(_From Reineke’s Note Book._)
MUTE ELOQUENCE.
Contrary to my expectations, I awoke on the morning after my arrival
at Xinara refreshed, with only that sensation of fatigue in the limbs
that makes it delightful to lie perfectly still and revel in the luxury
of homespun and lavender-perfumed sheets. The bed was the softest I
ever slept on, the room the prettiest and freshest I ever wakened in.
Such light, such a cheerful display of linen as everywhere greeted my
eyes! In the garden, by the drawn blind, I could see Persian lilacs,
in which the birds had evidently built their nests, and down among the
trees of the orchards thousands of others seemed to have congregated.
The effect of their _aubade_ on this lovely winter morning was curious.
It began by a soft twitter, which gradually deepened its volume, until
it swelled upon mighty waves and beat frantically against the silver
gates of the morning in a shower of sound. It shook the closed shutters
like hail that lashes the earth outside. In the half haze of troubled
sleep, I imagined, at first, that the heavens had suddenly opened
in an unwonted downpour, but as soon as I was thoroughly awake, and
glanced upon the dim world which slowly unfolded beneath the light
of the breaking day, I understood and recognised the cause of this
patter against the panes. The increasing red of the east began to sweep
across the pallid sky, washed the lingering moon white, and enriched
the zenith with a dash of warm blue. I got up and opened the nearest
window, and then lay back to follow the movement of that impetuous
swell of music, sustained with exquisite orchestral harmony. The sound
seemed to travel round and round in a circle, continuously gathering
force, and then burst into a flood of song. An indistinguishable tumult
of wave with ever this strange, perpetual, circuitous movement, as if
all the birds of all the gardens and woods had met, and were whirling
round and round this spot of earth in some mad dance of wing. I think
I must have slept again, or perhaps I lay in an open-eyed dream for
some time. When I looked once more out of the window, I saw the bright
pleasant little woman, who had welcomed me the night before, walk
sturdily down the path that leads to the village, with her red water
jar placed on her shoulder, one muscular brown arm flung round her
head to support it. What a pleasure it was to watch her! She looked so
secure, so contented, so seriously active, and there was a light in
her eye which betrayed something more than cheerfulness,--a sense of
humour, and a kind of still laugh just traced the faintest sympathetic
line round the mouth. I supposed her to be the mother of that
intolerable youth who had led my mule last night, and who served me as
guide in my most memorable ride.
My restful solitude was broken by the entrance of Annunziata, carrying
a little tray with coffee, an inviting roll called Koulouria, and some
cigarettes. She placed it beside me, and then touched my hand softly,
and stood and smiled upon me with maternal benignity.
“You are rested, Kyrie?” she asked.
“Quite fresh, and ready for another ride,” I answered, laughing.
When I had partaken of this sober fare, she begged me to be still
awhile, and held a light and a cigarette for me. I am fond enough of a
recumbent attitude, and nothing loth, accepted the proffered sedative.
Then she trotted off with her inimitable air of sturdy serenity, and
hardly had she left me to my own contented thoughts when the door
opened, and in walked Aristides. Is it not unreasonable to dislike a
man, for no other reason than that his exterior and certain tricks
of manner revolt you? The fellow is really a decent fellow, but he
has a way of lifting the pressure of his lithe frame from one foot to
another, and of running his forefinger along his shapely nose, that
provokes me to the verge of exasperation. I watch for these tricks
with an unaccountable impatience, and when they come, I am invariably
harassed with the suppressed impetuosity of physical rage, and expect
before long to fling something at him. He entered the room with an
air of polished familiarity, took a chair, uninvited, as if he were
a prince of the blood whose condescension singularly honoured me,
and smiled in large affability and tolerance as he began to roll a
cigarette. After a pause he remarked casually, with a very apparent
desire to set me at ease:
“Vera nice counthry, Ingland, like vera much I do Ingleesh--large
place, I hear.”
I nodded, and patiently waited to learn why I should be attacked in
execrable English.
“I knew Ingleeshman in Smyrna. He vera nice man, touch vera well piano.
You touch piano?”
I admitted an innocent weakness that way, and continued to smoke
complacently, tickled by the humour of the situation.
“You are Ingleesh, sarr?”
“I have not that honour.”
“Ah, vous êtes Français?”
I failed to claim that great and much belauded nationality, whereupon
Aristides, indefatigable in the pursuit of knowledge, and anxious to
confound me with his linguistic skill, burst out radiantly:
“Sie sind Deutsch.”
“If you will condescend to speak your own language and spare me your
exasperating murder of Continental tongues, it may be of some slight
advantage to you and me,” I cried.
My unaccustomed violence in nowise discomposed him. He proved his
philosophic superiority by blandly smiling, as if to turn aside a wrath
he considered childish and inconsequent, rolled another cigarette,
leant forward, lit it, and observed, with an air of casual approval,
that it was a pleasing surprise to meet a foreigner who could speak
Greek. He then proceeded to question me with the savage candour and
curiosity of his race. He was eager to learn my income, its source,
the cost of the clothes I wore, if they were purchased in Paris or
in London, if I admired the Greeks and Greece, if I were married, or
disposed to marry a Greek, if my parents were alive, and how many
brothers and sisters I had. To those singular questions I replied
curtly, contemptuously resolved to see how far he would push his
indiscreet investigations. Then when I grew tired, I proceeded to
obtain a little information on my own account. From the communicative
Aristides I learned that the amiable doctor, who so wisely recommended
me the bosom of nature and innocence, is for inscrutable reasons
recognised as the King of Tenos, that he is a member of King George’s
Parliament, and by claim of obstruction unillumined by a rushlight of
intelligence or motive, is called the Parnell of Greece.
My host, it appears, is a more interesting character. His attitude
towards the moderns is that of unsparing contempt. He lives with the
ancients, and entertains a very lively horror of that superior people,
the French. His daughter is reputed to be a handsome and cultivated
young woman, to whose hand every unmarried male of the island aspires.
She has an exquisite name, Inarime. When I got rid of Aristides, I lay
back and conjectured a variety of visions of the owner of such a name.
In turn I dismissed from my mind the amiable maiden, the attractive
peasant girl, the chill statue and the haughty pedant, the Arab, the
Turk, the Italian of the Levant. Not one of these seemed to fit in with
my ideal of Inarime, and the thought that she had left Xinara before my
arrival fretted me strangely with a sense of baffled desire.
“Just an old pagan philosopher,” Aristides had said, speaking of
Selaka, “who keeps the handsomest girl of Tenos locked away from
everyone, as if a glance were a stain. He seems to regard her as a
goddess, and nobody here worthy to look upon her divinity. That is
why he sent her away before you came. He distrusts you and every other
Christian. Now, if you happened to be a Pagan, I have not the slightest
doubt he would be willing to marry you right off to Inarime.”
Why should this impertinent suggestion of Aristides have shot the blood
of anger and shame into my face? And yet it did, and the heat remained
after the fellow had left me to my own reflections. I do not think that
I am specially nervous or sensitive, but the shock of that idea touched
me with a force that made me shrink as from a prophecy. I dreaded to
meet Inarime, and almost resented her exile on my account. There may
be something flattering to our masculine vanity in the fact that a
beautiful girl has been sent into banishment on our account, but this
balsam did not heal a certain dull ache of dismay and resentment.
In this unreasonable mood Selaka found me. He inquired after my health
with measured courtliness, and suggested a variety of additions to my
comfort. I was dressed now, and reclining on a sofa. Without hesitation
I followed his advice to breathe the air of the terrace awhile. The
broad sunshine and the open-air serenity of the scene soothed and
calmed me, and I felt I could have been content to sit thus for hours
watching the flapping shadows of the windmills upon the sunny hills,
under the spell of the noon-day silence of nature. My host sat beside
me, the inevitable cigarette between his fingers, with a sharp but
kindly glance turned occasionally upon me. I imagine the question of
my nationality was perplexing him, and he was, perhaps, seeking an
occasion to elicit direct information from me on this point. But this
did not conceal from me that the normal expression of his fine dark
eyes showed the glow of an impersonal enthusiasm, doubtless lit by
his long devotion to the ancients. By reason of his rough-hewn and
unfinished features, he looked rather a simple good-natured peasant,
removed from the sordid conflict and merely animal sensations of
husbandry, than a learned pedagogue or an earth-removed philosopher; a
man fond of questioning the stars and his own soul, but not indifferent
to the delights of shepherd-life; capable of sparing a daisy and
stepping out of the way of a burdened ant, when he walked abroad with
Plato or Thucydides in his hand. It struck me that Inarime could be
no vulgar glittering jewel to be thus carefully shielded from the
irreverent gaze by this sage of Tenos.
“I think you cannot be French,” he said, at last.
“Reineke is a German name,” I answered, evasively, for it was not my
wish to court coldness by an avowal of my nationality.
“Ah, it is well. I do not like the French.”
“And yet your countrymen adore them,” I said, and laughed.
“So they do, so they do--to their sorrow and shame.”
“How can that be? Is France not admittedly the first nation of the
civilised world?” I exclaimed.
“That depends upon what is understood by civilisation. If you mean
humbug, vice, vanity and bluster, infamous plays and vaudevilles,
immoral literature generally, you may crown France with a triple crown
of shameless glory. But if you mean truth, good manners, purity, sense
and honourable restraint in all things, as the old world understood it,
then France is below all other countries to-day. It is because Greece
is so infatuated with France that I completely despair of her future.”
“It seems to me that you are charging an innocent country with the
vices of a depraved town. France is not Paris, and Paris is the sinner.”
“Paris! France! It is one. The country looks on complacently, and
approves the nameless follies of the city. It makes no effort to impede
her fatal career, and is not dismayed to see her, with her band of
lascivious poets and novelists, dance madly towards her doom, in the
degradation of decay, with a weak and dissolute smile on her worn lips.”
“Do you condemn all her writers?”
“Upon moral and artistic grounds I condemn all unreservedly. You are
one of those who, perhaps, call Victor Hugo great. I do not. ‘Words,
words, words,’ as Hamlet says, and nothing to come at them. Chip away
all the superfluous decorations and excrescences of ‘Notre Dame,’ and
measure it by the severe restrictions of Greek Art. You have twenty
pages, strengthened, purified, with only essential action and speech,
instead, of two long volumes of intolerable verbiage. No, sir; France’s
sentence has been pronounced. One day Germany will sweep her away,
with her vices and her graces, and they, I admit, are many. She is
in a debilitated and anæmic state, starting up in spasms of febrile
vitality, and the sooner her destiny is accomplished, the better for us
and all other such feebly imitative peoples. Have you stayed long in
Athens?”
“No, in fact I have seen nothing as yet of the town.”
“Ah, then you have yet to learn why I, and every true lover of Greece,
should hate the name of France. The men and women in Athens speak bad
Greek, though there is no reason why their speech should not be as
pure as Plutarch’s. Every one chatters in bad French, with what object
it would puzzle the Lord himself to discover. The women rave about
Ohnet, a vulgar writer whose style even I can know to be execrable.
Like the illustrious Hugo, the men read Zola, and are thereby much
improved. There are French vaudevilles and _cafés-chantants_; our
army is superintended by Frenchmen, who draw large salaries for the
privilege of laughing at us. Paris condescends to send our women its
cast-off fashions at enormously disproportionate prices. Athens is, in
fact, a small, dull, feeble Paris,--Paris in caricature, without the
fascination of its many-sided life.”
He stopped suddenly, half-ashamed and slightly flushed after his burst
of indignation. When we had smoked a cigarette apiece, I made careless
mention of his brother, and asked about his family. Constantine, he
told me, had long ago married a handsome Levantine who, after a few
months of conjugal discord, had attempted to shoot him, and then
betaken herself to Constantinople with a native of Syra. This disaster
had naturally tended to convince Constantine of the nothingness of
marriage, and he had since remained in single inconsolation. Pericles
himself had been blessed with a wife, picked up at Ischia, as lovely
in soul as in body, but here again was demonstrated the singular
fleetingness of wedded bliss. This pearl among wives melted away in the
crucial test of childbirth--and Selaka was left, bereaved and truly
forlorn, with a baby girl upon his hands.
Later on in the afternoon Selaka joined me, just as my senses were
lazily shaking themselves out of the thrall of siesta. He asked me if I
were interested in the study of ancient Greek, and upon my enthusiastic
affirmative, his face brightened and his manner immediately assumed a
cordiality and a pleasure that charmed me. He invited me to accompany
him in his walk through his orchard and vineyard; and truly a delight
it was to me to be brought face to face with a nature so simple and
a mind so exquisitely cultivated as his. Perhaps it would be thought
that such exclusive recognition of the past and such a profound and
unutterable contempt for the present were narrow and pedantic. That
it tended to lessen his interest in humanity cannot be denied. But
how very precious, from sincerity and undecorated speech, were the
thoughts to which he gave expression during our leisurely walk! Much as
I delighted, however, in the ancients, and deeply interesting as was
any discussion upon the old Greek writers, I could not get out of my
head the one word “Inarime.” I was haunted with the wish, nay, almost
the need, to hear something of her, and at last, after a pause in our
conversation, I hazarded the question:
“Is your daughter married?”
Selaka fixed me with a quick, suspicious glance, and said, coldly,
“My daughter is young; it will be time enough yet to think of marrying
her!”
“Then she does not live with you?” I persisted, with pardonable
indelicacy.
“She is at present staying with her aunt at Mousoulou,” said Selaka.
I ought to have let the subject drop upon these strong hints, but I
went on:
“I am told she is very beautiful.”
“You have been told the truth,” said Selaka.
I saw that further questioning would be indiscreet. However discursive
he might be upon the subject of the ancient Greeks, his reticence upon
the subject of Inarime was not to be shaken.
Thus passed my three first days in Xinara. Aristides invariably
wounded and offended me by his impertinent freedom and his still more
impertinent confidences. It appears Aristides is one of Inarime’s
admirers, and being promoted to the rank of chief muleteer to his
mistress, naturally regards himself as having scored above all his
rivals. The early morning was generally spent by me in exploring the
neighbouring hills alone. In the afternoon I accompanied Selaka round
his small estate. A tranquil, healthy existence it was, and under its
influences my late fever and languor left me. With recurrent health
I gained in vitality and spirits, and had I not been pursued by an
indefinable curiosity--a sense of baffled hope,--I should ere this have
been measuring my forces for a return to Athens.
* * * * * * *
It was the fourth day since my arrival from Tenos, when I opened
the door of the bright sitting-room with the intention of passing
an hour or two among Selaka’s choice books. Looking out upon the
desolate Castor,--seeming the more desolate because of the cruel
joy of the sunshine that so ruthlessly exposed its empty flanks, my
ear was attracted by the sound of hysterical sobbing and half-angry
expostulation, that came from the courtyard through the opposite open
window. I walked across the room, wondering what could have happened
to disturb the active serenity of Annunziata. My eyes fell upon a
village woman, whose withered, sunburnt face was lifted in tearful
prayer to another, who sat with her back to me, leaning over a little
table. There was something exquisitely youthful and gracious in the
attitude,--of majestic youth in the line of the figure clad, as I could
see, in some dark yellow stuff. But the small head was completely
hidden in a muslin kerchief of spotless white, with a Turkish border of
yellow and crimson.
There was a restraint and firmness--an unconscious grace in the pose,
and I felt my pulses quicken with eagerness to see the face. Could this
be a young judge measuring awful depths of iniquity in a criminal? A
cold Diana reproving undue tenderness, a wise Athena rebuking folly? I
listened. The villager’s brogue and voluble utterances were difficult
to follow. But I gathered that there was question of a letter that had
been written, and that the dictator’s mind had altered, and that she
now wanted one written in an entirely different spirit.
“I am so sorry, Kyria. He will never come back to me if he gets that
letter, and what does anything matter to me as long as he remains
away? Tell him that I am not angry with him; that I will bear anything
rather than that he should not come back to me. If he would only leave
her and come away from Smyrna! Tell him anything, young lady, that will
touch him,--I am so lonely, so weary of waiting for him!” I heard the
woman say.
“But, my poor woman, what proof have I that, if I rewrite the letter
in this new mood, you will not be sorry for the leniency in another
hour, and implore me to write an angrier letter for you?” The voice
was clear and soft, with a curious throat sound that somehow carried
with it the idea of velvet. Something in it seemed to draw me with an
ache of desire to see the speaker. I acted upon an unaccountable and
irresistible impulse. It compelled me in a kind of dreamy expectation
down the marble steps, and, standing with my hand upon the top of the
pillar, close to her, my intense gaze was an equal compulsion to her.
She moved her head round slowly, and our eyes met. Was it the shock
of recognition, the awful bliss of surprised surrender, the force of
revelation, undreamed, unawaited, yet not the less complete because of
its suddenness, that held our glances in a steady dismay?
I laid down my arms at once happy, contented, prone, in a sacred
servitude; but she, I could divine, with the delicate instinct of
maidenhood, strove to struggle and release her soul. But no effort of
even her imperious will could move her eyes from mine, upon which they
rested in the mute eloquence of dazzled entreaty, shining as if they
were filled with light. And then slowly their golden hue faded into a
wistful brown, and slowly, grudgingly drooped their lids,--and mine, as
if by instinct, dropped. It was only afterwards that I could remember
the glory of her resplendent youth, and dwell upon the flash of her
great beauty.
She laid her hand upon the head of the kneeling, sobbing woman, and
said:
“I cannot write your letter to-day, Katinko, but come to me at
Mousoulou,” and then turning, looked at me again, this time with
less trouble and dismay through the unfathomable tenderness of her
gaze,--looked at me steadily, commandingly, unconsciously reminding me
that she was sovereign lady, and that not one inch of her sovereignty
would she forego for me. I humbly accepted the dismissal of her eyes,
without a word of protest or prayer, though the pulses of my body
rang with frantic urgence for both. I stood to let her pass me, and
was strong enough to resist the temptation to touch her hand as a
suppliant might, to prostrate myself before her as a servant. But no;
our attitude must be that of equals, something told me. If she be queen
then must I be king; sovereign, too. Not servant, Inarime. King of you,
as you, beloved, are henceforth queen of me!
I went to my room and tried to think. But thought was vain as action--I
could only feel. Feel that I had seen Inarime; that my soul had touched
hers; that there was henceforth no life apart for either of us. While
I sat thus, dismantled of reality, and full of an overpowering joy,
I heard the harsh voice of Aristides checking the impetuosity of his
mule, and the words “Kyria” and “Mousoulou” caught my wandering
attention.
I drew near to the window in a thrill of alarm. Inarime was seated on
the mule, with no other shelter from the beating sunbeams than the
white kerchief bound round her head. A strong impulse swept through me
to forbid this departure, to cry out passionately against the injustice
of flight and desertion. But this folly would but imperil my position.
What right had I to usurp authority and claim upon the surprised
declaration of her eloquent eyes? And there came upon me a sense of the
perfect tact of her action, its true fitness in accord with the dignity
of her sex. Pursuit was for me,--not flight, but a delicate, cold
aloofness was hers by divine privilege. Not other would I have her than
sensitively alive to the gracelessness of serene and easy conquest. And
I was not hurt, was I, by this withdrawal from the new light of day,
for her will must ever now be my own.