TOWARDS HYALOS
They passed through the Straits of Messina one brilliant morning, the
west wind still holding, the sea like a tray of broken sapphires, and
Etna a cone of almost translucent purple against the flower-blue sky.
A nautilus fleet was going with them with sails set to the favouring
wind, and away to starboard Sicilian fishing-boats putting out for the
Lipari Islands dotted the sea.
Martia, alone on deck for a moment but for Bowler at the wheel, and
Church and Atherfield forward, gazing from the Sicilian to the Italian
shore, breathed deep, half-intoxicated with the brilliancy and beauty
of it all.
Then her eyes fell on Bowler, his gaze fixed on the compass card, and
the others, indifferent to their surroundings as though they were in
the Thames estuary, and she remembered what Sam had said to Bobby
and repeated to her, that these men cared for nothing but their own
immediate interests and wants, that the great god Pan hauled alive and
kicking out of the waters of Hyalos would move them scarcely more than
the capture of a porpoise, that they were a crew of blind men, safe to
hold their tongues when they returned home.
She came to understand how, even if Greek fishermen looking down
through the water had observed the submerged town, as undoubtedly they
had in the course of centuries, the sight would have moved them not
at all, would have been forgotten when seen, or scarcely remembered,
having nothing to do with their interests, their comfort, or their
welfare.
It seemed to her that a great book could be written on the blindness of
the world, and not only on the blindness of common people, but of every
man towards everything unconnected with his own special desires and
ambitions.
She was thinking this when Bobby's head emerged from the saloon hatch;
he glanced around, seemingly as indifferent to the beauties about him
as Bowler, then he called to the girl.
"Come down," said Bobby. "We've got the charts out, and I want you to
have a look at them."
Sam was in the cabin in his shirt sleeves, before the table littered
with charts and maps.
"Here we are," said the skipper of the _Lorna_, pointing to their
position on the map. "We'll be into the Ionian Sea when we've passed
the straits, and then it will be a straight run for the Straits of
Cervi; from that it's only eighty or ninety miles to Hyalos. It's not
marked on the map, it's too small, but it's on the charts; it's just
about there, seventy miles or so south of Milo."
Martia looked at the map, and at the great strew of islands to the
east of Greece, stretching from Eubœa to Santorin; islands of eternal
summer still tinged with the light of the Golden Age.
She had read them up before leaving England, and she could tell the
others things they did not know.
"Seventy miles south of Milo?" said she. "That's where the Venus came
from."
"Which Venus?" asked Bobby.
"The Venus of Milo."
"Oh, that thing without arms," said Sam, putting the map aside and
spreading a chart.
"Yes, that thing without arms--the most beautiful statue in the world.
A peasant found it; he was pulling down a heap of stones, and there
it was. All these islands, at least the big ones, must have been full
of beautiful works of art once. I can't understand it. You have a
civilisation capable of producing these things, and then it vanishes,
and the people who come after smash them and destroy them, pull
down the temple of the Venus of Milo, break all the figures of the
Parthenon, and even haven't the eyes to find what we are going to find
at Hyalos. The Greeks deserve to lose their art treasures."
"They are going to lose the ones at Hyalos, anyhow," said Bobby.
"No, they aren't," said Martia. "How can a man lose what he doesn't
possess? Anyhow, what he doesn't deserve to possess. If a man possesses
a horse and treats it badly, it's taken away from him, isn't it? It's
just the same here."
"Well, I'm not bothering about the Greeks so much as the reefs," cut in
Sam. "Look, here's the chart of the waters round Hyalos, and I'll bet
a sovereign the soundings are all wrong. You see, they haven't bothered
about the island or the bay; the place is only a rock to be avoided.
But the reefs are given. Here to the north, where the bay lies, it's
all reefs, overlapping; doesn't seem to be a decent passage a ship
could take. Look!"
The girl sat down and examined the chart, and Bobby, watching them,
forgot everything, even the expedition itself, his mind engaged again
with the exasperating problem set for it by these two people.
There was something between them sufficient to make Sam fly off the
handle at Genoa, and yet, in the ordinary shipboard affairs, as now,
they seemed almost indifferent to one another's existence--just
ordinary shipmates. And yet Sam had distinctly given him to understand
that his aberration at Genoa was due to a girl who was in his mind--had
as good as said that the girl was Martia.
Taking the whole business from the start, every indication pointed to
the same conclusion, which was this:
Sam had once been engaged to the girl, or at all events they had been
in love with each other, then Isaac Behrens had turned up and captured
the affections of the lady, and the idiotic Sam had gone off in a rage
and "spoiled his life," by throwing his prospects away and taking to
longshore life at Poole.
What made Bobby bother about the whole business was the fact that he
was in love himself.
Martia had fascinated him from the first, and the close acquaintance
of shipboard life had not decreased that fascination; day by day her
hold had grown upon him. Had they been on shore, leading an ordinary
life, he would have declared himself at once, or even before this;
but the expedition tied him. Whatever his feelings might be, it was
impossible to show them till this business was complete and the work
before them finished.
All the same, that night when he was alone on deck with her, with
Church at the wheel and Atherfield on the look-out, something in the
depths of his mind rose up and spoke.
"Did you know much of Sam before he went off and took up with the
yachting business?" asked he.
"No," replied Martia; "very little."
She spoke in an ordinary tone as though Hackett was of no account at
all to her, and mystified more than ever, but relieved in his mind, he
said no more.