She turned away from him and said in a lower voice, dreamy and
embittered: “But what can become of me? Am I always to stay locked
up? I am fifteen already. The world is full of wonderful things and
people that I might never know about. I know it was wrong of me to
break my promise; but to live for years without ever knowing new
people,--to hear them passing the door all day, and to see them a
long ways off. Do you think I did very wrong?”
“No.”
“I don’t know anyone. I don’t know anyone.”
“Well ... well, you’ll come to know my sister. That will be a
beginning,” he said, taking her fingertips thoughtfully and
wonderingly in his.
“Yes,” she said.
“Everything is beginning over again. I’m your friend. Then my sister.
Soon you will have a great many. You’ll see.”
“But where will I be five years from now and ten years from now,”
she cried, staring about her wildly. “I don’t know. I’m afraid. I’m
unhappy. Everyone in the world is happy except me.”
The caress of the hands in first love, and never so simply again,
seems to be a sharing of courage, an alliance of two courages against
a confusing world. As his hand passed from her hair to her shoulder,
she turned to him with parted lips and hesitant eyes, then suddenly
bound both her arms about his neck. Into his ears her lips wildly and
all but meaninglessly repeated: “Yes. Yes. Yes. I can’t stay there
forever. I should never know anyone. I should never see anybody.”
“She will let you come to see me,” he said.
“No,” said Glycerium. “But I’ll come by myself. I mustn’t ask her.
She would not let me come. She always knows best. And the boys can
throw their stones. I don’t mind if you’re here. What ... what is
your name?”
“My name is Pamphilus, Glycerium.”
“Can ... can I call you by it?”
It was not at this meeting, nor at their next, but at the third,
beneath the dwarfed olive trees, that those caresses that seemed to
be for courage, for pity and for admiration, were turned by Nature to
her own uses.
These conversations took place in the early Spring. One afternoon
in the late Summer Chrysis slipped out of her house and climbed the
hill behind it. She was filled with a great desire to be alone and
to think. She looked out over the glittering sea. The winds were
moderate on that afternoon and before them the innumerable neat waves
hurried towards the shore, running up the sands with a long whisper,
or discreetly lifting against the rocks a scarf of foam. In the
distance a school of dolphins engaged at their eternal games led the
long procession of curving backs. The water was marbled at intervals
with the strange fields and roadways of a lighter blue; and behind
all she beheld with love the violet profile of Andros. For a time she
strayed about upon the crest of the hill, making sure that no one
was watching or following her, then descending the further side she
sought out her favorite retreats, a point of rock that projected into
the sea and a sheltered cove beside it. As she drew near the place,
she stumbled forward, almost running, and as she went she murmured
soothingly to herself: “We are almost there. Look, we are almost
there now.” At last, climbing over the boulders she let herself down
into an amphitheatre of hot dry sand. She started unbinding her
hair, but stopped herself abruptly: “No, no. I must think. I should
fall asleep here. I must think first. I shall come back soon,” she
muttered to the amphitheatre, and continuing her journey she reached
the furthermost heap of stones and sat down. She rested her chin upon
her hand and fixing her eyes upon the horizon she waited for the
thoughts to come.
The first thing to think about was her new illness. Several times
she had been awakened by a wild fluttering in her left side that
continued, deepening, until it seemed to her as though a great stake
were being driven into her heart. And all the day the sensation
would remain with her as of a heavy object burdening the place
where this trouble lay. “Probably ... very likely,” she said to
herself, “the next time I shall die of it.” At the thought a wave
of anticipation passed over her. “I shall probably die of it,” she
repeated cheerfully and became interested in some crayfish in the
pool at her feet. She plucked some grasses behind her and started
dragging them before the eyes of the indignant animals. “Nothing in
life could make me abandon my sheep, but if I die they will have
to fall back on Circumstance as I did. Glycerium, what will become
of you? Apraxine, Mysis...? There are times when we cannot see one
step ahead of us, but five years later we are eating and sleeping
somewhere.” (It was humorous, pretending that one’s heart was as
hard as that.) “Yes,” she said aloud, to the pain that trembled
within her, “only come quickly.” She leaned forward still dragging
the stems before the shellfish: “I have lived thirty-five years. I
have lived enough. _Stranger, near this spot lies Chrysis, daughter
of Arches of Andros: the ewe that has strayed from the flock lives
many years in one day and dies at a great age when the sun sets._”
She laughed at the deceptive comforts of self-pity and taking off a
sandal put her foot into the water. She drew herself up for a moment,
asking herself what there was left in the house for the colony’s
supper; then recollecting some fish and some salad on the shelf, she
returned to her thoughts. She repeated her epitaph, making it a song
and emphasizing, for self-mockery, its false sentiment. “O Andros, O
Poseidon, how happy I am. I have no right to be happy like this....”
And she knew as she gazed at the frieze of dolphins still playing in
the distance that her mind was avoiding another problem that awaited
her. “I am happy because I love this Pamphilus,--Pamphilus the
anxious, Pamphilus the stupid. Why cannot someone tell him that it
is not necessary to suffer so about living.” And the low exasperated
sigh escaped her, the protest we make at the preposterous, the
incorrigible beloved. “He thinks he is failing. He thinks he is
inadequate to life at every turn. Let him rest some day, O ye
Olympians, from pitying those who suffer. Let him learn to look the
other way. This is something new in the world, this concern for
the unfit and the broken. Once he begins that, there’s no end to
it, only madness. It leads nowhere. That is some god’s business.”
Whereupon she discovered that she was weeping; but when she had dried
her eyes she was still thinking about him. “Oh, such people are
unconscious of their goodness. They strike their foreheads with their
hands because of their failure, and yet the rest of us are made glad
when we remember their faces. Pamphilus, you are another herald from
the future. Some day men will be like you. Do not frown so....”
But these thoughts were very fatiguing. She arose and, returning
to the amphitheatre, laid herself down upon the sand. She murmured
some fragments from the Euripidean choruses and fell asleep. She
had always been an islander and this hot and impersonal sun playing
upon a cold and impersonal sea was not unfriendly to her. And now
for two hours the monotony of sun and sea played about her and wove
itself into the mood of her sleeping mind. As once the gray-eyed
Athena stood guarding Ulysses--she leaning upon her spear, her great
heart full of concern and of those long divine thoughts that are
her property--even so, now, the hour and the place all but gathered
itself into a presence and shed its influence upon her. When her eyes
finally opened she listened for a time to the calm in her heart.
“Some day,” she said, “we shall understand why we suffer. I shall be
among the shades underground and some wonderful hand, some Alcestis,
will touch me and will show me the meaning of all these things; and I
shall laugh softly for hours as I do now ... as I do now.”
She arose and binding up her hair prepared to ascend the slope. But
just as she turned to leave the place, there visited her the desire
to do something ceremonial, to mark the hour. She stood up straightly
and held out her arms to the setting sun: “If you still hear prayers
from the lips of mortals, if our longings touch you at all, hear me
now. Give to this Pamphilus some assurance--even some assurance such
as you have given to me, unstable though I am--that he is right.
And oh! (but I do not say this from vanity or pride, O Apollo,--but
perhaps this is weak, this is childish of me, perhaps this renders
the whole prayer powerless!) if it is possible, let the thought of me
or of something I have said be comforting to him some day. And ...
and....”
But her arms fell to her side. The world seemed empty. The sun went
down. The sea and sky became suddenly remote and she was left with
only the tears in her eyes and the longing in her heart. She closed
her lips and turned her head aside. “I suppose there is no god,” she
whispered. “We must do these things ourselves. We must drag ourselves
through life as best we can.”
* * * * *
Chrysis had made the mistake of accustoming the members of her
household to her invariable presence and now while she slept they
became increasingly indignant at the length of her absence. In twos
and threes they hovered about the door peering to the right and to
the left with mingled scorn and alarm.
“When she comes in, see that no one says a word to her,” directed
Apraxine, a tall lame woman whom Chrysis had found beaten and left
for dead at the edge of the desert below the terraces of Alexandria.
“Pretend you don’t see her.”
“... to go sallying off a whole day without a word to a soul.”
“I’m sure I don’t wish to stay in a house where I count for nothing.”
“... less than nothing, it seems.”
Presently however something happened that distracted their minds from
their resentment. A new sheep arrived at the fold.
Simo’s frank had carried to Andros the money that Chrysis intended
for the support of the stricken sea-captain. But Philocles’s
guardians had long since tired of their charge and become
discontented with the intermittent payments. They decided to take
advantage of this sum of money to ship him off to Brynos. It was
necessary for this purpose to wait for a lucid interval in the
patient’s condition. Such a moment finally arrived; they hurriedly
made up his bundle, brushed his hair, and led him down to the
waterfront, where they found the captain of a boat sailing between
the Cyclades who was willing to undertake the commission. And thus it
was that on the afternoon of Chrysis’s retreat to solitude Philocles
arrived on Brynos. A boy who attended at one of the wineshops in
the town was directed to escort him to her house, and suddenly
the childlike sea-captain was thrust into the courtyard among the
conspiring pensioners.
Ten years before Philocles had been the greatest navigator on the
Mediterranean, first in skill and experience and first in fame. He
had been many times to Sicily and to Carthage; he had passed through
the Gates of Hercules and visited the Tyrian mines in Britain. He had
sailed westward for months across the great shelf of water, seeking
new islands, and had been forced to turn back by the visible anger
of the gods. In the present age men were captains or merchants or
farmers, but in the great age men had been first Athenians or Greeks,
and the islanders regarded Philocles as of that order, a belated
giant. He was already in middle life when Chrysis first knew him--she
had been a passenger on one of his trips to Egypt--and it astonished
her to find someone laconic in a chattering world and with quiet
hands in a gesturing civilization. He was blackened and cured by
all weathers. He stood in the squares of the various ports of call,
his feet apart as though they were forever planted on a shifting
deck. He seemed to be too large for daily life; his very eyes were
strange--unaccustomed to the shorter range, too used to seizing the
appearances of a constellation between a cloud and a cloud, and the
outlines of a headland in rain. Wind, salt and starvation had moulded
his head, and his mind had been rendered, not buoyant, but rich and
concentrated by the enforced asceticisms of a prolonged duty and of
long sea voyages. He had been one of the persons whom Chrysis had
most loved in all her life and it was she who had discovered his
secret, the secret that it was neither adventure nor gain that drove
him along his adventurous life. He was passing the time and filling
the hours in anticipation of release from a life that had lost its
savor with the death of his daughter. These two saw in one another’s
eyes the thing they had in common, the fact that they had both died
to themselves. They lived at one remove from that self that supports
the generality of men, the self that is a bundle of self-assertions,
of greeds, of vanities and of easily-offended pride. Three years
before, Philocles had been forced to captain some ships of a city
at war. He had been captured and mutilated and what was left of so
kingly a person was a timorous child.
The sheep examined the newcomer who had been thrust so abruptly into
their midst. They questioned him and amused themselves with his
answers. Then they gave him a bench in the sunlight where he might
whisper to his heart’s content.
The sun set and soon after Chrysis came stumbling through the door,
laughing apologetically and pushing back her hair. “Forgive me,
O my dear friends, forgive me. I fell asleep on the sand and I’m
very sorry I’m so late.” (The men and women raised their eyebrows
cynically and went on with their work.) “Apraxine, has anything
happened?” (Apraxine cleared her throat with Alexandrian hauteur and
became absorbed in looking for a thread on the ground.) “Now we must
find something particularly rare for supper.”
The sheep exchanged pitying glances over all this tawdry artifice
and when Chrysis passed into the house they burst into laughter.
The laughter was condescending, but the soul had returned to the
community. Finally at a signal from Apraxine, Glycerium went to
the door and announced to Chrysis that Philocles had arrived from
Andros. He had seen her pass and some twinge of memory had set him
trembling. He rose and walked unsteadily to the middle of the court.
She saw him standing before her, haggard, with hollow puzzled eyes
and with untrimmed beard.
She went forward repeating, “My dear friend, my friend!” but as she
embraced him a loud voice within her seemed to say: “Something is
going to happen. The threads of my life are drawing together.”
* * * * *
That night Chrysis was awakened from a light and feverish sleep by
the instinctive knowledge that someone was near her. She raised
herself on one elbow and peered towards the faint glimmer of the door.
“Who is it? Who is there?” she said.
A figure seemed suddenly to rise from the threshhold. “It’s I,
Chrysis. It’s Glycerium.”
“Is something the matter? Is someone ill?”
“No ... it’s only....”
“Light a lamp, my child. What do you want?”
“Chrysis, are you angry with me for waking you up? I couldn’t sleep,
Chrysis, and I had to come into your room.”
“But why are you crying, my dear, my dove? Come now and sit on the
edge of the bed. Of course I’m not angry with you.” Glycerium sank
upon the floor beside her. “No, no,--the floor is cold. Come sit up
here. Your hair is wet! Tell me now, what is making you unhappy?”
“Nothing.”
“What? Then you have something to tell me?”
“No ... I don’t know what ... I just want you to talk to me.”
“Well, I have something to tell you.” Chrysis was stroking
Glycerium’s hair, delicately following with her finger-tips the
strands as they passed above and behind the ear, when suddenly
Glycerium threw her arms about her sister’s neck and sobbed
uncontrollably. Chrysis continued gravely with her caress, thinking
that she was merely dealing with one of the meaningless accesses of
despair that descend upon adolescence when the slow ache of existence
is first apprehended by the growing mind. “There!” she murmured in
a rhythmic undertone, “Sh ... sh ... sh ... sh.... We love you. We
all love you in this house. Our beautiful Glycerium, our gentle,
our very beautiful Glycerium ... sh ... sh ... there! Are you
comfortable now? I have some good news for you. (No, no, there is
plenty of room.) This is it: Beginning tomorrow you are going to lead
an altogether different life. I am going to let you wander all over
the island alone. And when Mysis and I go to market you can go with
us. You may climb the hills if you like, and you may explore along
the water’s edge,--I shall even show you the secret of the secrets
of my heart,--a beautiful hidden shelter by the sea where one can be
perfectly alone.... Well? are you pleased? Doesn’t this news make you
happy?”
“Yes, Chrysis.”
“Now! I thought it would make you very happy and all you say is: Yes,
Chrysis!”
“Chrysis, tell me: what will become of me?”
Chrysis changed her position and in the dark shut her eyes a moment.
“Oh, my dear, my dear ... that’s what everyone asks, everyone on
earth. Well, first you tell me: what do you want to become?”
“I want to marry someone and ... and be in his home. Chrysis, tell
me: can I marry someone? Without a father and a mother and without
anything, is it possible that I can marry someone?”
“My dear, there is always....”
“Chrysis, I’m grown-up now. I’m fifteen. Please tell me the truth. I
must know. Don’t say something merely to quiet me. I must know the
truth. Can a man ever ask me to marry him? Why are you waiting so
long to answer me?”
“I have been planning to have a long talk with you about all these
things. But not now. Wait a short time; wait until you have had a
week, two weeks, of this new life when you will be free to wander all
over the island. Then you will be able to understand better what I
have to say.”
Glycerium paused a moment. “I know, I know,” she said, her face
against Chrysis’s shoulder. “That means that no one will ever be able
to marry me.”
“No, no, I don’t say that....”
Glycerium rose and stood in the middle of the room. “I understand,”
she said in the darkness.
Chrysis raised herself again on one elbow and said slowly: “We are
not Greek citizens. We are not people with homes. We are considered
strange, only a little above the slaves. All those others live in
homes and everyone knows their fathers and their mothers; they marry
one another. They think we would never fit into their life. Although
all that is true,--”
“But there are stories,” said Glycerium, “of men who even married
girls that had been slaves.”
“Yes, if a young man should fall in love with you, it is possible
that he would take you into his home. That is why I have tried to
take such care of you and why I have kept you hidden here in the
house. Through the young men who come to the banquets, the island
knows that you are here and that you have been carefully protected.
And now that you are to walk about the island freely you must be a
hundred times more careful than other girls. You are beautiful and
you are good, and before all their unfriendly eyes you must show them
your modesty and your goodness. That is all there is to say and to
hope, my child.”
“Perhaps, Chrysis ... it is best that I do not go about the island
freely, after all.”
“No, no. You will feel like going out. It will come gradually. But
now you must go to bed and to sleep, my darling. All these things
will solve themselves as best they can. All you can do for the
present is to be yourself, your very self, my Glycerium.”
Glycerium moved unsteadily towards the bed: “Chrysis, I must tell you
something.”
“Yes?...”
“You will be angry with me, Chrysis.”
“Why....”
“May the gods protect me, I ... I have been talking with Mysis and
now I know that I am going to be the mother of a child.”
There was silence for a moment followed by the sound of Chrysis
putting her feet upon the floor. “Where is Mysis? Let me get up.”
“It is true, Chrysis. I broke my promise the times when you were
away. I used to go out over the hills.”
“Oh, my child, my child!”
“But he loves me. He will marry me. He loves me, I know.”
“Who is it? What is his name?”
“It is Pamphilus, son of Simo.”
Chrysis grew rigid in the darkness. Then she slowly put her feet back
into the bed. Glycerium continued wildly: “He loves me. He will take
care of me. He has told me so a hundred times. Chrysis, what shall I
do? What shall I do? I am afraid.”
A low moan at the door revealed the fact that Mysis had accompanied
her younger mistress to this interview and was kneeling outside the
door without the courage to enter.
After a moment Chrysis said in a light impersonal voice: “Well, you
... go off to bed now and go to sleep. Yes. We’ll both be catching
cold here. It’s late. I think it must be almost morning.”
“I cannot sleep.”
“Everything will be all right, Glycerium. I can’t talk any more now.
I’m not well. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Glycerium left the room, trembling.
In her darker hours Chrysis carried on what she called a “dialogue
with Fate.” And now as she turned to the wall she said: “I hear you.
You have won again.”
Before long the pain in her side became fixed and unremitting, and
Chrysis knew that her life was drawing to a close. She took to her
bed and her thoughts no longer clung to the world about her. Now
when her courage was being undermined by her pain she dared not
ask herself if she had lived and if she were dying, unloved, in
disorder, without meaning. From time to time she peered into her mind
to ascertain what her beliefs were in regard to a life after death,
its judgments or its felicities; but the most exhausting of all our
adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the
last halls where belief is enthroned. She resigned herself to the
memory of certain moments when intuition had comforted her and she
quieted her heart with Andrian cradle-songs and with fragments from
the tragic poets. She saved her strength to fulfill a last desire,
one that may perhaps seem unworthy to persons of a later age. Her
mind had been moulded by formal literature, by epics and odes, by
tragedies and by heroic biography, and from this reading she had been
imbued with the superstition that one should die in a noble manner,
and in this high decorum even the maintenance of her beauty played a
part. The only terror left in the world was the fear that she might
leave it with cries of pain, with a torn mind, and with discomposed
features.
The news spread about the island that the Andrian was gravely
ill. The young men who had been her guests were confused by the
discrepancy between their mothers’ sarcasms and the respect that
Chrysis had inspired in themselves, but some brought shy offerings
of wine and cheese to her door. For such brief interviews she
raised herself on one elbow and sought to recover her light-spoken
graciousness. But most of the young men stayed away; it required
a maturer mind than they could summon to hold side by side their
memories of sensual pleasure and their respect due to the dying.
Pamphilus had other reasons for staying away. It seemed more and more
unlikely that he would ever be permitted to marry Glycerium. But
one morning he appeared at Chrysis’s house and asked to see her. He
traversed the court, picking his way among her motley and dismayed
pensioners, and his eyes fell upon Glycerium. She was seated beside
Philocles at her sister’s door, silent and without hope. Pamphilus
stopped for a moment on one knee before her and took her hands in
his. “Do not be afraid,” he said in a low voice. “No harm will come
to you.” She derived no courage from his words; she lifted her
eyes and scanned his face. Her mouth trembled, but no words came
and her eyes returned to the ground. Pamphilus passed into the room
where Chrysis lay; for a moment he could distinguish nothing in the
darkness. Presently he became aware of the priest of Æsculapius and
Apollo bending over a brazier in the corner, and finally he saw
Chrysis smiling at him gravely from the bed. He sat down beside her
in silence; each waited for the other to begin.
“We are sorry, all of us are sorry, Chrysis,” he said at last, “to
hear that you have been so ill.”
“Thank you, Pamphilus. Thank them all.”
“There ... there has been so much rain. When the sunlight returns you
will feel better at once.”
“Yes, it has always been the sunlight that has done me the most
good. You are all well on your farm?”
“Yes, the gods be praised.”
“The gods be praised. I shall never forget a favor your father did
for me.”
Pamphilus was struck with amazement. “My father?”