'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, whowas 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 swamin 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 hislimbs, 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 werestill 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, alycéen—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 hisson, 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. ButIremain; 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 eatchoux 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 bebut 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 cœur." 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 herbangles, '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 noticedthe 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 influencesdont je ne connais pas la puissance sur votre cœur! 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.
After spending nearly two years in exile, Julian was once more upon his way to Herakleion.
On deck, brooding upon a great coil of rope, his head bare to the winds, absorbed and concentrated, he disregarded all his surroundings in favour of the ever equi-distant horizon. He seemed to be entranced by its promise. He seemed, moreover, to form part of the ship on which he travelled; part of it, crouching as he did always at the prow, as a figurehead forms part; part of the adventure, the winged gallantry, the eager onward spirit indissoluble from the voyage of a ship in the midst of waters from which no land is visible. The loneliness—for there is no loneliness to equal the loneliness of the sea—the strife of the wind, the generosity of the expanse, the pure cleanliness of the nights and days, met and matched his mood. At moments, feeling himself unconquerable, he tasted the full, rare, glory of youth and anticipation. He did not know which he preferred: the days full of sunlight on the wide blue sea, or the nights when the breeze was fresher against his face, and the road more mysterious, under a young moon that lit the ridges of the waves and travelled slowly past, overhead, across the long black lines of cordage and rigging. He knew only that he was happy as he had never been happy in his life.
His fellow-passengers had watched him when he joined the ship at Brindisi, and a murmur had run amongst them, 'Julian Davenant—son of those rich Davenants of Herakleion, you know—great wine-growers—they own a whole archipelago'; some one had disseminated the information even as Julian came upthe gangway, in faded old gray flannels, hatless, in a rage with his porter, who appeared to be terrified out of all proportion. Then, suddenly, he had lost all interest in his luggage, tossed some money to the porter, and, walking for'ard, had thrown himself down on the heap of ropes and stared straight in front of him to sea, straining his eyes forward to where Greece might lie.
From here he had scarcely stirred. The people who watched him, benevolent and amused, thought him very young. They saw that he relieved the intensity of his vigil with absurd and childlike games that he played by himself, hiding and springing out at the sailors, and laughing immoderately when he had succeeded in startling them—he fraternised with the sailors, though with no one else—or when he saw somebody trip over a ring in the deck. His humour, like his body, seemed to be built on large and simple lines.... In the mornings he ran round and round the decks in rubber-soled shoes. Then again he flung himself down and continued with unseeing eyes to stare at the curve of the horizon.
Not wholly by design, he had remained absent from Herakleion for nearly two years. The standards and systems of life on that remote and beautiful seaboard had not faded for him, this time, with their usual astonishing rapidity; he had rather laid them aside carefully and deliberately, classified against the hour when he should take them from their wrappings; he postponed the consideration of the mission which had presented itself to him, and crushed down the recollection of what had been, perhaps, the most intoxicating of all moments—more intoxicating even, because more unexpected, than the insidious flattery of Eve—the moment when Paul had said to him beneath the fragmentary frescoes of the life of Saint Benedict, in a surprised voice, forced into admission,—
'You have the quality of leadership. You have it.You have the secret. The people will fawn to the hand that chastens.'
Paul, his tutor and preceptor, from whom he had first learnt, so imperceptibly that he scarcely recognised the teaching as a lesson, of the Islands and their problems both human and political, Paul had spoken these words to him, renouncing the authority of the master, stepping aside to admit the accession of the pupil. From the position of a regent, he had abased himself to that of a Prime Minister. Julian had accepted the acknowledgement with a momentary dizziness. In later moments of doubt, the words had flamed for him, bright with reassurance. And then he had banished them with the rest. That world of romance had been replaced by the world of healthy and prosaic things. The letters he periodically received from Eve irritated him because of their reminder of an existence he preferred to regard, for the moment, as in abeyance.
'And so you are gone:veni, vidi, vici. You were well started on your career of devastation! You hadn't done badly, all things considered. Herakleion has heaved an "Ouf!" of relief. You, unimpressionable?Allons donc!You, apathetic? You, placid, unemotional, unawakened?Tu te payes ma tête!'Ah, the limitless ambition I have for you!'I want you to rule, conquer, shatter, demolish.'Haul down the simpering gods, the pampered gods, and put yourself in their place. It is in your power.'Why not? You havele feu sacré. Stagnation is death, death. Burn their temples with fire, and trample their altars to dust.'
'And so you are gone:veni, vidi, vici. You were well started on your career of devastation! You hadn't done badly, all things considered. Herakleion has heaved an "Ouf!" of relief. You, unimpressionable?Allons donc!You, apathetic? You, placid, unemotional, unawakened?Tu te payes ma tête!
'Ah, the limitless ambition I have for you!
'I want you to rule, conquer, shatter, demolish.
'Haul down the simpering gods, the pampered gods, and put yourself in their place. It is in your power.
'Why not? You havele feu sacré. Stagnation is death, death. Burn their temples with fire, and trample their altars to dust.'
This letter, scrawled in pencil on a sheet of torn foolscap, followed him to England immediately after his departure. Then a silence of six months. Then he read, written on spacious yellow writing-paper, withthe monogram E.D. embossed in a triangle of mother-of-pearl, vivid and extravagant as Eve herself—
They are trying to catch me, Julian! I come quite near, quite near, and they hold very quiet their hand with the crumbs in it. I see the other hand stealing round to close upon me—then there's a flutter—un battement d'ailes—l'oiseau s'est de nouveau dérobé!They remain gazing after me, with their mouths wide open. They look so silly. And they haven't robbed me of one plume—not a single plume.'Julian! Why this mania for capture? this wanting to take from me my most treasured possession—liberty? When I want to give, I'll give freely—largesse with both hands, showers of gold and flowers and precious stones—(don't say I'm not conceited!) but I'll never give my liberty, and I'll never allow it to be forced away from me. I should feel a traitor. I couldn't walk through a forest and hear the wind in the trees. I couldn't listen to music. (Ah, Julian! This afternoon I steeped myself in music; Grieg, elf-like, mischievous, imaginative, romantic, so Latin sometimes in spite of his Northern blood. You would love Grieg, Julian. In the fairyland of music, Grieg plays gnome to Debussy's magician.... Then "Khovantchina," of all music the most sublime, the most perverse, the mostbariolé, the most abandoned, and the most desolate.) I could have no comradeship with a free and inspired company. I should have betrayed their secrets, bartered away their mysteries....'
They are trying to catch me, Julian! I come quite near, quite near, and they hold very quiet their hand with the crumbs in it. I see the other hand stealing round to close upon me—then there's a flutter—un battement d'ailes—l'oiseau s'est de nouveau dérobé!They remain gazing after me, with their mouths wide open. They look so silly. And they haven't robbed me of one plume—not a single plume.
'Julian! Why this mania for capture? this wanting to take from me my most treasured possession—liberty? When I want to give, I'll give freely—largesse with both hands, showers of gold and flowers and precious stones—(don't say I'm not conceited!) but I'll never give my liberty, and I'll never allow it to be forced away from me. I should feel a traitor. I couldn't walk through a forest and hear the wind in the trees. I couldn't listen to music. (Ah, Julian! This afternoon I steeped myself in music; Grieg, elf-like, mischievous, imaginative, romantic, so Latin sometimes in spite of his Northern blood. You would love Grieg, Julian. In the fairyland of music, Grieg plays gnome to Debussy's magician.... Then "Khovantchina," of all music the most sublime, the most perverse, the mostbariolé, the most abandoned, and the most desolate.) I could have no comradeship with a free and inspired company. I should have betrayed their secrets, bartered away their mysteries....'
He had wondered then whether she were happy. He had visualised her, turbulent, defiant; courting danger and then childishly frightened when danger overtook her; deliciously forthcoming, inventive, enthusiastic, but always at heart withdrawn; she expressed herself truly when she said that the bird fluttered away from the hand that would have closed over it. He knew thatshe lived constantly, from choice, in a storm of trouble and excitement. Yet he read between the lines of her letters a certain dissatisfaction, a straining after something as yet unattained. He knew that her heart was not in what she described as 'my little round of complacent amourettes.'
The phrase had awoken him with a smile of amusement to the fact that she was no longer a child. He felt some curiosity to see her again under the altered and advanced conditions of her life, yet, lazy and diffident, he shrank from the storm of adventure and responsibility which he knew would at once assail him. The indolence he felt sprang largely from the certainty that he could, at any moment of his choice, stretch out his hand to gather up again the threads that he had relinquished. He had surveyed Herakleion, that other world, from the distance and security of England. He had the conviction that it awaited him, and this conviction bore with it a strangely proprietary sense in which Eve was included. He had listened with amusement and tolerance to the accounts of her exploits, his sleepy eyes bent upon his informant with a quiet patience, as a man who listens to a familiar recital. He had dwelt very often upon the possibility of his return to Herakleion, but, without a full or even a partial knowledge of his motives, postponed it. Yet all the while his life was a service, a dedication.
Then the letters which he received began to mention the forthcoming elections; a faint stir of excitement pervaded his correspondence; Eve, detesting politics, made no reference, but his father's rare notes betrayed an impatient and irritable anxiety; the indications grew, culminating in a darkly allusive letter which, although anonymous, he took to be from Grbits, and finally in a document which was a triumph of illiterate dignity, signed by Kato, Tsigaridis, Zapantiotis, and a doublecolumn of names that broke like a flight of exotic birds into the mellow enclosure of the Cathedral garden where it found him.
Conscious of his ripened and protracted strength, he took ship for Greece.
He had sent no word to announce his coming. A sardonic smile lifted one corner of his mouth as he foresaw the satisfaction of taking Eve by surprise. A standing joke between them (discovered and created, of course, by her, the inventive) was the invariable unexpectedness of his arrivals. He would find her altered, grown. An unreasoning fury possessed him, a jealous rage, not directed against any human being, but against Time itself, that it should lay hands upon Eve, his Eve, during his absence; taking, as it were, advantage while his back was turned. And though he had often professed to himself a lazy indifference to her devotion to him, Julian, he found intolerable the thought that that devotion might have been transferred elsewhere. He rose and strode thunderously down the deck, and one of his fellow-travellers, watching, whistled to himself and thought,—
'That boy has an ugly temper.'
Then the voyage became a dream to Julian; tiny islands, quite rosy in the sunlight, stained the sea here and there only a few miles distant, and along the green sea the ship drew a white, lacy wake, broad and straight, that ever closed behind her like an obliterated path, leaving the way of retreat trackless and unavailable. One day he realised that the long, mountainous line which he had taken for a cloud-bank, was in point of fact the coast. That evening, a sailor told him, they were due to make Herakleion. He grew resentful of the apathy of passengers and crew. The coast-line became more and more distinct. Presently they were passingAphros, and only eight miles lay between the ship and the shore. The foam that gave it its name was breaking upon the rocks of the island....
After that a gap occurred in his memory, and the scene slipped suddenly to the big frescoed drawing-room of his father's house in theplatia, where the peace and anticipation of his voyage were replaced by the gaiety of voices, the blatancy of lights, and the strident energy of three violins and a piano. He had walked up from the pier after the innumerable delays of landing; it was then eleven o'clock at night, and as he crossed theplatiaand heard the music coming from the lighted and open windows of his father's house, he paused in the shadows, aware of the life that had gone on for over a year without him.
'And why is that surprising? I'm an astounding egotist,' he muttered.
He was still in his habitual gray flannels, but he would not go to his room to change. He was standing in the doorway of the drawing-room on the first floor, smiling gently at finding himself still unnoticed, and looking for Eve. She was sitting at the far end of the room between two men, and behind her the painted monkeys grimaced on the wall, swinging by hands and tails from the branches of the unconvincing trees. He saw her as seated in the midst of that ethereal and romantic landscape.
Skirting the walls, he made his way round to her, and in the angle he paused, and observed her. She was unconscious of his presence. Young Christopoulos bent towards her, and she was smiling into his eyes.... In eighteen months she had perfected her art.
Julian drew nearer, critically, possessively, and sarcastically observing her still, swift to grasp the essential difference. She, who had been a child when he had left her, was now a woman. The strangeness ofher face had come to its own in the fullness of years, and the provocative mystery of her person, that withheld even more than it betrayed, now justified itself likewise. There seemed to be a reason for the red lips and ironical eyes that had been so incongruous, so almost offensive, in the face of the child. An immense fan of orange feathers drooped from her hand. Her hair waved turbulently round her brows, and seemed to cast a shadow over her eyes.
He stood suddenly before her.
For an instant she gazed up at him, her lips parted, her breath arrested. He laughed easily, pleased to have bettered her at her own game of melodrama. He saw that she was really at a loss, clutching at her wits, at her recollection of him, trying desperately to fling a bridge across the gulf of those momentous months. She floundered helplessly in the abrupt renewal of their relations. Seeing this, he felt an arrogant exhilaration at the discomfiture which he had produced. She had awoken in him, without a word spoken, the tyrannical spirit of conquest which she induced in all men.
Then she was saved by the intervention of the room; first by Christopoulos shaking Julian's hand, then by dancers crowding round with exclamations of welcome and surprise. Mr Davenant himself was brought, and Julian stood confused and smiling, but almost silent, among the volubility of the guests. He was providing a sensation for lives greedy of sensation. He heard Madame Lafarge, smiling benevolently at him behind her lorgnon, say to Don Rodrigo Valdez,—
'C'est un original que ce garçon.'
They were all there, futile and vociferous. The few new-comers were left painfully out in the cold. They were all there: the fat Danish Excellency, her yellow hair fuzzing round her pink face; Condesa Valdez, painted like a courtesan; Armand, languid, with hismagnolia-like complexion; Madame Delahaye, enterprising and equivocal; Julie Lafarge, thin and brown, timidly smiling; Panaïoannou in his sky-blue uniform; the four sisters Christopoulos, well to the front. These, and all the others. He felt that, at whatever moment during the last eighteen months he had timed his return, he would have found them just the same, complete, none missing, the same words upon their lips. He accepted them now, since he had surrendered to Herakleion, but as for their reality as human beings, with the possible exceptions of Grbits the giant, crashing his way to Julian through people like an elephant pushing through a forest, and of the Persian Minister, hovering on the outskirts of the group with the gentle smile still playing round his mouth, they might as well have been cut out of cardboard. Eve had gone; he could see her nowhere. Alexander, presumably, had gone with her.
Captured at last by the Danish Excellency, Julian had a stream of gossip poured into his ears. He had been in exile for so long, he must be thirsty for news. A new English Minister had arrived, but he was said to be unsociable. He had been expected at the races on the previous Sunday, but had failed to put in an appearance. Armand had had an affair with Madame Delahaye. At a dinner-party last week, Rafaele, the Councillor of the Italian Legation, had not been given his proper place. The Russian Minister, who was the doyen of thecorps diplomatique, had promised to look into the matter with the Chef du Protocole. Once etiquette was allowed to become lax.... The season had been very gay. Comparatively few political troubles. She disliked political troubles. She—confidentially—preferred personalities. But then she was only a woman, and foolish. She knew that she was foolish. But she had a good heart. She was not clever, like his cousin Eve.
Eve? A note of hostility and reserve crept into herexpansiveness. Eve was, of course, very charming, though not beautiful. She could not be called beautiful; her mouth was too large and too red. It was almost improper to have so red a mouth; not quitecomme il fautin so young a girl. Still, she was undeniably successful. Men liked to be amused, and Eve, when she was not sulky, could be very amusing. Her imitations were proverbial in Herakleion. Imitation was, however, an unkindly form of entertainment. It was perhaps a pity that Eve was somoqueuse. Nothing was sacred to her, not even things which were really beautiful and touching—patriotism, or moonlight, or art—even Greek art. It was not that she, Mabel Thyregod, disapproved of wit; she had even some small reputation for wit herself; no; but she held that there were certain subjects to which the application of wit was unsuitable. Love, for instance. Love was the most beautiful, the most sacred thing upon earth, yet Eve—a child, a chit—had no veneration either for love in the abstract or for its devotees in the flesh. She wasted the love that was offered her. She could have no heart, no temperament. She was perhaps fortunate. She, Mabel Thyregod, had always suffered from having too warm a temperament.
A struggle ensued between them, Fru Thyregod trying to force the personal note, and Julian opposing himself to its intrusion. He liked her too much to respond to her blatant advances. He wondered, with a brotherly interest, whether Eve were less crude in her methods.
The thought of Eve sent him instantly in her pursuit, leaving Fru Thyregod very much astonished and annoyed in the ball-room. He found Eve with a man he did not know sitting in her father's business-room. She was lying back in a chair, listless and absent-minded, while her companion argued with vehemence and exasperation. She exclaimed,—
'Julian again! another surprise appearance! Have you been wearing a cap of invisibility?'
Seeing that her companion remained silent in uncertainty, she murmured an introduction,—
'Do you know my cousin Julian? Prince Ardalion Miloradovitch.'
The Russian bowed with a bad grace, seeing that he must yield his place to Julian. When he had gone, unwillingly tactful and full of resentment, she twitted her cousin,—
'Implacable as always, when you want your own way! I notice you have neither outgrown your tyrannical selfishness nor left it behind in England.'
'I have never seen that man before; who is he?'
'A Russian. Not unattractive. I am engaged to him,' she replied negligently.
'You are going to marry him?'
She shrugged.
'Perhaps, ultimately. More probably not.'
'And what will he do if you throw him over?' Julian asked with a certain curiosity.
'Oh, he has a fineje-m'en-fichisme; he'll shrug his shoulders, kiss the tips of my fingers, and die gambling,' she answered.
When Eve said that, Julian thought that he saw the whole of Miloradovitch, whom he did not know, quite clearly; she had lit him up.
They talked then of a great many things, extraneous to themselves, but all the while they observed one another narrowly. She found nothing actually new in him, only an immense development along the old, careless, impersonal lines. In appearance he was as untidy as ever; large, slack-limbed, rough-headed. He, however, found much that was new in her; new, that is, to his more experienced observation, but which, hitherto, in its latent form had slept undiscovered by his boyisheyes. His roaming glance took in the deliberate poise and provocative aloofness of her self-possession, the warm roundness of her throat and arms, the littlemoucheat the corner of her mouth, her little graceful hands, and white skin that here and there, in the shadows, gleamed faintly gold, as though a veneer of amber had been brushed over the white; the pervading sensuousness that glowed from her like the actual warmth of a slumbering fire. He found himself banishing the thought of Miloradovitch....
'Have you changed?' he said abruptly. 'Look at me.'
She raised her eyes, with the assurance of one well-accustomed to personal remarks; a slow smile crept over her lips.
'Well, your verdict?'
'You are older, and your hair is brushed back.'
'Is that all?'
'Do you expect me to say that you are pretty?'
'Oh, no,' she said, snapping her fingers, 'I never expect compliments from you, Julian. On the other hand, let me pay you one. Your arrival, this evening, has been a triumph. Most artistic. Let me congratulate you. You know of old that I dislike being taken by surprise.'
'That's why I do it.'
'I know,' she said, with sudden humility, the marvellous organ of her voice sinking surprisingly into the rich luxuriance of its most sombre contralto.
He noted with a fresh enjoyment the deep tones that broke like a honeyed caress upon his unaccustomed ear. His imagination bore him away upon a flight of images that left him startled by their emphasis no less than by their fantasy. A cloak of black velvet, he thought to himself, as he continued to gaze unseeingly at her; a dusky voice, a gipsy among voices! the purple ripenessof a plum; the curve of a Southern cheek; the heart of red wine. All things seductive and insinuating. It matched her soft indolence, her exquisite subtlety, her slow, ironical smile.
'Your delicious vanity,' he said unexpectedly, and, putting out his hand he touched the hanging fold of silver net which was bound by a silver ribbon round one of her slender wrists.
Herakleion. The white town. The sun. The precipitate coast, and Mount Mylassa soaring into the sky. The distant slope of Greece. The low islands lying out in the jewelled sea. The diplomatic round, the calculations of gain, the continuous and plaintive music of the Islands, the dream of rescue, the ardent championship of the feebler cause, the strife against wealth and authority. The whole fabric of youth.... These were the things abruptly rediscovered and renewed.
The elections were to take place within four days of Julian's arrival. Father Paul, no doubt, could add to the store of information Kato had already given him. But Father Paul was not to be found in the little tavern he kept in the untidy village close to the gates of the Davenants' country house. Julian reined up before it, reading the familiar name, Xenodochion Olympos, above the door, and calling out to the men who were playing bowls along the little gravelled bowling alley to know where he might find the priest. They could not tell him, nor could the old islander Tsigaridis, who sat near the door, smoking a cigar, and dribbling between his fingers the beads of a bright green rosary.
'Thepapáis often absent from us,' added Tsigaridis, and Julian caught the grave inflection of criticism in his tone.
The somnolent heat of the September afternoon lay over the squalid dusty village; in the whole length of its street no life stirred; the dogs slept; the pale pink and blue houses were closely shuttered, with an effect of flatness and desertion. Against the pink front of the tavern splashed the shadows of a great fig-tree, andupon its threshold, but on one side the tree had been cut back to prevent any shadows from falling across the bowling-alley. Julian rode on, enervated by the too intense heat and the glare, and, giving up his horse at his uncle's stables, wandered in the shade under the pergola of gourds at the bottom of the garden.
He saw Father Paul coming towards him across the grass between the lemon-trees; the priest walked slowly, his head bent, his hands clasped behind his back, a spare black figure among the golden fruit. So lean, so lank he appeared, his natural height accentuated by his square black cap; so sallow his bony face in contrast to his stringy red hair. Julian likened him to a long note of exclamation. He advanced unaware of Julian's presence, walking as though every shuffling step of his flat, broad-toed shoes were an accompaniment to some laborious and completed thought.
'Perhaps,' Julian reflected, watching him, 'by the time he reaches me he'll have arrived at his decision.'
He speculated amusedly as to the priest's difficulties: an insurgent member of the flock? a necessary repair to the church? Nothing, nothing outside Herakleion. A tiny life! A priest, a man who had forsworn man's birthright. The visible in exchange for the invisible world. A life concentrated and intense; tight-handed, a round little ball of a life. No range, no freedom. Village life under a microscope; familiar faces and familiar souls. Julian seemed to focus suddenly the rays of the whole world into a spot of light which was the village, and over which the priest's thin face was bent poring with a close, a strained expression of absorption, so that his benevolent purpose became almost a force of evil, prying and inquisitive, and from which the souls under his charge strove to writhe away in vain. To break the image, he called out aloud,—
'You were very deeply immersed in your thoughts, father?'
'Yes, yes,' Paul muttered. He took out his handkerchief to pass it over his face, which Julian now saw with surprise was touched into high lights by a thin perspiration.
'Is anything wrong?' he asked.
'Nothing wrong. Your father is very generous,' the priest added irrelevantly.
Julian, still under the spell, inquired as to his father's generosity.
'He has promised me a new iconostase,' said Paul, but he spoke from an immense distance, vagueness in his eyes, and with a trained, obedient tongue. 'The old iconostase is in a disgraceful state of dilapidation,' he continued, with a new, uncanny energy; 'when we cleaned out the panels we found them hung with bats at the back, and not only bats, but, do you know, Julian, the mice had nested there; the mice are a terrible plague in the church. I am obliged to keep the consecrated bread in a biscuit tin, and I do not like doing that; I like to keep it covered over with a linen cloth; but no, I cannot, all on account of the mice. I have set traps, and I had got a cat, but since she caught her foot in one of the traps she has gone away. I am having great trouble, great trouble with the mice.'
'I know,' said Julian, 'I used to have mice in my rooms at Oxford.'
'A plague!' cried Paul, still fiercely energetic, but utterly remote. 'One would wonder, if one were permitted to wonder, why He saw fit to create mice. I never caught any in my traps; only the cat's foot. And the boy who cleans the church ate the cheese. I have been very unfortunate—very unfortunate with the mice,' he added.
Would they never succeed in getting away from thetopic? The garden was populated with mice, quick little gray objects darting across the path. And Paul, who continued to talk vehemently, with strange, abrupt gestures, was not really there at all.
'Nearly two years since you have been away,' he was saying. 'I expect you have seen a great deal; forgotten all about Paul? How do you find your father? Many people have died in the village; that was to be expected. I have been kept busy, funerals and christenings. I like a full life. And then I have the constant preoccupation of the church; the church, yes. I have been terribly concerned about the iconostase. I have blamed myself bitterly for my negligence. That, of course, was all due to the mice. A man was drowned off these rocks last week; a stranger. They say he had been losing in the casino. I have been into Herakleion once or twice, since you have been away. But it is too noisy. The trams, and the glare.... It would not seem noisy to you. You no doubt welcome the music of the world. You are young, and life for you contains no problems. But I am very happy; I should not like you to think I was not perfectly happy. Your father and your uncle are peculiarly considerate and generous men. Your uncle has promised to pay for the installation of the new iconostase and the removal of the old one. I forgot to tell you that. Completely perished, some of the panels.... And your aunt, a wonderful woman.'
Julian listened in amazement. The priest talked like a wound-up and crazy machine, and all the while Julian was convinced that he did not know a word he was saying. He had once been grave, earnest, scholarly, even wise.... He kept taking off and putting on his cap, to the wild disordering of his long hair.
'He's gone mad,' Julian thought in dismay.
Julian despaired of struggling out of the quicksandsthat sucked at their feet. He thought desperately that if the priest would come back, would recall his spirit to take control of his wits, all might be well. The tongue was babbling in an empty body while the spirit journeyed in unknown fields, finding there what excruciating torment? Who could tell! For the man was suffering, that was clear; he had been suffering as he walked across the grass, but he had suffered then in controlled silence, spirit and mind close-locked and allied in the taut effort of endurance; now, their alliance shattered by the sound of a human voice, the spirit had fled, sweeping with it the furies of agony, and leaving the mind bereaved, chattering emptily, noisily, in the attempt at concealment. He, Julian, was responsible for this revelation of the existence of an unguessed secret. He must repair the damage he had done.
'Father!' he said, interrupting, and he took the priest strongly by the wrist.
Their eyes met.
'Father!' Julian said again. He held the wrist with the tensest effort of his fingers, and the eyes with the tensest effort of his will. He saw the accentuated cavities of the priest's thin face, and the pinched lines of suffering at the corners of the mouth. Paul had been strong, energetic, masculine. Now his speech was random, and he quavered as a palsied old man. Even his personal cleanliness had, in a measure, deserted him; his soutane was stained, his hair lank and greasy. He confronted Julian with a scared and piteous cowardice, compelled, yet seeking escape, then as he slowly steadied himself under Julian's grip the succeeding emotions were reflected in his eyes: first shame; then a horrified grasping after his self-respect; finally, most touching of all, confidence and gratitude; and Julian, seeing the cycle completed and knowing that Paul was again master of himself, released the wrist and asked, in the most casual voiceat his command, 'All right?' He had the sensation of having saved some one from falling.
Paul nodded without speaking. Then he began to ask Julian as to how he had employed the last eighteen months, and they talked for some time without reference to the unaccountable scene that had passed between them. Paul talked with his wonted gentleness and interest, the strangeness of his manner entirely vanished; Julian could have believed it a hallucination, but for the single trace left in the priest's disordered hair. Red strands hung abjectly down his back. Julian found his eyes drawn towards them in a horrible fascination, but, because he knew the scene must be buried unless Paul himself chose to revive it, he kept his glance turned away with conscious deliberation.
He was relieved when the priest left him.
'Gone to do his hair'—the phrase came to his mind as he saw the priest walk briskly away, tripping with the old familiar stumble over his soutane, and saw the long wisps faintly red on the black garment. 'Like a woman—exactly!' he uttered in revolt, clenching his hand at man's degradation. 'Like a woman, long hair, long skirt; ready to listen to other people's troubles. Unnatural existence; unnatural? it's unnatural to the point of viciousness. No wonder the man's mind is unhinged.'
He was really troubled about his friend, the more so that loyalty would keep him silent and allow him to ask no questions. He thought, however, that if Eve volunteered any remarks about Paul it would not be disloyal to listen. The afternoon was hot and still; Eve would be indoors. The traditions of his English life still clung to him sufficiently to make him chafe vaguely against the idleness of the days; he resented the concession to the climate. A demoralising place. A place where priests let their hair grow long, and went temporarily mad....
He walked in the patchy shade of the lemon-trees towards the house in a distressed and irascible frame of mind. He longed for action; his mind was never content to dwell long unoccupied. He longed for the strife the elections would bring. The house glared very white, and all the green shutters were closed; behind them, he knew, the windows would be closed too. Another contradiction. In England, when one wanted to keep a house cool, one opened the windows wide.
He crossed the veranda; the drawing-room was dim and empty. How absurd to paint sham flames on the ceiling in a climate where the last thing one wanted to remember was fire. He called,—
'Eve!'
Silence answered him. A book lying on the floor by the writing-table showed him that she had been in the room; no one else in that house would read Albert Samain. He picked it up and read disgustedly,—