at least three miles away. What do they hope to kill? a fish? Confound
the dusk. How soon will the launch be ready?'
'It will be round to the steps at any moment now,' said the Chief of
Police, and he gave an order in an irritable voice to his men, who had
continued to let off their carbines aimlessly and spasmodically.
In spite of his assurance, the launch did not appear. The Englishman
was heard discoursing at length to Madame Lafarge, who, at regular
intervals, fervently agreed with what he had been saying, and the
Danish Excellency whispered and tittered with young Christopoulos.
Social distinctions were sharply marked: the diplomatic party stood
away from the casual crowd, and the casual crowd stood away from the
rabble. Over all the dusk deepened, one or two stars came out, and the
little boat was no longer distinguishable from the fishing fleet with
its triangular sails.
Finally, throbbing, fussing, important, the motor-launch came churning
to a standstill at the foot of the steps. The Chief of Police jumped
in, Alexander followed him, promising that he would come straight
to the French Legation on his return and tell them exactly what had
happened.
In the mirrored drawing-rooms, three hours later, he made his recital.
The gilt chairs were drawn round in a circle, in the middle of which
he stood, aware that the Danish Excellency was looking at him,
enraptured, with her prominent blue eyes.
'Of course, in spite of the start they had had, we knew that they stood
no chance against a motor-boat, no chance whatsoever. They could not
hope to reach Aphros before we overtook them. We felt quite confident
that it was only a question of minutes. We agreed that the men must
have been mad to imagine that they could make good their escape in
that way. Sterghiou and I sat in the stern, smoking and talking. What
distressed us a little was that we could no longer see the boat we were
after, but you know how quickly the darkness comes, so we paid very
little attention to that.
'Presently we came up with the fishing smacks from Aphros, and they
shouted to us to keep clear of their tackle--impudence. We shut off
our engines while we made inquiries from them as to the rowing-boat.
Rowing-boat? they looked blank. They had seen no rowing-boat--no boat
of any sort, other than their own. The word was passed, shouting, from
boat to boat of the fleet; no one had seen a rowing-boat. Of course
they were lying; how could they not be lying? but the extraordinary
fact remained'--he made an effective pause--'there was no sign of a
rowing-boat anywhere on the sea.'
A movement of appreciative incredulity produced itself among his
audience.
'Not a sign!' Alexander repeated luxuriously. 'The sea lay all round us
without a ripple, and the fishing smacks, although they were under full
sail, barely moved. It was so still that we could see their reflection
unbroken in the water. There might have been twenty of them, dotted
about--twenty crews of bland liars. We were, I may as well admit it,
nonplussed. What can you do when you are surrounded by smiling and
petticoated liars, leaning against their masts, and persisting in
idiotic blankness to all your questions? Denial, denial, was all their
stronghold. They had seen nothing. But they must be blind to have seen
nothing? They were very sorry, they had seen nothing at all. Would the
gentlemen look round for themselves, they would soon be satisfied that
nothing was in sight.
'As for the idea that the boat had reached Aphros in the time at their
disposal, it was absolutely out of the question.
'I could see that Sterghiou was getting very angry; I said nothing, but
I think he was uncomfortable beneath my silent criticism. He and his
police could regulate the traffic in the rue Royale, but they could
not cope with an emergency of this sort. From the very first moment
they had been at fault. And they had taken at least twenty minutes to
get out the motor-launch. Sterghiou hated me, I feel sure, for having
accompanied him and seen his discomfiture.
'Anyway, he felt he must take some sort of action, so he ordered his
men to search all the fishing smacks in turn. We went the round, a
short throbbing of the motors, and then silence as we drew alongside
and the men went on board. Of course, they found nothing. I watched the
faces of the islanders during this inspection; they sat on the sides
of their boats, busy with their nets, and pretending not to notice the
police that moved about, turning everything over in their inefficient
way, but I guessed their covert grins, and I swear I caught two of them
winking at one another. If I had told this to Sterghiou, I believe he
would have arrested them on the spot, he was by then in such a state of
exasperation, but you can't arrest a man on a wink, especially a wink
when darkness has very nearly come.
'And there the matter remains. We had found nothing, and we were
obliged to turn round and come back again, leaving that infernally
impudent fleet of smacks in possession of the battle-ground. Oh, yes,
there is no doubt that they got the best of it. Because, naturally, we
have them to thank.'
'Have you a theory, Alexander?' some one asked, as they were intended
to ask.
Alexander shrugged.
'It is so obvious. A knife through the bottom of the boat would very
quickly send her to the bottom, and a shirt and a fustanelle will very
quickly transform a respectable bank-thief into an ordinary islander.
Who knows that the two ruffians I saw winking were not the very men we
were after? A sufficiently ingenious scheme altogether--too ingenious
for poor Sterghiou.'
IV
These things came, made their stir, passed, and were forgotten, leaving
only a quickened ripple upon the waters of Herakleion, of which Julian
Davenant, undergraduate, aged nineteen, bordering upon twenty, was
shortly made aware. He had arrived from England with no other thought
in his mind than of his riding, hawking, and sailing, but found himself
almost immediately netted in a tangle of affairs of which, hitherto, he
had known only by the dim though persistent echoes which reached him
through the veils of his deliberate indifference. He found now that his
indifference was to be disregarded. Men clustered round him, shouting,
and tearing with irascible hands at his unsubstantial covering. He was
no longer permitted to remain a boy. The half-light of adolescence was
peopled for him by a procession of figures, fortunately distinct by
virtue of their life-long familiarity, figures that urged and upbraided
him, some indignant, some plaintive, some reproachful, some vehement,
some dissimulating and sly; many vociferous, all insistent; a crowd of
human beings each playing his separate hand, each the expounder of his
own theory, rooted in his own conviction; a succession of intrigues,
men who took him by the arm, and, leading him aside, discoursed to him,
a strange medley of names interlarding their discourse with concomitant
abuse or praise; men who flattered him; men who sought merely his
neutrality, speaking of his years in tones of gentle disparagement. Men
who, above all, would not leave him alone. Who, by their persecution,
even those who urged his youth as an argument in favour of his
neutrality, demonstrated to him that he had, as a man, entered the
arena.
For his part, badgered and astonished, he took refuge in a taciturnity
which only tantalised his pursuers into a more zealous aggression. His
opinions were unknown in the club where the men set upon him from the
first moment of his appearance. He would sit with his legs thrown over
the arm of a leather arm-chair, loose-limbed and gray-flannelled, his
mournful eyes staring out of the nearest window, while Greek, diplomat,
or foreigner argued at him with gesture and emphasis. They seemed to
him, had they but known, surprisingly unreal for all their clamour,
pompous and yet insignificant.
His father was aware of the attacks delivered on his son, but, saying
nothing, allowed the natural and varied system of education to take
its course. He saw him standing, grave and immovable, in the surging
crowd of philosophies and nationalities, discarding the charlatan
by some premature wisdom, and assimilating the rare crumbs of true
worldly experience. He himself was ignorant of the thoughts passing
in the boy's head. He had forgotten the visionary tumult of nineteen,
when the storm of life flows first over the pleasant, easy meadows of
youth. Himself now a sober man, he had forgotten, so completely that
he had ceased to believe in, the facile succession of convictions,
the uprooting of beliefs, the fanatical acceptance of newly proffered
creeds. He scarcely considered, or he might perhaps not so readily have
risked, the possible effect of the queer systems of diverse ideals
picked up, unconsciously, and put together from the conversation of
the mountebank administrators of that tiny state, the melodramatic
champions of the oppressed poor, and the professional cynicism of
dago adventurers. If, sometimes, he wondered what Julian made of the
talk that had become a jargon, he dismissed his uneasiness with a
re-affirmation of confidence in his impenetrability.
'Broaden his mind,' he would say. 'It won't hurt him. It doesn't go
deep. Foam breaking upon a rock.'
So might Sir Henry have spoken, to whom the swags of fruit were but the
vintage of a particular year, put into a labelled bottle.
Julian had gone more than once out of a boyish curiosity to hear the
wrangle of the parties in the Chamber. Sitting up in the gallery, and
leaning his arms horizontally on the top of the brass railing, he had
looked down on the long tables covered with red baize, whereon reposed,
startlingly white, a square sheet of paper before the seat of each
deputy, and a pencil, carefully sharpened, alongside. He had seen the
deputies assemble, correctly frock-coated, punctiliously shaking hands
with one another, although they had probably spent the morning in one
another's company at the club--the club was the natural meeting-place
of the Greeks and the diplomats, while the foreigners, a doubtful lot,
congregated either in the gambling-rooms or in the _jardin anglais_ of
the casino. He had watched them taking their places with a good deal of
coughing, throat-clearing, and a certain amount of expectoration. He
had seen the Premier come in amid a general hushing of voices, and take
his seat in the magisterial arm-chair in the centre of the room, behind
an enormous ink-pot, pulling up the knees of his trousers and smoothing
his beard away from his rosy lips with the tips of his fingers as he
did so. Julian's attention had strayed from the formalities attendant
upon the opening of the session, and his eyes had wandered to the
pictures hanging on the walls: Aristidi Patros, the first Premier,
after the secession from Greece, b. 1760, d. 1831, Premier of the
Republic of Herakleion from 1826 to 1830; Pericli Anghelis, general,
1774-1847; Constantine Stavridis, Premier from 1830 to 1835, and
again from 1841 to 1846, when he died assassinated. The portraits of
the other Premiers hung immediately below the gallery where Julian
could not see them. At the end of the room, above the doors, hung a
long and ambitious painting executed in 1840 and impregnated with the
romanticism of that age, representing the Declaration of Independence
in the _platia_ of Herakleion on the 16th September--kept as an ever
memorable and turbulent anniversary--1826. The Premier, Patros,
occupied the foreground, declaiming from a scroll of parchment, and
portrayed as a frock-coated young man of godlike beauty; behind him
stood serried ranks of deputies, and in the left-hand corner a group of
peasants, like an operatic chorus, tossed flowers from baskets on to
the ground at his feet. The heads of women clustered at the windows of
the familiar houses of the _platia_, beneath the fluttering flags with
the colours of the new Republic, orange and green.
Julian always thought that a portrait of his grandfather, for twelve
months President of the collective archipelago of Hagios Zacharie,
should have been included among the notables.
He had tried to listen to the debates which followed upon the formal
preliminaries; to the wrangle of opponents; to the clap-trap patriotism
which so thinly veiled the desire of personal advancement; to the
rodomontade of Panaïoannou, Commander-in-Chief of the army of four
hundred men, whose sky-blue uniform and white breeches shone among
all the black coats with a resplendency that gratified his histrionic
vanity; to the bombastic eloquence which rolled out from the luxuriance
of the Premier's beard, with a startling and deceptive dignity in
the trappings of the ancient and classic tongue. Malteios used such
long, such high-sounding words, and struck his fist upon the red baize
table with such emphatic energy, that it was hard not to believe
in the authenticity of his persuasion. Julian welcomed most the
moments when, after a debate of an hour or more, tempers grew heated,
and dignity--that is to say, the pretence of the sobriety of the
gathering--was cast aside in childish petulance.
'The fur flew,' said Julian, who had enjoyed himself. 'Christopoulos
called Panaïoannou a fire-eater, and Panaïoannou called Christopoulos a
money-grubber. "Where would you be without my money?" "Where would you
be without my army?" "Army! can the valiant general inform the Chamber
how many of his troops collapsed from exhaustion on the _platia_ last
Independence Day, and had to be removed to the hospital?" And so on
and so forth. They became so personal that I expected the general at
any moment to ask Christopoulos how many unmarried daughters he had at
home.'
Malteios himself, president of the little republic, most plausible
and empiric of politicians, was not above the discussion of current
affairs with the heir of the Davenants towards whom, it was suspected,
the thoughts of the islanders were already turning. The President was
among those who adopted the attitude of total discouragement. The
interference of a headstrong and no doubt Quixotic schoolboy would be
troublesome; might become disastrous. Having dined informally with the
Davenant brothers at their country house, he crossed the drawing-room
after dinner, genial, a long cigar protruding from his mouth, to the
piano in the corner where Eve and Julian were turning over some sheets
of music.
'May an old man,' he said with his deliberate but nevertheless charming
suavity, 'intrude for a moment upon the young?'
He sat down, removing his cigar, and discoursed for a little upon the
advantages of youth. He led the talk to Julian's Oxford career, and
from there to his future in Herakleion.
'A knotty little problem, as you will some day find--not, I hope, for
your own sake, until a very remote some day. Perhaps not until I and
my friend and opponent Gregori Stavridis are figures of the past,'
he said, puffing smoke and smiling at Julian; 'then perhaps you will
take your place in Herakleion and bring your influence to bear upon
your very difficult and contrary Islands. Oh, very difficult, I assure
you,' he continued, shaking his head. 'I am a conciliatory man myself,
and not unkindly, I think I may say; they would find Gregori Stavridis
a harder taskmaster than I. They are the oldest cause of dispute,
your Islands, between Gregori Stavridis and myself. Now see,' he
went on, expanding, 'they lie like a belt of neutral territory, your
discontented, your so terribly and unreasonably discontented Islands,
between me and Stavridis. We may agree upon other points; upon that
point we continually differ. He urges upon the Senate a policy of
severity with which I cannot concur. I wish to compromise, to keep the
peace, but he is, alas! perpetually aggressive. He invades the neutral
zone, as it were, from the west--periodical forays--and I am obliged to
invade it from the east; up till now we have avoided clashing in the
centre.' Malteios, still smiling, sketched the imaginary lines of his
illustration on his knee with the unlighted tip of his cigar. 'I would
coax, and he would force, the islanders to content and friendliness.'
Julian listened, knowing well that Malteios and Stavridis, opponents
from an incorrigible love of opposition for opposition's sake, rather
than from any genuine diversity of conviction, had long since seized
upon the Islands as a convenient pretext. Neither leader had any very
definite conception of policy beyond the desire, respectively, to
remain in, or to get himself into, power. Between them the unfortunate
Islands, pulled like a rat between two terriers, were given ample cause
for the discontent of which Malteios complained. Malteios, it was
true, adopted the more clement attitude, but for this clemency, it was
commonly said, the influence of Anastasia Kato was alone responsible.
Through the loud insistent voices of the men, Julian was to remember
in after years the low music of that woman's voice, and to see, as in
a vignette, the picture of himself in Kato's flat among the cushions
of her divan, looking again in memory at the photographs and ornaments
on the shelf that ran all round the four walls of the room, at the
height of the top of a dado. These ornaments appeared to him the
apotheosis of cosmopolitanism. There were small, square wooden figures
from Russia, a few inches high, and brightly coloured; white and gray
Danish china; little silver images from Spain; miniature plants of
quartz and jade; Battersea snuff-boxes; photographs of an Austrian
archduke in a white uniform and a leopard-skin, of a Mexican in a wide
sombrero, mounted on a horse and holding a lasso, of Mounet-Sully as
the blinded OEdipus. Every available inch of space in the singer's
room was crowded with these and similar trophies, and the shelf had
been added to take the overflow. Oriental embroideries, heavily
silvered, were tacked up on the walls, and on them again were plates
and brackets, the latter carrying more ornaments; high up in one corner
was an ikon, and over the doors hung open-work linen curtains from
the bazaars of Constantinople. Among the many ornaments the massive
singer moved freely and spaciously, creating havoc as she moved, so
that Julian's dominating impression remained one of setting erect
again the diminutive objects she had knocked over. She would laugh
good-humouredly at herself, and would give him unequalled Turkish
coffee in little handleless cups, like egg-cups, off a tray of beaten
brass set on a small octagonal table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and
all the while she would talk to him musically, earnestly, bending
forward, and her restless fingers would turn the bangles round and
round upon her arms.
He could not think Kato unreal, though many of the phrases upon her
lips were the same as he heard from the men in the club; he could not
think her unreal, when her voice broke over the words 'misery' and
'oppression,' and when her eyes burned their conviction into his. He
began to believe in the call of the Islands, as he listened to the
soft, slurring speech of their people in her voice, and discovered,
listening to her words with only half his mind, the richness of the
grapes in the loose coils of her dark hair, and the fulvous colouring
of the Islands in the copper draperies she always affected. It seemed
to Julian that, at whatever time of day he saw her, whether morning,
afternoon, or evening, she was always wearing the same dress, but he
supposed vaguely that this could not actually be so. Like his father,
he maintained her as a woman of genuine patriotic ardour, dissociating
her from Herakleion and its club and casino, and associating her with
the Islands where injustice and suffering, at least, were true things.
He lavished his enthusiasm upon her, and his relations learned to
refrain, in his presence, from making the usual obvious comments on her
appearance. He looked upon her flat as a sanctuary and a shrine. He
fled one day in disgust and disillusionment when the Premier appeared
with his ingratiating smile in the doorway. Julian had known, of
course, of the liaison, but was none the less distressed and nauseated
when it materialised beneath his eyes.
He fled to nurse his soul-sickness in the country, lying on his back at
full length under the olive-trees on the lower slopes of Mount Mylassa,
his hands beneath his head, his horse moving near by and snuffing
for pasture on the bare terraces. The sea, to-day of the profoundest
indigo, sparkled in the sun below, and between the sea and the foot of
the mountain, plainly, as in an embossed map, stretched the strip of
flat cultivated land where he could distinguish first the dark ilex
avenue, then the ribbon of road, then the village, finally the walled
plantation which was his uncle's garden, and the roofs of the low house
in the centre. The bougainvillea climbing over the walls and roof of
his uncle's house made a warm stain of magenta.
Herakleion was hidden from sight, on the other hand, by the curve of
the hill, but the Islands were visible opposite, and, caring only for
them, he gazed as he had done many times, but now their meaning and
purport crystallised in his mind as never before. There was something
symbolical in their detachment from the mainland--in their clean
remoteness, their isolation; all the difference between the unfettered
ideal and the tethered reality. An island land that had slipped the
leash of continents, forsworn solidarity, cut adrift from security and
prudence! One could readily believe that they made part of the divine,
the universal discontent, that rare element, dynamic, life-giving, that
here and there was to be met about the world, always fragmentary, yet
always full and illuminating, even as the fragments of beauty.
This was a day which Julian remembered, marked, as it were, with an
asterisk in the calendar of his mind, by two notes which he found
awaiting him on his return to the house in the _platia_. Aristotle
handed them to him as he dismounted at the door.
The first he opened was from Eve.
'I am so angry with you, Julian. What have you done to my Kato? I
found her in tears. She says you were with her when the Premier
came, and that you vanished without a word.
'I know your _sauts de gazelle_; you are suddenly bored or annoyed,
and you run away. Very naïf, very charming, very candid, very
fawn-like--or is it, hideous suspicion, a pose?'
He was surprised and hurt by her taunt. One did not wish to remain, so
one went away; it seemed to him very simple.
The second note was from Kato.
'Julian, forgive me,' it ran; 'I did not know he was coming.
Forgive me. Send me a message to say when I shall see you. I did
not know he was coming. Forgive me.'
He read these notes standing in the drawing-room with the
palely-frescoed walls. He looked up from reading them, and encountered
the grinning faces of the painted monkeys and the perspective of the
romantic landscape. The colours were faint, and the rough grain of the
plaster showed through in tiny lumps. Why should Kato apologise to
him for the unexpected arrival of her lover? It was not his business.
He sat down and wrote her a perfectly polite reply to say that he had
nothing to forgive and had no intention of criticising her actions. The
sense of unreality was strong within him.
It seemed that he could not escape the general determination to
involve him, on one side or the other, in the local affairs. Besides
the men at the club, Sharp, the head clerk at the office, spoke to
him--'The people look to you, Mr Julian; better keep clear of the
Islands if you don't want a crowd of women hanging round kissing your
hands--, murmured to him in the hall when he
went to dine at the French Legation; Walters, the _Times_ correspondent
in Herakleion, winked to him with a man to man expression that
flattered the boy.
'I know the Balkans inside out, mind you; nearly lost my head to the
Bulgars and my property to the Serbs; I've been held to ransom by
Albanian brigands, and shot at in the streets of Athens on December
the second; I've had my rooms ransacked by the police, and I could
have been a rich man now if I'd accepted half the bribes that I've had
offered me. So you can have my advice, if you care to hear it, and that
is, hold your tongue till you're sure you know your own mind.'
The women, following the lead, chattered to him. He had never known
such popularity. It was hard, at times, to preserve his non-committal
silence, yet he knew, ignorant and irresolute, that therein lay his
only hope of safety. They must not perceive that they had taken
him unawares, that he was hopelessly at sea in the mass of names,
reminiscences, and prophecies that they showered upon him. They must
not suspect that he really knew next to nothing about the situation....
He felt his way cautiously and learnt, and felt his strength growing.
In despite of Sharp's warning, he went across to the Islands, taking
with him Father Paul. Eve exclaimed that he took the priest solely from
a sense of the suitability of a retinue, and Julian, though he denied
the charge, did not do so very convincingly. He had certainly never
before felt the need of a retinue. He had always spent at least a week
of his holidays on Aphros, taking his favourite hawk with him, and
living either in his father's house in the village, or staying with the
peasants. When he returned, he was always uncommunicative as to how he
had passed his time.
Because he felt the stirring of events in the air, and because he
knew from signs and hints dropped to him that his coming was awaited
with an excited expectancy, he chose to provide himself with the
dignity of an attendant. He had, characteristically, breathed no word
of his suspicions, but moved coldly self-reliant in the midst of his
uncertainties. Father Paul only thought him more than usually silent
as he busied himself with the sail of his little boat and put out to
sea from the pier of Herakleion. Aphros lay ahead, some seven or eight
miles--a couple of hours' sailing in a good breeze.
His white sails were observed some way off by the villagers, who by
chance were already assembled at the weekly market in the village
square. They deserted the pens and stalls to cluster round the top
of the steps that descended, steep as an upright ladder, and cut in
the face of the rock, from the market place straight down to the sea,
where the white foam broke round the foot of the cliff. Julian saw
the coloured crowd from his boat; he distinguished faces as he drew
nearer, and made out the flutter of handkerchiefs from the hands of
the women. The village hung sheerly over the sea, the face of the
white houses flat with the face of the brown rocks, the difference of
colour alone betraying where the one began and the other ended, as
though some giant carpenter had planed away all inequalities of surface
from the eaves down to the washing water. The fleet of fishing-boats,
their bare, graceful masts swaying a little from the perpendicular as
the boats ranged gently at their moorings with the sigh of the almost
imperceptible waves, lay like resting seagulls in the harbour.
'They are waiting to welcome you--feudal, too feudal,' growled Father
Paul, who, though himself the creature and dependent of the Davenants,
loudly upheld his democratic views for the rest of mankind.
'And why?' muttered Julian. 'This has never happened before. I have
been away only four months.'
Three fishermen wearing the white kilted fustanelle and tasselled
shoes were already on the jetty with hands outstretched to take his
mooring-rope. Eager faces looked down from above, and a hum went
through the little crowd as Julian sprang on to the jetty, the boat
rocking as his weight released it--a hum that died slowly, like the
note of an organ, fading harmoniously into a complete silence. Paul
knew suddenly that the moment was significant. He saw Julian hesitate,
faltering as it were between sea and land, his dark head and broad
shoulders framed in an immensity of blue, the cynosure of the crowd
above, still silent and intent upon his actions. He hesitated until his
hesitation became apparent to all. Paul saw that his hands were shut
and his face stern. The silence of the crowd was becoming oppressive,
when a woman's voice rang out like a bell in the pellucid air,--
'Liberator!'
Clear, sudden, and resonant, the cry vibrated and hung upon echo, so
that the mind followed it, when it was no more heard, round the island
coast, where it ran up into the rocky creeks, and entered upon the
breeze into the huts of goat-herds on the hill. Julian slowly raised
his head as at a challenge. He looked up into the furnace of eyes
bent upon him, lustrous eyes in the glow of faces tanned to a golden
brown, finding in all the same query, the same expectancy, the same
breathless and suspended confidence. For a long moment he gazed up, and
they gazed down, challenge, acceptance, homage, loyalty, devotion, and
covenant passing unspoken between them; then, his hesitation a dead
and discarded thing, he moved forward and set his foot firmly upon the
lowest step. The silence of the crowd was broken by a single collective
murmur.
The crowd--which consisted of perhaps not more than fifty souls, men
and women--parted at the top as his head and shoulders appeared on the
level of the market-place. Paul followed, tripping over his soutane on
the ladder-like stairs. He saw Julian's white shoes climbing, climbing
the flight, until the boy stood deliberately upon the market-place. A
few goats were penned up for sale between wattled hurdles, bleating
for lost dams or kids; a clothes-stall displayed highly-coloured
handkerchiefs, boleros for the men, silk sashes, puttees, tasselled
caps, and kilted fustanelles; a fruit-stall, lined with bright blue
paper, was stacked from floor to ceiling with oranges, figs, bunches
of grapes, and scarlet tomatoes. An old woman, under an enormous green
umbrella, sat hunched on the back of a tiny gray donkey.
Julian stood, grave and moody, surveying the people from under
lowered brows. They were waiting for him to speak to them, but, as
a contrast to the stifled volubility seething in their own breasts,
his stillness, unexpected and surprising, impressed them more than
any flow of eloquence. He seemed to have forgotten about them,
though his eyes dwelt meditatively on their ranks; he seemed remote,
preoccupied; faintly disdainful, though tolerant, of the allegiance
they had already, mutely, laid at his feet, and were prepared to offer
him in terms of emotional expression. He seemed content to take this
for granted. He regarded them for a space, then turned to move in the
direction of his father's house.
The people pressed forward after him, a whispering and rustling
bodyguard, disconcerted but conquered and adoring. Their numbers had
been increased since the news of his landing had run through the town.
Fishermen, and labourers from olive-grove and vineyard, men whose lives
were lived in the sun, their magnificent bare throats and arms glowed
like nectarines in the white of the loose shirts they wore. Knotted
handkerchiefs were about their heads, and many of them wore broad
hats of rough straw over the handkerchief. Ancestrally more Italian
than Greek, for the original population of the archipelago of Hagios
Zacharie had, centuries before, been swamped by the settlements of
colonising Genoese, they resembled the peasants of southern Italy.
The headman of the village walked with them, Tsantilas Tsigaridis,
sailor and fisherman since he could remember, whose skin was drawn
tightly over the fine bony structure of his face, and whose crisp
white hair escaped in two bunches over his temples from under the red
handkerchief he wore; he was dressed, incongruously enough, in a blue
English jersey which Mrs Davenant had given him, and a coffee-coloured
fustanelle. Behind the crowd, as though he were shepherding them,
Nico Zapantiotis, overseer of the Davenant vineyards, walked with a
long pole in his hand, a white sheepdog at his heels, and a striped
blue and white shirt fluttering round his body, open at the throat,
and revealing the swelling depth of his hairy chest. Between these
two notables pressed the crowd, bronzed and coloured, eyes eager and
attentive and full of fire, a gleam of silver ear-rings among the shiny
black ringlets. Bare feet and heelless shoes shuffled alike over the
cobbles.
At the end of the narrow street, where the children ran out as in the
story of the Pied Piper to join in the progress, the doorway of the
Davenant house faced them.
It was raised on three steps between two columns. The monastery had
been a Genoese building, but the Greek influence was unmistakable in
the columns and the architrave over the portico. Julian strode forward
as though unconscious of his following. Paul became anxious. He hurried
alongside.
'You must speak to these people,' he whispered.
Julian mounted the steps and turned in the dark frame of the doorway.
The people had come to a standstill, filling the narrow street. It was
now they who looked up to Julian, and he who looked down upon them,
considering them, still remote and preoccupied, conscious that here and
now the seed sown in the club-rooms must bear its fruit, that life,
grown impatient of waiting for a summons he did not give, had come to
him of its own accord and ordered him to take the choice of peace or
war within its folded cloak. If he had hoped to escape again to England
with a decision still untaken, that hope was to be deluded. He was
being forced and hustled out of his childhood into the responsibilities
of a man. He could not plead the nebulousness of his mind; action
called to him, loud and insistent. In vain he told himself, with the
frown deepening between his brows, and the people who watched him
torn with anxiety before that frown--in vain he told himself that the
situation was fictitious, theatrical. He could not convince himself of
this truth with the fire of the people's gaze directed upon him. He
must speak to them; they were silent, expectant, waiting. The words
broke from him impelled, as he thought, by his terror of his own
helplessness and lack of control, but to his audience they came as a
command, a threat, and an invitation.
'What is it you want of me?'
He stood on the highest of the three steps, alone, the back of his head
pressed against the door, and a hand on each of the flanking columns.
The black-robed priest had taken his place below him, to one side,
on the ground level. Julian felt a sudden resentment against these
waiting people, that had driven him to bay, the resentment of panic and
isolation, but to them, his attitude betraying nothing, he appeared
infallible, dominating, and inaccessible.
Tsantilas Tsigaridis came forward as spokesman, a gold ring hanging
in the lobe of one ear, and a heavy silver ring shining dully on the
little finger of his brown, knotted hand.
'Kyrie,' he said, 'Angheliki Zapantiotis has hailed you. We are your
own people. By the authorities we are persecuted as though we were
Bulgars, we, their brothers in blood. Last week a score of police came
in boats from Herakleion and raided our houses in search of weapons.
Our women ran screaming to the vineyards. Such weapons as the police
could find were but the pistols we carry for ornament on the feast-days
of church, and these they removed, for the sake, as we know, not being
blind, of the silver on the locks which they will use to their own
advantage. By such persecutions we are harried. We may never know when
a hand will not descend on one of our number, on a charge of sedition
or conspiracy, and he be seen no more. We are not organised for
resistance. We are blind beasts, leaderless.'
A woman in the crowd began to sob, burying her face in her scarlet
apron. A man snarled his approval of the spokesman's words, and spat
violently into the gutter.
'And you demand of me?' said Julian, again breaking his silence.
'Championship? leadership? You cannot say you are unjustly accused of
sedition! What report of Aphros could I carry to Herakleion?'
He saw the people meek, submissive, beneath his young censure, and the
knowledge of his power surged through him like a current through water.
'Kyrie,' said the old sailor, reproved, but with the same inflexible
dignity, 'we know that we are at your mercy. But we are your own
people. We have been the people of your people for four generations.
The authorities have torn even the painting of your grandfather from
the walls of our assembly room....'
'Small blame to them,' thought Julian; 'that shows their good sense.'
Tsantilas pursued,--
' ... we are left neither public nor private liberty. We are already
half-ruined by the port-dues which are directed against us islanders
and us alone.' A crafty look came into his eyes. 'Here, Kyrie, you
should be in sympathy.'
Julian's moment of panic had passed; he was now conscious only of his
complete control. He gave way to the anger prompted by the mercenary
trait of the Levantine that marred the man's natural and splendid
dignity.
'What sympathy I may have,' he said loudly, 'is born of compassion, and
not of avaricious interest.'
He could not have told what instinct urged him to rebuke these people
to whose petition he was decided to yield. He observed that with each
fresh reproof they cringed the more.
'Compassion, Kyrie, and proprietary benevolence,' Tsantilas rejoined,
recognising his mistake. 'We know that in you we find a disinterested
mediator. We pray to God that we may be allowed to live at peace with
Herakleion. We pray that we may be allowed to place our difficulties
and our sorrows in your hands for a peaceful settlement.'
Julian looked at him, majestic as an Arab and more cunning than a Jew,
and a slightly ironical smile wavered on his lips.
'Old brigand,' he thought, 'the last thing he wants is to live at peace
with Herakleion; he's spoiling for a stand-up fight. Men on horses,
himself at their head, charging the police down this street, and
defending our house like a beleaguered fort; rifles cracking from every
window, and the more police corpses the better. May I be there to see
it!'
His mind flew to Eve, whom he had last seen lying in a hammock, drowsy,
dressed in white, and breathing the scent of the gardenia she held
between her fingers. What part would she, the spoilt, the exquisite,
play if there were to be bloodshed on Aphros?
All this while he was silent, scowling at the multitude, who waited
breathless for his next words.
'Father will half kill me,' he thought.
At that moment Tsigaridis, overcome by his anxiety, stretched out his
hands towards him, surrendering his dignity in a supreme appeal,--
'Kyrie? I have spoken.'
He dropped his hands to his sides, bowed his head, and fell back a pace.
Julian pressed his shoulders strongly against the door; it was solid
enough. The sun, striking on his bare hand, was hot. The faces and
necks and arms of the people below him were made of real flesh and
blood. The tension, the anxiety in their eyes was genuine. He chased
away the unreality.
'You have spoken,' he said, 'and I have accepted.'
The woman named Angheliki Zapantiotis, who had hailed him as liberator,
cast herself forward on to the step at his feet, as a stir and a
movement, that audibly expressed itself in the shifting of feet and the
releasing of contained breaths, ruffled through the crowd. He lifted
his hand to enjoin silence, and spoke with his hand raised high above
the figure of the woman crouching on the step.
He told them that there could now be no going back, that, although
the time of waiting might seem to them long and weary, they must
have hopeful trust in him. He exacted from them trust, fidelity, and
obedience. His voice rang sharply on the word, and his glance circled
imperiously, challenging defiance. It encountered none. He told them
that he would never give his sanction to violence save as a last
resort. He became intoxicated with the unaccustomed wine of oratory.
'An island is our refuge; we are the garrison of a natural fortress,
that we can hold against the assault of our enemies from the sea. We
will never seek them out, we will be content to wait, restrained and
patient, until they move with weapons in their hands against us. Let us
swear that our only guilt of aggression shall be to preserve our coasts
inviolate.'
A deep and savage growl answered him as he paused. He was flushed
with the spirit of adventure, the prerogative of youth. The force
of youth moved so strongly within him that every man present felt
himself strangely ready and equipped for the calls of the enterprise.
A mysterious alchemy had taken place. They, untutored, unorganised,
scarcely knowing what they wanted, much less how to obtain it,
had offered him the formless material of their blind and chaotic
rebellion, and he, having blown upon it with the fire of his breath,
was welding it now to an obedient, tempered weapon in his hands. He had
taken control. He might disappear and the curtains of silence close
together behind his exit; Paul, watching, knew that these people would
henceforward wait patiently, and with confidence, for his return.
He dropped suddenly from his rhetoric into a lower key.
'In the meantime I lay upon you a charge of discretion. No one in
Herakleion must get wind of this meeting; Father Paul and I will be
silent, the rest lies with you. Until you hear of me again, I desire
you to go peaceably about your ordinary occupations.'
'Better put that in,' he thought to himself.
'I know nothing, nor do I wish to know,' he continued, shrewdly
examining their faces, 'of the part you played in the robbery at the
casino. I only know that I will never countenance the repetition
of any such attempt; you will have to choose between me and your
brigandage.' He suddenly stamped his foot. 'Choose now! which is it to
be?'
'Kyrie, Kyrie,' said Tsigaridis, 'you are our only hope.'
'Lift up your hands,' Julian said intolerantly.
His eyes searched among the bronzed arms that rose at his command like
a forest of lances; he enjoyed forcing obedience upon the crowd and
seeing their humiliation.
'Very well,' he said then, and the hands sank, 'see to it that you
remember your promise. I have no more to say. Wait, trust, and hope.'
He carried his hand to his forehead and threw it out before him in a
gesture of farewell and dismissal.
He suspected himself of having acted and spoken in a theatrical manner,
but he knew also that through the chaos of his mind an unextinguishable
light was dawning.
V
Julian in the candour of his inexperience unquestioningly believed that
the story would not reach Herakleion. Before the week was out, however,
he found himself curiously eyed in the streets, and by the end of the
week, going to dinner at the French Legation, he was struck by the hush
that fell as his name was announced in the mirrored drawing-rooms.
Madame Lafarge said to him severely,--
'Jeune homme, vous avez été très indiscret,' but a smile lurked in her
eyes beneath her severity.
An immense Serbian, almost a giant, named Grbits, with a flat,
Mongolian face, loomed ominously over him.
'Young man, you have my sympathy. You have disquieted the Greeks. You
may count at any time upon my friendship.'
His fingers were enveloped and crushed in Grbits' formidable handshake.
The older diplomatists greeted him with an assumption of censure that
was not seriously intended to veil their tolerant amusement.
'Do you imagine that we have nothing to do,' Don Rodrigo Valdez said to
him, 'that you set out to enliven the affairs of Herakleion?'
Fru Thyregod, the Danish Excellency, took him into a corner and tapped
him on the arm with her fan with that half flirtatious, half friendly
familiarity she adopted towards all men.
'You are a dark horse, my dark boy,' she said meaningly, and, as he
pretended ignorance, raising his brows and shaking his head, added,
'I'm much indebted to you as a living proof of my perception. I always
told them; I always said, "Carl, that boy is an adventurer," and Carl
said, "Nonsense, Mabel, your head is full of romance," but I said,
"Mark my words, Carl, that boy will flare up; he's quiet now, but
you'll have to reckon with him."'
He realised the extent of the gratitude of social Herakleion. He
had provided a flavour which was emphatically absent from the usual
atmosphere of these gatherings. Every Legation in turn, during both
the summer and the winter season, extended its hospitality to its
colleagues with complete resignation as to the lack of all possibility
of the unforeseen. The rules of diplomatic precedence rigorously
demanding a certain grouping, the Danish Excellency, for example, might
sit before her mirror fluffing out her already fluffy fair hair with
the complacent if not particularly pleasurable certainty that this
evening, at the French Legation, she would be escorted in to dinner
by the Roumanian Minister, and that on her other hand would sit the
Italian Counsellor, while to-morrow, at the Spanish Legation, she would
be escorted to dinner by the Italian Counsellor and would have upon her
other hand the Roumanian Minister--unless, indeed, no other Minister's
wife but Madame Lafarge was present, in which case she would be placed
on the left hand of Don Rodrigo Valdez. She would have preferred to
sit beside Julian Davenant, but he, of course, would be placed amongst
the young men--secretaries, young Greeks, and what not--at the end
of the table. These young men--'les petits jeunes gens du bout de la
table,' as Alexander Christopoulos, including himself in their number,
contemptuously called them--always ate mournfully through their dinner
without speaking to one another. They did not enjoy themselves, nor did
their host or hostess enjoy having them there, but it was customary
to invite them.... Fru Thyregod knew that she must not exhaust all
her subjects of conversation with her two neighbours this evening, but
must keep a provision against the morrow; therefore, true to her little
science, she refrained from mentioning Julian's adventure on Aphros
to the Roumanian, and discoursed on it behind her fan to the Italian
only. Other people seemed to be doing the same. Julian heard whispers,
and saw glances directed towards him. Distinctly, Herakleion and its
hostesses would be grateful to him.
He felt slightly exhilarated. He noticed that no Greeks were present,
and thought that they had been omitted on his account. He reflected,
not without a certain apprehensive pleasure, that if this roomful
knew, as it evidently did, the story would not be long in reaching
his father. Who had betrayed him? Not Paul, he was sure, nor Kato, to
whom he had confided the story. (Tears had come into her eyes, she had
clasped her hands, and she had kissed him, to his surprise, on his
forehead.) He was glad on the whole that he had been betrayed. He had
come home in a fever of exaltation and enthusiasm which had rendered
concealment both damping and irksome. Little incidents, of significance
to him alone, had punctuated his days by reminders of his incredible,
preposterous, and penetrating secret; to-night, for instance, the
chasseur in the hall, the big, scarlet-coated chasseur, an islander,
had covertly kissed his hand....
His father took an unexpected view. Julian had been prepared for anger,
in fact he had the countering phrases already in his mind as he mounted
the stairs of the house in the _platia_ on returning from the French
Legation. His father was waiting, a candle in his hand, on the landing.
'I heard you come in. I want to ask you, Julian,' he said at once,
'whether the story I have heard in the club to-night is true? That you
went to Aphros, and entered into heaven knows what absurd covenant
with the people?'
Julian flushed at the reprimanding tone.
'I knew that you would not approve,' he said. 'But one must do
something. Those miserable, bullied people, denied the right to
live....'
'Tut,' said his father impatiently. 'Have they really taken you in?
I thought you had more sense. I have had a good deal of trouble in
explaining to Malteios that you are only a hot-headed boy, carried away
by the excitement of the moment. You see, I am trying to make excuses
for you, but I am annoyed, Julian, I am annoyed. I thought I could
trust you. Paul, too. However, you bring your own punishment on your
head, for you will have to keep away from Herakleion in the immediate
future.'
'Keep away from Herakleion?' cried Julian.
'Malteios' hints were unmistakable,' his father said dryly. 'I am glad
to see you are dismayed. You had better go to bed now, and I will speak
to you to-morrow.'
Mr Davenant started to go upstairs, but turned again, and came down the
two or three steps, still holding his candle in his hand.
'Come,' he said in a tone of remonstrance, 'if you really take the
thing seriously, look at it at least for a moment with practical sense.
What is the grievance of the Islands? That they want to be independent
from Herakleion. If they must belong to anybody, they say, let them
belong to Italy rather than to Greece or to Herakleion. And why?
Because they speak an Italian rather than a Greek patois! Because a lot
of piratical Genoese settled in them five hundred years ago! Well, what
do you propose to do, my dear Julian? Hand the Islands over to Italy?'
'They want independence,' Julian muttered. 'They aren't even allowed
to speak their own language,' he continued, raising his voice. 'You
know it is forbidden in the schools. You know that the port-dues in
Herakleion ruin them--and are intended to ruin them. You know they are
oppressed in every petty as well as in every important way. You know
that if they were independent they wouldn't trouble Herakleion.'
'Independent! independent!' said Mr Davenant, irritable and uneasy.
'Still, you haven't told me what you proposed to do. Did you mean to
create a revolution?'
Julian hesitated. He did not know. He said boldly,--
'If need be.'
Mr Davenant snorted.
'Upon my word,' he cried sarcastically, 'you have caught the emotional
tone of Aphros to perfection. I suppose you saw yourself holding
Panaïoannou at bay? If these are your ideas, I shall certainly support
Malteios in keeping you away. I am on the best of terms with Malteios,
and I cannot afford to allow your Quixotism to upset the balance. I can
obtain almost any concession from Malteios,' he added thoughtfully,
narrowing his eyes and rubbing his hand across his chin.
Julian watched his father with distaste and antagonism.
'And that is all you consider?' he said then.
'What else is there to consider?' Mr Davenant replied. 'I am a
practical man, and practical men don't run after chimeras. I hope I'm
not more cynical than most. You know very well that at the bottom of
my heart I sympathise with the Islands. Come,' he said, with a sudden
assumption of frankness, seeing that he was creating an undesirable
rift between himself and his son, 'I will even admit to you, in
confidence, that the republic doesn't treat its Islands as well as it
might. You know, too, that I respect and admire Madame Kato; she comes
from the Islands, and has every right to hold the views of an islander.
But there's no reason why you should espouse those views, Julian. We
are foreigners here, representatives of a great family business, and
that business, when all's said and done, must always remain our first
consideration.'
'Yet people here say,' Julian argued, still hoping for the best against
the cold disillusionment creeping over him, 'that no political move can
be made without allowing for your influence and Uncle Robert's. And my
grandfather, after all....'
'Ah, your grandfather!' said Mr Davenant, 'your grandfather was an
extremely sagacious man, the real founder of the family tradition,
though I wouldn't like Malteios to hear me say so. He knew well enough
that in the Islands he held a lever which gave him, if he chose to use
it, absolute control over Herakleion. He only used it once, when he
wanted something they refused to give him; they held out against him
for a year, but ultimately they came to heel. A very sagacious man....
Don't run away with the idea that he was inspired by anything other
than a most practical grasp--though I don't say it wasn't a bold one--a
most practical grasp of the situation. He gave the politicians of
Herakleion a lesson they haven't yet forgotten.
He paused, and, as Julian said nothing, added--
'We keep very quiet, your uncle Robert and I, but Malteios, and
Stavridis himself, know that in reality we hold them on a rope. We
give them a lot of play, but at any moment we choose, we can haul them
in. A very satisfactory arrangement. Tacit agreements, to my mind, are
always the most satisfactory. And so you see that I can't tolerate your
absurd, uneducated interference. Why, there's no end to the harm you
might do! Some day you will thank me.'
As Julian still said nothing, he looked at his son, who was standing,
staring at the floor, a deep frown on his forehead, thunderous,
unconvinced. Mr Davenant, being habitually uncommunicative, felt
aggrieved that his explanatory condescension had not been received with
a more attentive deference. He also felt uneasy. Julian's silences were
always disquieting.
'You are very young still,' he said, in a more conciliatory tone, 'and
I ought perhaps to blame myself for allowing you to go about so freely
in this very unreal and bewildering place. Perhaps I ought not to have
expected you to keep your head. Malteios is quite right: Herakleion is
no place for a young man. Don't think me hard in sending you away. Some
day you will come back with, I hope, a better understanding.'
He rested his hand kindly for a moment on Julian's shoulder, then
turned away, and the light of his candle died as he passed the bend of
the stairs.
On the following evening Julian, returning from the country-house where
he had spent the day, was told that the Premier was with Mr Davenant
and would be glad to see him.
He had ridden out to the country, regardless of the heat, turning
instinctively to Eve in his strange and rebellious frame of mind.
For some reason which he did not analyse, he identified her with
Aphros--the Aphros of romance and glamour to which he so obstinately
clung. To his surprise she listened unresponsive and sulky.
'You are not interested, Eve?'
Then the reason of her unreasonableness broke out.
'You have kept this from me for a whole week, and you confide in me
now because you know the story is public property. You expect me to be
interested. Grand merci!'
'But, Eve, I had pledged myself not to tell a soul.'
'Did you tell Kato?'
'Damn your intuition!' he said angrily.
She lashed at him then, making him feel guilty, miserable, ridiculous,
though as he sat scowling over the sea--they were in their favourite
place at the bottom of the garden, where under the pergola of gourds
it was cool even at that time of the day--he appeared to her more than
usually unmoved and forbidding.
After a long pause,--
'Julian, I am sorry.--I don't often apologise.--I said I was sorry.'
He looked coldly at her with his mournful eyes, that, green in repose,
turned black in anger.
'Your vanity makes me ill.'
'You told Kato.'
'Jealousy!'
She began to protest; then, with a sudden change of front,--
'You know I am jealous. When I am jealous, I lie awake all night. I
lose all sense of proportion. It's no joke, my jealousy; it's like an
open wound. I put up a stockade round it to protect it. You are not
considerate.'
'Can you never forget yourself? Do you care nothing for the Islands?
Are you so self-centred, so empty-headed? Are all women, I wonder, as
vain as you?'
They sat on the parapet, angry, inimical, with the coloured gourds
hanging heavily over their heads.
Far out to sea the Islands lay, so pure and fair and delicate that
Julian, beholding them, violently rejected the idea that in this
possession of such disarming loveliness his grandfather had seen merely
a lever for the coercion of recalcitrant politicians. They lay there
as innocent and fragile as a lovely woman asleep, veiled by the haze
of sunshine as the sleeper's limbs by a garment of lawn. Julian gazed
till his eyes and his heart swam in the tenderness of passionate
and protective ownership. He warmed towards his grandfather, the man
whose generous ideals had been so cynically libelled by the succeeding
generation. No man deserving the name could be guilty of so repulsive
an act of prostitution....
'They will see me here again,' he exclaimed, striking his fist on the
parapet.
To the startled question in Eve's eyes he vouchsafed an explanation.
'Malteios is sending me away. But when his term of office is over, I
shall come back. It will be a good opportunity. We will break with
Herakleion over the change of government. Kato will restrain Malteios
so long as he is in power, I can trust her; but I shall make my break
with Stavridis.'
In his plans for the future he had again forgotten Eve.
'You are going away?'
'For a year or perhaps longer,' he said gloomily.
Her natural instinct of defiant secrecy kept the flood of protest back
from her lips. Already in her surprisingly definite philosophy of life,
self-concealment held a sacred and imperious position. Secrecy--and her
secrecy, because disguised under a superficial show of expansiveness,
was the more fundamental, the more dangerous--secrecy she recognised as
being both a shield and a weapon. Therefore, already apprehending that
existence in a world of men was a fight, a struggle, and a pursuit,
she took refuge in her citadel. And, being possessed of a picturesque
imagination, she had upon a certain solemn occasion carried a symbolic
key to the steps which led down to the sea from the end of the pergola
of gourds, and had flung it out as far as she was able into the
guardianship of the waters.
She remembered this now as she sat on the parapet with Julian, and
smiled to herself ironically. She looked at him with the eye of an
artist, and thought how his limbs, fallen into their natural grace
of relaxed muscularity, suggested the sculptural ease of stone far
more than the flat surfaces of canvas. Sculptural, she thought, was
undoubtedly the adjective which thrust itself upon one. In one of her
spasmodic outbursts of activity she had modelled him, but, disdainful
of her own talents, had left the clay to perish. Then she remembered
acutely that she would not see him again.
'My mythological Julian....' she murmured, smiling.
A world of flattery lay in her tone.
'You odd little thing,' he said, 'why the adjective?'
She made an expressive gesture with her hands.
'Your indifference, your determination--you're so intractable, so
contemptuous, so hard--and sometimes so inspired. You're so fatally
well suited to the Islands. Prince of Aphros?' she launched at him
insinuatingly.
She was skilful; he flushed. She was giving him what he had, half
unconsciously, sought.
'Siren!' he said.
'Am I? Perhaps, after all, we are both equally well suited to the
Islands,' she said lightly.
And for some reason their conversation dropped. Yet it sufficed to
send him, stimulated, from her side, full of self-confidence; he had
forgotten that she was barely seventeen, a child! and for him the smile
of pride in her eyes had been the smile of Aphros.
In the house, on his way through, he met Father Paul.
'Everything is known,' said the priest, wringing his hand with his
usual energy.
'What am I to do? Malteios wants me to leave Herakleion. Shall I
refuse? I am glad to have met you,' said Julian, 'I was on my way to
find you.'
'Go, if Malteios wants you to go,' the priest replied, 'the time is not
ripe yet; but are you determined, in your own mind, to throw in your
lot with Hagios Zacharie? Remember, I cautioned you when we were still
on Aphros: you must be prepared for a complete estrangement from your
family. You will be running with the hare, no longer hunting with the
hounds. Have you considered?'
'I am with the Islands.'
'Good,' said the priest, making a sign over him. 'Go, all the same,
if Malteios exacts it; you will be the more of a man when you return.
Malteios' party will surely fall at the next elections. By then we
shall be ready, and I will see that you are summoned. God bless you.'
'Will you go out to Eve in the garden, father? She is under the
pergola. Go and talk to her.'
'She is unhappy?' asked the priest, with a sharp look.
'A little, I think,' said Julian, 'will you go?'
'At once, at once,' said Paul, and he went quickly, through the grove
of lemon-trees, stumbling over his soutane....
Julian returned to Herakleion, where he found his father and Malteios
in the big frescoed drawing-room, standing in an embrasure of the
windows. The Premier's face as he turned was full of tolerant benignity.
'Ah, here is our young friend,' he began paternally. 'What are these
stories I hear of you, young man? I have been telling your father
that when I was a schoolboy, a _lycéen_--I, too, tried to meddle in
politics. Take my advice, and keep clear of these things till you
are older. There are many things for the young: dancing, poetry, and
love. Politics to the old and the middle-aged. Of course, I know your
little escapade was nothing but a joke ... high spirits ... natural
mischief....'
The interview was galling and humiliating to Julian; he disliked the
Premier's bantering friendliness, through which he was not sufficiently
experienced to discern the hidden mistrust, apprehension, and
hostility. His father, compelled to a secret and resentful pride in
his son, was conscious of these things. But Julian, his eyes fixed on
the middle button of the Premier's frock-coat, sullen and rebellious,
tried to shut his ears to the prolonged murmur of urbane derision. He
wished to look down upon, to ignore Malteios, the unreal man, and this
he could not do while he allowed those smooth and skilful words to flow
unresisted in their suave cruelty over his soul. He shut his ears, and
felt only the hardening of his determination. He would go; he would
leave Herakleion, only to return with increase of strength in the hour
of fulfilment.
Dismissed, he set out for Kato's flat, hatless, in a mood of thunder.
His violence was not entirely genuine, but he persuaded himself, for
he had lately been with Eve, and the plausible influence of Herakleion
was upon him. He strode down the street, aware that people turned to
gaze at him as he went. On the quay, the immense Grbits rose suddenly
up from the little green table where he sat drinking vermouth outside a
café.
'My young friend,' he said, 'they tell me you are leaving Herakleion?
'They are wise,' he boomed. 'You would break their toys if you
remained. But _I_ remain; shall I watch for you? You will come back? I
have hated the Greeks well. Shall we play a game with them? ha! ha!'
His huge laugh reverberated down the quay as Julian passed on, looking
at the visiting card which the giant had just handed to him:--
SRGJÁN GRBITS.
_Attaché à la Légation de S.M. le Roi des Serbes,
Croates, et Slovènes._
'Grbits my spy!' he was thinking. 'Fantastic, fantastic.'
Kato's flat was at the top of a four-storied house on the quay. On the
ground floor of the house was a cake-shop, and, like every other house
along the sea-front, over every window hung a gay, striped sunblind
that billowed slightly like a flag in the breeze from the sea. Inside
the cake-shop a number of Levantines, dressed in their hot black, were
eating sweet things off the marble counter. Julian could never get Eve
past the cake-shop when they went to Kato's together; she would always
wander in to eat _choux à la crème_, licking the whipped cream off her
fingers with a guilty air until he lent her his handkerchief, her own
being invariably lost.
Julian went into the house by a side-door, up the steep narrow
stairs, the walls painted in Pompeian red with a slate-coloured
dado; past the first floor, where on two frosted glass doors ran the
inscription: KONINKLIJKE NEDERLANDSCHE STOOMBOOT-MAATSCHAPPIJ; past
the second floor, where a brass plate said: Th. Mavrudis et fils,
Cie. d'assurance; past the third floor, where old Grigoriu, the
money-lender, was letting himself in by a latchkey; to the fourth
floor, where a woman in the native dress of the Islands admitted him to
Kato's flat.
The singer was seated on one of her low, carpet-covered divans, her
throat and arms, as usual, bare, the latter covered with innumerable
bangles; her knees wide apart and a hand placed resolutely upon each
knee; before her stood Tsigaridis, the headman of Aphros, his powerful
body encased in the blue English jersey Mrs Davenant had given him,
and from the compression of which his pleated skirt sprang out so
ridiculously. Beside Kato on the divan lay a basket of ripe figs which
he had brought her. Their two massive figures disproportionately filled
the already overcrowded little room.
They regarded Julian gravely.
'I am going away,' he said, standing still before their scrutiny, as a
pupil before his preceptors.
Kato bowed her head. They knew. They had discussed whether they should
let him go, and had decided that he might be absent from Herakleion
until the next elections.
'But you will return, Kyrie?'
Tsigaridis spoke respectfully, but with urgent authority, much in the
tone a regent might adopt towards a youthful king.
'Of course I shall return,' Julian answered, and smiled and added, 'You
mustn't lose faith, Tsantilas.'
The fisherman bowed with that dignity he inherited from unnamed but
remotely ascending generations; he took his leave of Kato and the boy,
shutting the door quietly behind him. Kato came up to Julian, who had
turned away and was staring out of the window. From the height of this
fourth story one looked down upon the peopled quay below, and saw
distinctly the houses upon the distant Islands.
'You are sad,' she said.
She moved to the piano, which, like herself, was a great deal too big
for the room, and which alone of all the pieces of furniture was not
loaded with ornaments. Julian had often wondered, looking at the large
expanse of lid, how Kato had so consistently resisted the temptation to
put things upon it. The most he had ever seen there was a gilt basket
of hydrangeas, tied with a blue ribbon, from which hung the card of the
Premier.
He knew that within twenty-four hours he would be at sea, and that
Herakleion as he would last have seen it--from the deck of the
steamer, white, with many coloured sunblinds, and, behind it, Mount
Mylassa, rising so suddenly, so threateningly, seemingly determined
to crowd the man-built town off its narrow strip of coast into the
water--Herakleion, so pictured, would be but a memory; within a
week, he knew, he would be in England. He did not know when he would
see Herakleion again. Therefore he abandoned himself, on this last
evening, to Aphros, to the memory of Eve, and to romance, not naming,
not linking the three that took possession of and coloured all the
daylight of his youth, but quiescent, sitting on the floor, his knees
clasped, and approaching again, this time in spirit, the island where
the foam broke round the foot of the rocks and the fleet of little
fishing-boats swayed like resting seagulls in the harbour. He scarcely
noticed that, all this while, Kato was singing. She sang in a very low
voice, as though she were singing a lullaby, and, though the words did
not reach his consciousness, he knew that the walls of the room had
melted into the warm and scented freedom of the terraces on Aphros when
the vintage was at its height, and when the air, in the evening, was
heavy with the smell of the grape. He felt Eve's fingers lightly upon
his brows. He saw again her shadowy gray eyes, red mouth, and waving
hair. He visualised the sparkle that crept into her eyes--strange eyes
they were! deep-set, slanting slightly upwards, so ironical sometimes,
and sometimes so inexplicably sad--when she was about to launch one of
her more caustic and just remarks. How illuminating her remarks could
be! they always threw a new light; but she never insisted on their
value; on the contrary, she passed carelessly on to something else. But
whatever she touched, she lit.... One came to her with the expectation
of being stimulated, perhaps a little bewildered, and one was not
disappointed. He recalled her so vividly--yet recollection of her could
never be really vivid; the construction of her personality was too
subtle, too varied; as soon as one had left her one wanted to go back
to her, thinking that this time, perhaps, one would succeed better in
seizing and imprisoning the secret of her elusiveness. Julian caught
himself smiling dreamily as he conjured her up. He heard the murmur of
her seductive voice,--
'I love you, Julian.'
He accepted the words, which he had heard often from her lips, dreamily
as part of his last, deliberate evening, so losing himself in his
dreams that he almost failed to notice when the music died and the
notes of Kato's voice slid from the recitative of her peasant songs
into conversation with himself. She left the music-stool and came
towards him where he sat on the floor.
'Julian,' she said, looking down at him, 'your cousin Eve, who is full
of perception, says you are so primitive that the very furniture is
irksome to you and that you dispense with it as far as you can. I know
you prefer the ground to a sofa.'
He became shy, as he instantly did when the topic of his own
personality was introduced. He felt dimly that Eve, who remorselessly
dragged him from the woods into the glare of sunlight, alone had the
privilege. At the same time he recognised her methods of appropriating
a characteristic, insignificant in itself, and of building it up,
touching it with her own peculiar grace and humour until it became
a true and delicate attribute, growing into life thanks to her
christening of it; a method truly feminine, exquisitely complimentary,
carrying with it an insinuation faintly exciting, and creating a link
quite separately personal, an understanding, almost an obligation to
prove oneself true to her conception....
'So you are leaving us?' said Kato, 'you are going to live among other
standards, other influences, "_dont je ne connais point la puissance
sur votre coeur_." How soon will it be before you forget? And how soon
before you return? We want you here, Julian.'
'For the Islands?' he asked.
'For the Islands, and may I not say,' said Kato, spreading her hands
with a musical clinking of all her bangles, 'for ourselves also? How
soon will it be before you forget the Islands?' she forced herself to
ask, and then, relapsing, 'Which will fade first in your memory, I
wonder--the Islands? or Kato?'
'I can't separate you in my mind,' he said, faintly ill at ease.
'It is true that we have talked of them by the hour,' she answered,
'have we talked of them so much that they and I are entirely
identified? Do you pay me the compliment of denying me the mean
existence of an ordinary woman?'
He thought that by answering in the affirmative he would indeed be
paying her the greatest compliment that lay within his power, for he
would be raising her to the status of a man and a comrade. He said,--
'I never believed, before I met you, that a woman could devote herself
so whole-heartedly to her patriotism. We have the Islands in common
between us; and, as you know, the Islands mean more than mere Islands
to me: a great many things to which I could never give a name. And
I am glad, yes, so glad, that our friendship has been, in a way, so
impersonal--as though I were your disciple, and this flat my secret
school, from which you should one day discharge me, saying "Go!"'
Never had he appeared to her so hopelessly inaccessible as now when he
laid his admiration, his almost religious idealisation of her at her
feet.
He went on,--
'You have been so infinitely good to me; I have come here so often, I
have talked so much; I have often felt, when I went away, that you, who
were accustomed to clever men, must naturally....'
'Why not say,' she interrupted, 'instead of "clever men," "men of my
own age? my own generation"?'
He looked at her doubtfully, checked. She was standing over him, her
hands on her hips, and he noticed the tight circles of fat round her
bent wrists, and the dimples in every joint of her stumpy hands.
'But why apologise?' she added, taking pity on his embarrassment, with
a smile both forgiving and rueful for the ill she had brought upon
herself. 'If you have enjoyed our talks, be assured I have enjoyed
them too. For conversations to be as successful as ours have been, the
enjoyment cannot possibly be one-sided. I shall miss them when you are
gone. You go to England?'
After a moment she said,--
'Isn't it strange, when those we know so intimately in one place
travel away to another place in which we have never seen them? What do
I, Kato, know of the houses you will live in in England, or of your
English friends? as some poet speaks, in a line I quoted to you just
now, of all the influences _dont je ne connais pas la puissance sur
votre coeur_! Perhaps you will even fall in love. Perhaps you will
tell this imaginary woman with whom you are to fall in love, about our
Islands?'
'No woman but you would understand,' he said.
'She would listen for your sake, and for your sake she would pretend
interest. Does Eve listen when you talk about the Islands?'
'Eve doesn't care about such things. I sometimes think she cares only
about herself,' he replied with some impatience.
'You ...' she began again, but, checking herself, she said instead,
with a grave irony that was lost upon him, 'You have flattered me
greatly to-day, Julian. I hope you may always find in me a wise
preceptor. But I can only point the way. The accomplishment lies with
you. We will work together?' She added, smiling, 'In the realms of the
impersonal? A philosophic friendship? A Platonic alliance?'
When he left her, she was still, gallantly, smiling.