do not vanish never to be heard of again. The time surely arrives when the secret is revealed. So Sophia said to herself--now! ”

“ In turn, let me ask you not to make the State bankrupt at Monte Carlo.’
‘It wants a man with a system to do that,’ laughed Sophia.
Petros and Leonard, an amazingly sunny infant, went down to Mavromáti to see the Princess off, and returned together to Amandos about six o’clock. Petros did not care for children, and the unconscious Leonard merely roused in him a sense of futile envy at the thought that the boy would some day be Prince of Rhodopé, not merely the husband of its Princess. ”

“ Motorists have not yet spoiled the population of Sant' Ambrogio, and, unmolested by any clamour for alms, Sophia passed along the shady street, where the black-haired, kerchiefed women, with their fine, rock-hewn faces and deep-set eyes, were knitting at their house doors. In the big, cool church, whose walls of banded black and white marble were quieted by the dim light, which just showed the dark gargoyles writhing like things of a dream over cornice and capital, Sophia knelt down, more to wrap herself in the peace of it than to pray. ”

“ Unless Sophia—unless the Princess—is here before that forged Bill of hers comes before the House on the thirty-first,{172} she is no more Princess of Rhodopé. She, her line, her country, are at stake. She is at Corfu—ah! do not ask me how I know, but I know she is—with the Empress, ready to return. Come she must.’
Lord Abbotsworthy held up a listening hand.
‘Boom! boom!’ he said; ‘that is the Adriatic. But you are so unexpected, Blanche. Dear me, how sleepy I am! Princess Sophia may be at Corfu, or the Falkland Islands; it is all one. Why should she come? ”

“ She schemed through all the virtues for the apotheosis of Lady Sophia, and she called her scheming the vindication of truth, which she held to be a Romish monopoly. She would have made me a nun, as part of it, and taken all the credit with Heaven. I can hardly regret that she was foiled. I love truth as well as any woman, only, being a woman, à contre-cœur, and not a saint, for me it must be coloured, and in the newest shades. To ask me to love it for its own sake is to ask me to be a dowd; and, for all my respect for Lady Sophia, I have never fancied a heaven of dowds. ”

“ I The kitchen steps were as steep, dark, and difficult as ever. Up those steps Sophia Scales, nine years older than when she had failed to persuade Constance to leave the Square, was carrying a large basket, weighted with all the heaviness of Fossette. Sophia, despite her age, climbed the steps violently, and burst with equal violence into the parlour, where she deposited the basket on the floor near the empty fireplace. ”

“ To her Prince Petros, in a moment of unguarded confidence, had hinted at the upshot of this night’s work, and when she saw Sophia her voluminous bodice remained expanded with a quick-taken breath, and the two for a moment looked at each other in silence. Sophia recovered herself first.
‘Oh, I am even as delighted and surprised to see you, dear Princess,’ she cried, ‘as you are to see me. I appear like the man in the moon, do I not? It is ages since we met. Where is Petros, you ask me? ”

“ Moreover, the words of the ‘Preacher,’ in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, “Wisdom (Σοφία) is the mother of fair Love and Hope and holy Fear,” suggested an allegory of a holy woman with three daughters so called, and thus, in compliment, no doubt, to the glorious newly-built church, the niece of Justinian’s empress, afterwards wife to his nephew and successor, was called Sophia, a name which thenceforward became the fashion among 107the purple-born daughters, and spread from them among the Slavonian nations, who regarded Constantinople as the centre of civilization. ”

“ She was shameless with men. She ignored all orders as to what she was to eat and what she was not to eat. She lived up to the full resources of her employers. She could be to the last degree slatternly. Or she could be as neat as a pin, with an apron that symbolized purity and propriety, as to-night. She could be idle during a whole day, accumulating dirty dishes from morn till eve. On the other hand she could, when she chose, work with astonishing celerity and even thoroughness. In short, she was born to infuriate a mistress like Sophia and to wear out a mistress like Constance. ”

“ Sophia detested the man; with her habitual force of expression, she had said that to be in the room with him was like having tea with a centipede: one never knew where it would be next, and the prevalent impression was that it was crawling up one’s back. But Petros from the first had made much of him; he had often told his wife that so acute a financier was a goose who laid golden eggs for the State. It would be of the nature of suicide to strangle anything so intimately connected with the well-being of the principality. He might be like a centipede, socially speaking, if she would have it so ”

“ If she should speak out her whole heart, would he not turn against her and Faith with bitterness? Then, for just one brief moment—the thought of her helplessness flashed upon Sophia's mind. All was lost to them. They were already as those who had gone down among the tombs. Would it not be right for her to save Faith, at least, by complying? Faith would be free!—Raft had promised it. She herself might be delivered from the power of Spite and Hide, who would compel her to marry Halfway. True, she would be a Pixie's wife. But how much better Raft than Halfway! ”

“ Sophia got up from the table, and went indoors to the nursery to see the adorable Leonard, the four-months-old baby. Petros’s arrangement seemed to her to be in every way admirable. Apart from the convenience of getting away when she wanted, it gave her the opportunity of getting away alone. She was fond of her husband, but constantly irritated by him. She had no idea of letting herself be schooled by him into dependence, to be taught the duty of royalty by him, and she never forgot that she was Princess of Rhodopé, and he her husband. ”

“ It was tacitly understood between her and Petros that the Prince would not accompany her, and such had been the success of his Regency the year before that now Sophia begged him never to send her anything referring, however remotely, to State matters.
‘I am sick of the sceptre!’ she said to him the day before she left; ‘and you, Petros, are still rather fond of it. Oh, you remind me so much of a child dressing up in Court finery; when it comes to put the finery on in earnest, how bored it is! ”

“ Sophia's tone seemed to imply an accusation of Constance. The general tension was acute.
Then suddenly their whispers expired, and the door opened and the servant came in to lay the supper. Her nose was high, her gaze cruel, radiant, and conquering. She was a pretty and an impudent girl of about twenty-three. She knew she was torturing her old and infirm mistresses. She did not care. She did it purposely. Her motto was: War on employers, get all you can out of them, for they will get all they can out of you. ”

“ Constance had opened the door before the car came to a stop in the gloom of King Street. The young people considered that she bore the shock well, though the carrying into the house of Sophia's inert, twitching body, with its hat forlornly awry, was a sight to harrow a soul sturdier than Constance. ”

“ She shuts up the club she has opened—on whose suggestion? We are here in debate, a course unprecedented when the Crown introduces a Bill. That such a Bill should be opposed is beyond question, but who is the real author of it? Who but one has persuaded her to this course? Too long—I say it openly—have we suffered under the strange whims of the House of Ægina. Princess Sophia, as you all very well know, spends her days at Monte Carlo, yet she treats us like children, and would forbid us to gamble in Rhodopé. ”

“ The disposition of the rooms had to remain exactly as it had always been. There was the same draught under the door, the same darkness on the kitchen stairs, the same difficulties with tradesmen in the distant backyard, the same twist in the bedroom stairs, the same eternal ascending and descending of pails. An efficient cooking-stove, instead of the large and capacious range, alone represented the twentieth century in the fixtures of the house.
Buried at the root of the relations between the sisters was Sophia's grudge against Constance for refusing to leave the Square. Sophia was loyal. ”