The water fell off a ledge like lead--like a chain with thick white
links. The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob saw
striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy.
A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept up
with the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced together
with vines--as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous
leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys
in ringed socks. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It
was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at
Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures
over the roofs.
These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them,
and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of the
gorge the clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like a
train on a scenic railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, and
amazing white villages are crowded on ledges. There is always a white
tower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer drop
beneath. It is not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thing
there is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees.
Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. And
there are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with the
shadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, where
one eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness,
exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange,
too, how you never get away from villas.
Still, to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is a
fine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he would
go on foot. He could live on bread and wine--the wine in straw
bottles--for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The
Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy
talked a lot of rot, all the same. "You ought to have been in Athens,"
he would say to Bonamy when he got back. "Standing on the Parthenon," he
would say, or "The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime
reflections," which he would write out at length in letters. It might
turn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between the ancients
and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith--something in
the style of Gibbon.
A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slung
with gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of the
Latin race, looked out of the window.
It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights you
are in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear;
and men-servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in between
pompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at once
momentary and astonishingly intimate--to be displayed before the eyes of
a foreigner. And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, and
yet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on an
omnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the fields,
sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of
earth--Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes.
Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through the
night. The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and he
wrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh all
white in the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, which
floated round the globe with the green shade on it. The Italian
gentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned....
And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob an
intolerable weariness--sitting in hotels by oneself and looking at
monuments--he'd have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant....
"O--h," Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of
him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to
get something--the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled,
obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash.
So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walking
down the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of the
Parthenon came upon him in a clap.
"By Jove!" he thought, "we must be nearly there!" and he stuck his head
out of the window and got the air full in his face.
It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintance
should be able to say straight off something very much to the point
about being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon all
emotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob had
followed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or so
back; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys;
had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and of
Maggi's consomme; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt of
bad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out opposite
his hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among
coffee-cups; which he read. But what could he do after dinner?
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without
our astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having
given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more
probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous
imagination. One's aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle
who was last heard of--poor man--in Rangoon. He will never come back any
more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that
for a head (they say)--nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls,
eyebrows--everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and
arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of
development--the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And
the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read
Xenophon; then Euripides. One day--that was an occasion, by God--what
people have said appears to have sense in it; "the Greek spirit"; the
Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say
that any Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we
have been brought up in an illusion.
Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail
crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom.
"But it's the way we're brought up," he went on.
And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done
about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about
to be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to an
American called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and left
her. They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense--what damned
nonsense--and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, an
international magazine which is supplied free of charge to the
proprietors of hotels.
In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced in
the electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotel
sitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously to
get the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge,
beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned.
The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man,
carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying the
only arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down,
put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there.
"I shall want to be called early to-morrow," said Jacob, over his
shoulder. "I am going to Olympia."
This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a
modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough.
Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the
matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He
would go into Parliament and make fine speeches--but what use are fine
speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our
veins--of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and evening
parties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray's
Inn--something solid, immovable, and grotesque--is at the back of it,
Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which was
beginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving Home
Rule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?
For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things--as
indeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys,
studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table,
was aware.
That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she knew
everything, by instinct.
And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, posted
at Milan, "Telling me," she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, "really nothing
that I want to know"; but she brooded over it.
Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and his
hat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded and
very stern too, she thought.
"I am going," he would say, "to cadge a meal of Bonamy."
"Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames," Fanny cried, as she hurried
past the Foundling Hospital.
"But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking
about for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed so
profoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud him
at any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was not
much given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamy
thought, in his rooms in Lincoln's Inn.
"He will fall in love," thought Bonamy. "Some Greek woman with a
straight nose."
It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras--to Bonamy who couldn't
love a woman and never read a foolish book.
There are very few good books after all, for we can't count profuse
histories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, or
the volubility of fiction.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like
sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. I like words to be
hard--such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of those
whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up
the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear a
shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature.
That was not Bonamy's way at all. That his taste in literature affected
his friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and only
quite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking,
was the charge against him.
But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking--far
from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table
and falling into thought about Jacob's character, not for the first
time.
The trouble was this romantic vein in him. "But mixed with the stupidity
which leads him into these absurd predicaments," thought Bonamy, "there
is something--something"--he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of
any one in the world.
Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. There
he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of
the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into
groups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for him
was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction--it
was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.
Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia,
the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were
sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained
gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be
alone; out of England; on one's own; cut off from the whole thing. There
are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them blue
sea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish coast. Well now, to
go walking by oneself all day--to get on to that track and follow it up
between the bushes--or are they small trees?--to the top of that
mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity--
"Yes," said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, "let's look at the map."
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To
gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth
spin; to have--positively--a rush of friendship for stones and grasses,
as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go
hang--there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us
pretty often.
The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at
Olympia.
"I am full of love for every one," thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams,
"--for the poor most of all--for the peasants coming back in the evening
with their burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It is
sad, it is sad. But everything has meaning," thought Sandra Wentworth
Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic,
and exalted. "One must love everything."
She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling--stories by
Tchekov--as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at
Olympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty.
The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitable
compromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write it
down. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant
her chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of her
own beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write it
down. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish when
he shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soup
which were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhound
eyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, his
conviction that though forced to live with circumspection and
deliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which,
as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His consideration was
flawless; his silence unbroken.
"Everything seems to mean so much," said Sandra. But with the sound of
her own voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only there
remained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily,
there was a looking-glass.
"I am very beautiful," she thought.
She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass;
and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannot
ignore it. But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drank
his soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window.
"Quails," said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly. "And then goat, I
suppose; and then..."
"Caramel custard presumably," said her husband in the same cadence, with
his toothpick out already.
She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away half
finished. Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was the
English type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched their
hats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and
under-gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down
the broad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with the
Prime Minister to pick a rose--which, perhaps, she was trying to forget,
as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seeking
the window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she had
discovered something--something very profound it had been, about love
and sadness and the peasants.
But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But,
being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish,
he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at his
finger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and
Charles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age with
them and theirs. "Yet there never was a time when great men are more
needed," he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh. Here he
was picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia. He had done. But Sandra's
eyes wandered.
"Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous," he said gloomily. And as
he spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit.
"Beautiful but dangerous," said Sandra, immediately talking to her
husband in the presence of a third person. ("Ah, an English boy on
tour," she thought to herself.)
And Evan knew all that too.
Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, to
have affairs. But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five
feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own
personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he
sighed), it was useless. He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob and
asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he
had come straight out from England.
"How very English!" Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next
morning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain.
"I am sure he asked you for a bath?" at which the waiter shook his head,
and said that he would ask the manager.
"You do not understand," laughed Sandra. "Never mind."
Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself
immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life.
But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to
see the paper; then Mrs. Williams asked him (as they strolled on the
terrace smoking--and how could he refuse that man's cigar?) whether he'd
seen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether
he read Greek and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had to
sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?
"And now," wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, "I shall have to read
her cursed book"--her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.
Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places,
fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows
half-way between England and America, suit us better than cities.
There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It is
this which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in a
room. "So delighted," says somebody, "to meet you," and that is a lie.
And then: "I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I
think, as one gets older." For women are always, always, always talking
about what one feels, and if they say "as one gets older," they mean you
to reply with something quite off the point.
Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for
the theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wild
red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from
clump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun,
striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes.
Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with
an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.
Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him
uneasy--when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate
fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn't make him
understand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leave
him alone. He was dull. He was apt to be grumpy.
He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker.
Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in quest
of adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps,
but uncommonly upright--Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on a
level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all
in his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out of
the Museum and left her.
Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if white
suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a
black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was
arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked.
With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed
to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed
to notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed to
discriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed his
legs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers.
"But he is very distinguished looking," Sandra decided.
And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees,
envied them. The best thing he could do would be to publish, with
Macmillans, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. But
confound this tumid, queasy feeling--this restlessness, swelling, and
heat--it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which he had sworn never to
feel again.
"Come with us to Corinth, Flanders," he said with more than his usual
energy, stopping by Jacob's chair. He was relieved by Jacob's reply, or
rather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that he
would like very much to come with them to Corinth.
"Here is a fellow," thought Evan Williams, "who might do very well in
politics."
"I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live," Jacob wrote
to Bonamy. "It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from
civilization."
"Goodness knows what he means by that," Bonamy sighed. For as he never
said a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob's made him feel
apprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for the
definite, the concrete, and the rational.
Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended the
Acro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode over
rougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age of
four; and the Park was vast.
"One never seemed able to get out of it," she laughed. Of course there
was the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. "I used
to stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler's knees," she laughed,
sadly though.
Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for she
had been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself,
"People wouldn't understand a woman talking as she talks."
She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw,
under her short skirts.
"Women like Fanny Elmer don't," he thought. "What's-her-name Carslake
didn't; yet they pretend..."
Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his own
knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one
thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known
himself before.
Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down
hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly
clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades,
each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling
deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon,
occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are
scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees and
sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks),
as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage,
with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the
knuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite,
dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.
"Heartless!" thought Evan (which was untrue).
"Brainless!" he suspected (and that was not true either). "Still...!" He
envied her.
When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found.
Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy!
No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy.
"I shall go to Athens all the same," he resolved, looking very set, with
this hook dragging in his side.
The Williamses had already been to Athens.
Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest
combination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; now
immortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Now
the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the
knee. No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing
afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the
royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the
pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in
bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap,
and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal
wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raises
itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow
columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.
The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the
day firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships
in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the
waistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings
which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the
children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.
There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victory
and the Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly you
unlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter,
the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are.
The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white,
again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of
the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere
dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite
independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently
humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud--memories,
abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions--the Parthenon is separate
from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for
centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is
dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it
is beauty alone that is immortal.
Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songs
rasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yet
insignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishing
in its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from being
decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the
entire world.
"And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backs
of their statues," said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that the
side of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough.
He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which "the
artistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy," he
read in his guide-book.
He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used to
stand, and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath.
In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreover
he was pestered by guides. This was on Monday.
But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come at
once. And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter.
"For one thing he wouldn't come," he thought. "And then I daresay this
sort of thing wears off." "This sort of thing" being that uneasy,
painful feeling, something like selfishness--one wishes almost that the
thing would stop--it is getting more and more beyond what is
possible--"If it goes on much longer I shan't be able to cope with
it--but if some one else were seeing it at the same time--Bonamy is
stuffed in his room in Lincoln's Inn--oh, I say, damn it all, I
say,"--the sight of Hymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and
the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky
pink feathered, the plain all colours, the marble tawny in one's eyes,
is thus oppressive. Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal
association; he seldom thought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the
other hand his feeling for architecture was very strong; he preferred
statues to pictures; and he was beginning to think a great deal about
the problems of civilization, which were solved, of course, so very
remarkably by the ancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to
us. Then the hook gave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on
Wednesday night; and he turned over with a desperate sort of tumble,
remembering Sandra Wentworth Williams with whom he was in love.
Next day he climbed Pentelicus.
The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the place
almost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sun
struck full upon the Acropolis.
Jacob's intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum of
marble conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yet
it was in the shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him,
there he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Why
not rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again.
No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised his
spirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has these
moments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, got
into the way of thinking about politics.
And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were
given an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins;
yet there he was.
(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the
courtyard--French ladies on their way to join their husbands in
Constantinople.)
Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as if
inspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance of
history--upon democracy--one of those scribbles upon which the work of a
lifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty years
later, and one can't remember a word of it. It is a little painful. It
had better be burnt.
Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladies
opening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, looking
at the sky, that one did not know what to expect--rain or fine weather?
Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are still
several women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacob
straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body
first. These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned,
and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with her
kodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of her
age, her figure, and her tight boots--having, now that her daughter was
married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way,
into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had
seen her.
"Damn these women--damn these women!" he thought. And he went to fetch
his book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.
"How they spoil things," he murmured, leaning against one of the
pillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As for
the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under
cloud.)
"It is those damned women," said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness,
but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been
should never be.
(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men
in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become
fathers of families and directors of banks.)
Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously
round him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather
furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her
head. She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her,
then looked away. He looked at her, then looked away. He was
extraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head,
with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in his head, off he
started to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone, in the
heat.
That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to tea
with Clara Durrant in the square behind Sloane Street where, on hot
spring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, single
horses pawing the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen in
yellow waistcoats ringing bells and stepping in very politely when the
maid demurely replies that Mrs. Durrant is at home.
Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organ
piping sweetly outside; the water-cart going slowly along spraying the
pavement; the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brown
and blue rugs and vases filled with green boughs, striped with trembling
yellow bars.
The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration--Bonamy kept on
gently returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at an
existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs.
Durrant meanwhile enunciating strident politics with Sir Somebody in the
back room) until the virginity of Clara's soul appeared to him candid;
the depths unknown; and he would have brought out Jacob's name had he
not begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him--and could do
nothing whatever.
"Nothing whatever!" he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man of
his temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through the
park, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisingly
geometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the most
senseless way in the world. "Was Clara," he thought, pausing to watch
the boys bathing in the Serpentine, "the silent woman?--would Jacob
marry her?"
But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossible
to get afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk them
all the other way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams,
veiled, in white, her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on the
arm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds wavering and drifting from her
cigarette.
The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, the
band, the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rose
coloured--all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williams
after her second cup of coffee that she began dramatizing the story of
the noble and impulsive Englishwoman who had offered a seat in her
carriage to the old American lady at Mycenae (Mrs. Duggan)--not
altogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan, standing first
on one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stop
chattering.
"I am putting the life of Father Damien into verse," Mrs. Duggan had
said, for she had lost everything--everything in the world, husband and
child and everything, but faith remained.
Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in a
trance.
The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternal
drudge and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls
of yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses
on lips that are to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat and
sound--though to be sure there is the quiet evening with its lovely
pallor, "For I am sensitive to every side of it," Sandra thought, "and
Mrs. Duggan will write to me for ever, and I shall answer her letters."
Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred wider
rings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mount
and ride out to sea on--the hair blown back (so she envisaged it, and
the breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she herself was
emerging from silver spray--when she saw Jacob. He was standing in the
Square with a book under his arm looking vacantly about him. That he was
heavily built and might become stout in time was a fact.
But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin.
"There is that young man," she said, peevishly, throwing away her
cigarette, "that Mr. Flanders."
"Where?" said Evan. "I don't see him."
"Oh, walking away--behind the trees now. No, you can't see him. But we
are sure to run into him," which, of course, they did.
But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the age
of twenty-six a stupid fellow? It is no use trying to sum people up. One
must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is
done. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character at
once. Others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind old
ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat
will always go to a good man, they say; but then, Mrs. Whitehorn,
Jacob's landlady, loathed cats.
There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is
much overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter--that Fanny Elmer
was all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? that
Clara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother's
influence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, and
only to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which were
positively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon some
one unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the character-mongers
said, she had a spark of her mother's spirit in her--was somehow heroic.
But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree, others
thought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attracts
Dick Bonamy--the young man with the Wellington nose. Now HE'S a dark
horse if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause.
Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition--long rumoured
among them.
"But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of that
temperament need..." Miss Julia Eliot would hint.
"Well," Mr. Bowley would reply, "it may be so."
For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out their
victims' characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers of
geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision.
"That young man, Jacob Flanders," they would say, "so distinguished
looking--and yet so awkward." Then they would apply themselves to Jacob
and vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to
hounds--after a fashion, for he hadn't a penny.
"Did you ever hear who his father was?" asked Julia Eliot.
"His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers,"
replied Mr. Bowley.
"He doesn't overwork himself anyhow."
"His friends are very fond of him."
"Dick Bonamy, you mean?"
"No, I didn't mean that. It's evidently the other way with Jacob. He is
precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the
rest of his life."
"Oh, Mr. Bowley," said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her
imperious manner, "you remember Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece."
And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries.
So we are driven back to see what the other side means--the men in clubs
and Cabinets--when they say that character-drawing is a frivolous
fireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosing
vacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls.
The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations
accurately apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target
which (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand--at the sixth
he looks up) flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young
men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of
the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of
machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin
soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops,
reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through
field glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up
and down like fragments of broken match-stick.
These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks,
laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokes
which oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as
smoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. But
you will observe that far from being padded to rotundity his face is
stiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so.
When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight from
shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses,
sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop.
It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They
say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through
their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we
live by--this unseizable force.
"Where are the men?" said old General Gibbons, looking round the
drawing-room, full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people.
"Where are the guns?"
Mrs. Durrant looked too.
Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went out
again.
They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven by
this unseizable force) walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ran
straight into the Williamses.
"Oh!" cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evan
added, "What luck!"
The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Square
of the Constitution was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls.
There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise of
innumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce.
It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out at
intervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek King's monogram wrought in
yellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this way
and that over his shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimes
sighed. It was strange. For they were English people come together in
Athens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that,
answered intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice.
The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, they
said.
"Before you are up," said Sandra.
They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered
something--a bottle of wine--from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of
solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible.
To be left alone--that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a
time when the country had more need of men. He sighed.
"And you have been to the Acropolis?" asked Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan
spoke to the head waiter about calling them early.
"It is astonishing," said Jacob, in a gruff voice.
Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a
little too.
"At half-past six then," said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if
he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their
backs to the window.
Sandra smiled at him.
And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in
broken half-sentences:
"Well, but how lovely--wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan--or are you
too tired?"
At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him,
at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress--not that
she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for
anything he could do, cease its tortures.
They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the
Square of the Constitution.
"Evan is happier alone," said Sandra. "We have been separated from the
newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they
want.... You have seen all these wonderful things since we met.... What
impression ... I think that you are changed."
"You want to go to the Acropolis," said Jacob. "Up here then."
"One will remember it all one's life," said Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. "I wish you could have come in the day-time."
"This is more wonderful," said Sandra, waving her hand.
Jacob looked vaguely.
"But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time," he said. "You
couldn't come to-morrow--it would be too early?"
"You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?"
"There were some awful women this morning," said Jacob.
"Awful women?" Sandra echoed.
"Frenchwomen."
"But something very wonderful has happened," said Sandra. Ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, half an hour--that was all the time before her.
"Yes," he said.
"When one is your age--when one is young. What will you do? You will
fall in love--oh yes! But don't be in too great a hurry. I am so much
older."
She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.
"Shall we go on?" Jacob asked.
"Let us go on," she insisted.
For she could not stop until she had told him--or heard him say--or was
it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon
she discerned it and could not rest.
"You'd never get English people to sit out like this," he said.
"Never--no. When you get back to England you won't forget this--or come
with us to Constantinople!" she cried suddenly.
"But then..."
Sandra sighed.
"You must go to Delphi, of course," she said. "But," she asked herself,
"what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have
missed...."
"You will get there about six in the evening," she said. "You will see
the eagles."
Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner
and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there
was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme
disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life.
Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need
not come to him--this disillusionment from women in middle life.
"The hotel is awful," she said. "The last visitors had left their basins
full of dirty water. There is always that," she laughed.
"The people one meets ARE beastly," Jacob said.
His excitement was clear enough.
"Write and tell me about it," she said. "And tell me what you feel and
what you think. Tell me everything."
The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.
"I should like to, awfully," he said.
"When we get back to London, we shall meet..."
"Yes."
"I suppose they leave the gates open?" he asked.
"We could climb them!" she answered wildly.
Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds
passed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened;
the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.
It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the
streets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric
light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves
being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few
lights.
"I'd love to bring my brother, if I may," Jacob murmured.
"And then when your mother comes to London--," said Sandra.
The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must
have touched the waves and spattered them--the dolphins circling deeper
and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea
of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.
In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the
sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it
pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing
stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.
Sandra's veils were swirled about her.
"I will give you my copy," said Jacob. "Here. Will you keep it?"
(The book was the poems of Donne.)
Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark.
Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great
towns--Paris--Constantinople--London--were black as strewn rocks.
Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in
leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and
the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly
towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern.
Something gentle has passed into it from the grass-rounded hills,
something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders's bedroom
window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow,
sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little
longer--oh, a little longer!--the oppression of eternity.
But to return to Jacob and Sandra.
They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The
columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on
them year after year; and of that what remains?
As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that
when Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep
for ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople.
Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne's poems
upon her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the
English country house where Sally Duggan's Life of Father Damien in
verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little
volumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and
her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the
arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for
sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing
across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She
had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked
and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, "What for?
What for?"
"What for? What for?" Sandra would say, putting the book back, and
strolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards
would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast
mutton, by Sandra's sudden solicitude: "Are you happy, Miss Edwards?"--a
thing Cissy Edwards hadn't thought of for years.
"What for? What for?" Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to
judge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the
depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters,
and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young--a man.
And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At
forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things
he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place
beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare.
But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens,
rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood
which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single
person, or inspection of features. All faces--Greek, Levantine, Turkish,
English--would have looked much the same in that darkness. At length the
columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and
St. Peter's arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul's looms up.
The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their
interpretation of the day's meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters
of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers,
resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact--how there
is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin
voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that
collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn
sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath--you can hear it from an open
window even in the heart of London.
But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with
hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in
skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in
flesh.
"The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning," says Mrs. Grandage,
glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat
stretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round
paws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late today), a baby
is deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar basin while Tom
Grandage reads the golfing article in the "Times," sips his coffee,
wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest
authority upon the foreign exchanges and marked for promotion. The
skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind
rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford
Square it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season),
plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving
the room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word said on
the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of the
alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs
stir; hives are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runs
rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with
breathing; elastic with filaments.
Only here--in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square--each
insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the
forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey
is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the
indescribable agitation of life.
But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into
tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the
gauze of the air and the grasses and pools.
The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of
golden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey and
strawberry and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburban
trains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of
all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the
lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the
coffee-cups; and the chairs standing askew.
Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon
all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured,
resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which
has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood
glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an
armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs
engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant of
armies drawn out in battle array upon the plain.