The second attack on Aphros was delivered within a week of their arrival.
Eve and Kato, refusing the retreat in the heart of the island, spent the morning together in the Davenant house. In the distance the noise of the fighting alternately increased and waned; now crackling sharply, as it seemed, from all parts of the sea, now dropping into a disquieting silence. At such times Eve looked mutely at the singer. Kato gave her no comfort, but, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders, expressed only her ignorance. She found that she could speak to Julian sympathetically of Eve, but not to Eve sympathetically of Julian. She had made the attempt, but after the pang of its effort, had renounced it. Their hostility smouldered dully under the shelter of their former friendship. Now, alone in the house, they might indeed have remained for the most time apart in separate rooms, but the common anxiety which linked them drew them together, so that when Kato moved Eve followed her, unwillingly, querulously; and expressions of affection were even forced from them, of which they instantly repented, and by some phrase of veiled cruelty sought to counteract.
No news reached them from outside. Every man was at his post, and Julian had forbidden all movement about the village. By his orders also the heavy shutters had been closed over the windows of the Davenant drawing-room, where Eve and Kato sat, with the door open on to the courtyard for the sake of light, talking spasmodically, and listening to thesounds of the firing. At the first quick rattle Kato had said, 'Machine-guns,' and Eve had replied, 'Yes; the first time—when we were here alone—he told me they had a machine-gun on the police-launch;' then Kato said, after a pause of firing, 'This time they have more than one.'
Eve raised tormented eyes.
'Anastasia, he said he would be in shelter.'
'Would he remain in shelter for long?' Kato replied scornfully.
Eve said,—
'He has Grbits with him.'
Kato, crushing down the personal preoccupation, dwelt ardently on the fate of her country. She must abandon to Eve the thought of Julian, but of the Islands at least she might think possessively, diverting to their dear though inanimate claim all the need of passion and protection humanly denied her. From a woman of always intense patriotism, she had become a fanatic. Starved in one direction, she had doubled her energy in the other, realising, moreover, the power of that bond between herself and Julian. She could have said with thorough truthfulness that her principal cause of resentment against Eve was Eve's indifference towards the Islands—a loftier motive than the more human jealousy. She had noticed Julian's reluctance to mention the Islands in Eve's presence. Alone with herself and Grbits, he had never ceased to pour forth the flood of his scheme, both practical and utopian, so that Kato could not be mistaken as to the direction of his true preoccupations. She had seen the vigour he brought to his governing. She had observed with a delighted grin to Grbits that, despite his Socialistic theories, Julian had in point of fact instituted a complete and very thinly-veiled autocracy in Hagios Zacharie. She had seen him in the village assembly,when, in spite of his deferential appeals to the superior experience of the older men, he steered blankly past any piece of advice that ran contrary to the course of his own ideas. She knew that, ahead of him, when he should have freed himself finally of Herakleion (and that he would free himself he did not for a moment doubt), he kept always the dream of his tiny, ideal state. She revered his faith, his energy, and his youth, as the essence in him most worthy of reverence. And she knew that Eve, if she loved these things in him, loved them only in theory, but in practice regarded them with impatient indifference. They stole him away, came between him and her.... Kato knew well Eve's own ideals. Courage she exacted. Talents she esteemed. Genius, freedom, and beauty she passionately worshipped as her gods upon earth. But she could tolerate nothing material, nor any occupation that removed her or the other from the blind absorption of love.
Kato sighed. Far otherwise would she have cared for Julian! She caught sight of herself in a mirror, thick, squat, black, with little sparkling eyes; she glanced at Eve, glowing with warmth, sleek and graceful as a little animal, idle and seductive. Outside a crash of firing shook the solid house, and bullets rattled upon the roofs of the village.
It was intolerable to sit unoccupied, working out bitter speculations, while such activity raged around the island. To know the present peril neither of Julian nor of Aphros! To wait indefinitely, probably all day, possibly all night!
'Anastasia, sing.'
Kato complied, as much for her own sake as for Eve's. She sang some of her own native songs, then, breaking off, she played, and Eve drew near to her, lost and transfigured by the music; she clasped and unclasped her hands, beautified by her ecstasy, andKato's harsh thoughts vanished; Eve was, after all, a child, an all too loving and passionate child, and not, as Kato sometimes thought her, a pernicious force of idleness and waste. Wrong-headed, tragically bringing sorrow upon herself in the train of her too intense emotions.... Continuing to play, Kato observed her, and felt the light eager fingers upon her arm.
'Ah, Kato, you make me forget. Like some drug of forgetfulness that admits me to caves of treasure. Underground caves heaped with jewels. Caves of the winds; zephyrs that come and go. I'm carried away into oblivion.'
'Tell me,' Kato said.
Obedient to the lead of the music, Eve wandered into a story,—
'Riding on a winged horse, he swept from east to west; he looked down upon the sea, crossed by the wake of ships, splashed here and there with islands, washing on narrow brown stretches of sand, or dashing against the foot of cliffs—you hear the waves breaking?—and he saw how the moon drew the tides, and how ships came to rest for a little while in harbours, but were homeless and restless and free; he passed over the land, swooping low, and he saw the straight streets of cities, and the gleam of fires, the neat fields and guarded frontiers, the wider plains; he saw the gods throned on Ida, wearing the clouds like mantles and like crowns, divinely strong or divinely beautiful; he saw things mean and magnificent; he saw the triumphal procession of a conqueror, with prisoners walking chained to the back of his chariot, and before him white bulls with gilded horns driven to the sacrifice, and children running with garlands of flowers; he saw giants hammering red iron in northern mountains; he saw all the wanderers of the earth; Io the tormented, and all gipsies, vagabonds, and wastrels:all jongleurs, poets, and mountebanks; he saw these wandering, but all the staid and solemn people lived in the cities and counted the neat fields, saying, "This shall be mine and this shall be yours." And sometimes, as he passed above a forest, he heard a scurry of startled feet among crisp leaves, and sometimes he heard, which made him sad, the cry of stricken trees beneath the axe.'
She broke off, as Kato ceased playing.
'They are still firing,' she said.
'Things mean and magnificent,' quoted Kato slowly. 'Why, then, withhold Julian from the Islands?'
She had spoken inadvertently. Consciousness of the present had jerked her back from remembrance of the past, when Eve had come almost daily to her flat in Herakleion, bathing herself in the music, wrapped up in beauty; when their friendship had hovered on the boundaries of the emotional, in spite of—or perhaps because of?—the thirty years that lay between them.
'I heard the voice of my fantastic Eve, of whom I once thought,' she added, fixing her eyes on Eve, 'as the purest of beings, utterly removed from the sordid and the ugly.'
Eve suddenly flung herself on her knees beside her.
'Ah, Kato,' she said, 'you throw me off my guard when you play to me. I'm not always hard and calculating, and your music melts me. It hurts me to be, as I constantly am, on the defensive. I'm too suspicious by nature to be very happy, Kato. There are always shadows, and ... and tragedy. Please don't judge me too harshly. Tell me what you mean by sordid and ugly—what is there sordid or ugly in love?'
Kato dared much; she replied in a level voice,—
'Jealousy. Waste. Exorbitance. Suspicion. I am sometimes afraid of your turning Julian into anotherof those men who hoped to find their inspiration in a woman, but found only a hindrance.'
She nodded sagely at Eve, and the gold wheat-ears trembled in her hair.
Eve darkened at Julian's name; she got up and stood by the door looking into the court. Kato went on,—
'You are so much of a woman, Eve, that it becomes a responsibility. It is a gift, like genius. And a great gift without a great soul is a curse, because such a gift is too strong to be disregarded. It's a force, a danger. You think I am preaching to you'—Eve would never know what the words were costing her—'but I preach only because of my belief in Julian—and in you,' she hastened to add, and caught Eve's hand; 'don't frown, you child. Look at me; I have no illusions and no sensitiveness on the score of my own appearance; look at me hard, and let me speak to you as a sexless creature.'
Eve was touched in spite of her hostility. She was also shocked and distressed. There was to her, so young herself, so insolently vivid in her sex-pride, something wrong and painful in Kato's renouncement of her right. She had a sense of betrayal.
'Hush, Anastasia,' she whispered. They were both extremely moved, and the constant volleys of firing played upon their nerves and stripped reserve from them.
'You don't realise,' said Kato, who had, upon impulse, sacrificed her pride, and beaten down the feminine weakness she branded as unworthy, 'how finely the balance, in love, falters between good and ill. You, Eve, are created for love; any one who saw you, even without speaking to you, across a room, could tell you that.' She smiled affectionately; she had, at that moment, risen so far above all personal vanity thatshe could bring herself to smile affectionately at Eve. 'You said, just now, with truth I am sure, that shadows and tragedy were never very far away from you; you're toorareto be philosophical. I wish there were a word to express the antithesis of a philosopher; if I could call you by it, I should have said all that I could wish to say about you, Eve. I'm so much afraid of sorrow for you and Julian....'
'Yes, yes,' said Eve, forgetting to be resentful, 'I am afraid, too; it overcomes me sometimes; it's a presentiment.' She looked really haunted, and Kato was filled with an immense pity for her.
'You mustn't be weak,' she said gently. 'Presentiment is only a high-sounding word for a weak thought.'
'You are so strong and sane, Kato; it is easy for you to be—strong and sane.'
They broke off, and listened in silence to an outburst of firing and shouts that rose from the village.
Grbits burst into the room early in the afternoon, his flat sallow face tinged with colour, his clothes torn, and his limbs swinging like the sails of a windmill. In one enormous hand he still brandished a revolver. He was triumphantly out of breath.
'Driven off!' he cried. 'They ran up a white flag. Not one succeeded in landing. Not one.' He panted between every phrase. 'Julian—here in a moment. I ran. Negotiations now, we hope. Sea bobbing with dead.'
'Our losses?' said Kato sharply.
'Few. All under cover,' Grbits replied. He sat down, swinging his revolver loosely between his knees, and ran his fingers through his oily black hair, so that it separated into straight wisps across his forehead. He was hugely pleased and good-humoured, and grinned widely upon Eve and Kato. 'Good fighting—thoughtoo much at a distance. Julian was grazed on the temple—told me to tell you,' he added, with the tardy haste of a child who has forgotten to deliver a message. 'We tied up his head, and it will be nothing of a scratch.—Driven off! They have tried and failed. The defence was excellent. They will scarcely try force again. I am sorry I missed the first fight. I could have thrown those little fat soldiers into the sea with one hand, two at a time.'
Kato rushed up to Grbits and kissed him; they were like children in their large, clumsy excitement.
Julian came in, his head bandaged; his unconcern deserted him as he saw Kato hanging over the giant's chair. He laughed out loud.
'A miscellaneous fleet!' he cried. 'Coastal steamers, fort tugs, old chirkets from the Bosphorus—who was the admiral, I wonder?'
'Panaïoannou,' cried Grbits, 'his uniform military down one side, and naval down the other.'
'Their white flag!' said Julian.
'Sterghiou's handkerchief!' said Grbits.
'Coaling steamers, mounting machine-guns,' Julian continued.
'Stavridis must have imagined that,' said Kato.
'Play us a triumphal march, Anastasia!' said Grbits.
Kato crashed some chords on the piano; they all laughed and sang, but Eve, who had taken no part at all, remained in the window-seat staring at the ground and her lips trembling. She heard Julian's voice calling her, but she obstinately shook her head. He was lost to her between Kato and Grbits. She heard them eagerly talking now, all three, of the negotiations likely to follow. She heard the occasional shout with which Grbits recalled some incident in the fighting, and Julian's response. She felt that her ardent hatred of the Islands rose in proportion to their ardent love.'He cares nothing for me,' she kept repeating to herself, 'he cares for me as a toy, a pastime, nothing more; he forgets me for Kato and the Islands. The Islands hold his true heart. I am the ornament to his life, not life itself. And he is all my life. He forgets me....' Pride alone conquered her tears.
Later, under cover of a white flag, the ex-Premier Malteios was landed at the port of Aphros, and was conducted—since he insisted that his visit was unofficial—to the Davenant house.
Peace and silence reigned. Grbits and Kato had gone together to look at the wreckage, and Eve, having watched their extraordinary progress down the street until they turned into the market-place, was alone in the drawing-room. Julian slept heavily, his arms flung wide, on his bed upstairs. Zapantiotis, who had expected to find him in the court or in the drawing-room, paused perplexed. He spoke to Eve in a low voice.
'No,' she said, 'do not wake Mr Davenant,' and, raising her voice, she added, 'His Excellency can remain with me.'
She was alone in the room with Malteios, as she had desired.
'But why remain thus, as it were, at bay?' he said pleasantly, observing her attitude, shrunk against the wall, her hand pressed to her heart. 'You and I were friends once, mademoiselle. Madame?' he substituted.
'Mademoiselle,' she replied levelly.
'Ah? Other rumours, perhaps—no matter. Here upon your island, no doubt, different codes obtain. Far be it from me to suggest.... An agreeable room,' he said, looking round, linking his fingers behind his back, and humming a little tune; 'you have a piano, I see; have you played much during your leisure? But, of course, I was forgetting: Madame Kato isyour companion here, is she not? and to her skill a piano is a grateful ornament. Ah, I could envy you your evenings, with Kato to make your music. Paris cries for her; but no, she is upon a revolutionary island in the heart of the Ægean! Paris cries the more. Her portrait appears in every paper. Madame Kato, when she emerges, will find her fame carried to its summit. And you, Mademoiselle Eve, likewise something of a heroine.'
'I am here in the place of my cousin,' Eve said, looking across at the ex-Premier.
He raised his eyebrows, and, in a familiar gesture, smoothed away his beard from his rosy lips with the tips of his fingers.
'Is that indeed so? A surprising race, you English. Very surprising. You assume or bequeath very lightly the mantle of government, do you not? Am I to understand that you have permanently replaced your cousin in the—ah!—presidency of Hagios Zacharie?'
'My cousin is asleep; there is no reason why you should not speak to me in his absence.'
'Asleep? but I must see him, mademoiselle.'
'If you will wait until he wakes.'
'Hours, possibly!'
'We will send to wake him in an hour's time. Can I not entertain you until then?' she suggested, her natural coquetry returning.
She left the wall against which she had been leaning, and, coming across to Malteios, gave him her fingers with a smile. The ex-Premier had always figured picturesquely in her world.
'Mademoiselle,' he said, kissing the fingers she gave him, 'you are as delightful as ever, I am assured.'
They sat, Malteios impatient and ill at ease, unwilling to forego his urbanity, yet tenacious of his purpose.In the midst of the compliments he perfunctorily proffered, he broke out,—
'Children!Ces gosses.... Mais il est fou, voyons, votre cousin. What is he thinking about? He has created a ridiculous disturbance; well, let that pass; we overlook it, but this persistence.... Where is it all to end? Obstinacy feeds and grows fat upon obstinacy; submission grows daily more impossible, more remote. His pride is at stake. A threat, well and good; let him make his threat; he might then have arrived at some compromise. I, possibly, might myself have acted as mediator between him and my friend and rival, Gregori Stavridis. In fact, I am here to-day in the hope that my effort will not come too late. But after so much fighting! Tempers run high no doubt in the Islands, and I can testify that they run high in Herakleion. Anastasia—probably you know this already—Madame Kato's flat is wrecked. Yes, the mob. We are obliged to keep a cordon of police always before your uncle's house. Neither he nor your father and mother dare to show themselves at the windows. It is a truly terrible state of affairs.'
He reverted to the deeper cause of his resentment,—
'I could have mediated, in the early days, so well between your cousin and Gregori Stavridis. Pity, pity, pity!' he said, shaking his head and smiling his benign, regretful smile that to-day was tinged with a barely concealed bitterness, 'a thousand pities, mademoiselle.'
He began again, his mind on Herakleion,—
'I have seen your father and mother, also your uncle. They are very angry and impotent. Because the people threw stones at their windows and even, I regret to say, fired shots into the house from theplatia, the windows are all boarded over and they live by artificial light. I have seen them breakfasting bycandles. Yes. Your, father, your mother, and your uncle, breakfasting together in the drawing-room with lighted candles on the table. I entered the house from the back. Your father said to me apprehensively, "I am told Madame Kato's flat was wrecked last night?" and your mother said, "Outrageous! She is infatuated, either with those Islands or with that boy. She will not care. All her possessions, littering the quays! An outrage." Your uncle said to me, "See the boy, Malteios! Talk to him. We are hopeless." Indeed they appeared hopeless, although not resigned, and sat with their hands hanging by their sides instead of eating their eggs; your mother, even, had lost her determination.
'I tried to reassure them, but a rattle of stones on the boarded windows interrupted me. Your uncle got up and flung away his napkin. "One cannot breakfast in peace," he said petulantly, as though that constituted his most serious grievance. He went out of the room, but the door had scarcely closed behind him before it reopened and he came back. He was quite altered, very irritable, and all his courteous gravity gone from him. "See the inconvenience," he said to me, jerking his hands, "all the servants have gone with my son, all damned islanders." I found nothing to say.'
'Kato may return to Herakleion with you?' Eve suggested after a pause during which Malteios recollected himself, and tried to indicate by shrugs and rueful smiles that he considered the bewilderment of the Davenants a deplorable but nevertheless entertaining joke. At the name of Kato a change came over his face.
'A fanatic, that woman,' he replied; 'a martyr who will rejoice in her martyrdom. She will never leave Aphros while the cause remains.—A heroic woman,' he said, with unexpected reverence.
He looked at Eve, his manner veering again to the insinuating and the crafty; his worse and his better natures were perpetually betraying themselves.
'Would she leave Aphros? no! Would your cousin leave Aphros? no! They have between them the bond of a common cause. I know your cousin. He is young enough to be an idealist. I know Madame Kato. She is old enough to applaud skilfully. Hou!' He spread his hands. 'I have said enough.'
Eve revealed but little interest, though for the first time during their interview her interest was passionately aroused. Malteios watched her, new schemes germinating in his brain; they played against one another, their hands undeclared, a blind, tentative game. This conversation, which had begun as it were accidentally, fortuitously, turned to a grave significance along a road whose end lay hidden far behind the hills of the future. It led, perhaps, nowhere. It led, perhaps....
Eve said lightly,—
'I am outdistanced by Kato and my cousin; I don't understand politics, or those impersonal friendships.'
'Mademoiselle,' Malteios replied, choosing his words and infusing into them an air of confidence, 'I tell you an open secret, but one to which I would never refer save with a sympathetic listener like yourself, when I tell you that for many years a friendship existed between myself and Madame Kato, political indeed, but not impersonal. Madame Kato,' he said, drawing his chair a little nearer and lowering his voice, 'is not of the impersonal type.'
Eve violently rebelled from his nearness; fastidious, she loathed his goatish smile, his beard, his rosy lips, but she continued to smile to him, a man who held, perhaps, one of Julian's secrets. She was aware of the necessity of obtaining that secret. Of the dishonour towards Julian, sleeping away his hurts and his fatiguein the room above, she was blindly unaware. Love to her was a battle, not a fellowship. She must know! Already her soul, eagerly receptive and bared to the dreaded blow, had adopted the theory of betrayal. In the chaos of her resentments and suspicions, she remembered how Kato had spoken to her in the morning, and without further reflection branded that conversation as a blind. She even felt a passing admiration for the other woman's superior cleverness. She, Eve, had been completely taken in.... So she must contend, not only against the Islands, but against Kato also? Anguish and terror rushed over her. She scarcely knew what she believed or did not believe, only that her mind was one seething and surging tumult of mistrust and all-devouring jealousy. She was on the point of abandoning her temperamentally indirect methods, of stretching out her hands to Malteios, and crying to him for the agonising, the fiercely welcome truth, when he said,—
'Impersonal? Do you, mademoiselle, know anything of your sex? Ah, charming! disturbing, precious, indispensable, even heroic, tant que vous voudrez, but impersonal, no! Man, yes, sometimes. Woman, never. Never.' He took her hand, patted it, kissed the wrist, and murmured, 'Chère enfant, these are not ideas for your pretty head.'
She knew from experience that his preoccupation with such theories, if no more sinister motive, would urge him towards a resumption of the subject, and after a pause full of cogitation he continued,—
'Follow my advice, mademoiselle: never give your heart to a man concerned in other affairs. You may love, both of you, but you will strive in opposite directions. Your cousin, for example.... And yet,' he mused, 'you are a woman to charm the leisure of a man of action. The toy of a conqueror.' He laughed.'Fortunately, conquerors are rare.' But she knew he hovered round the image of Julian. 'Believe me, leave such men to such women as Kato; they are more truly kin. You—I discover you—are too exorbitant; love would play too absorbing a rôle. You would tolerate no rival, neither a person nor a fact. Your eyes smoulder; I am near the truth?'
'One could steal the man from his affairs,' she said almost inaudibly.
'The only hope,' he replied.
A long silence fell, and his evil benevolence gained on her; on her aroused sensitiveness his unspoken suggestions fell one by one as definitely as the formulated word. He watched her; she trembled, half compelled by his gaze. At length, under the necessity of breaking the silence, she said,—
'Kato is not such a woman; she would resent no obstacle.'
'Wiser,' he added, 'she would identify herself with it.'
He began to banter horribly,—
'Ah, child, Eve, child made for love, daily bless your cousinship! Bless its contemptuous security. Smile over the confabulations of Kato and your cousin. Smile to think that he, she, and the Islands are bound in an indissoluble triology. If there be jealousy to suffer, rejoice in that it falls, not to your share, but to mine, who am old and sufficiently philosophical. Age and experience harden, you know. Else, I could not see Anastasia Kato pass to another with so negligible a pang. Yet the imagination makes its own trouble. A jealous imagination.... Very vivid. Pictures of Anastasia Kato in your cousin's arms—ah, crude, crude, I know, but the crudity of the jealous imagination is unequalled. Not a detail escapes. That is why I say, bless your cousinship and its security.' Heglanced up and met her tortured eyes. 'As I bless my philosophy of the inevitable,' he finished softly, caressing her hand which he had retained all the while.
No effort at 'Impossible!' escaped her; almost from the first she had blindly adopted his insinuations. She even felt a perverse gratitude towards him, and a certain fellowship. They were allies. Her mind was now set solely upon one object. That self-destruction might be involved did not occur to her, nor would she have been deterred thereby. Like Samson, she had her hands upon the columns....
'Madame Kato lives in this house?' asked Malteios, as one who has been following a train of thought.
She shook her head, and he noticed that her eyes were turned slightly inwards, as with the effort of an immense concentration.
'You have power,' he said with admiration.
Bending towards her, he began to speak in a very low, rapid voice; she sat listening to him, by no word betraying her passionate attention, nodding only from time to time, and keeping her hands very still, linked in her lap. Only once she spoke, to ask a question, 'He would leave Herakleion?' and Malteios replied, 'Inevitably; the question of the Islands would be for ever closed for him;' then she said, producing the words from afar off, 'He would be free,' and Malteios, working in the dark, following only one of the two processes of her thought, reverted to Kato; his skill could have been greater in playing upon the instrument, but even so it sufficed, so taut was the stringing of the cords. When he had finished speaking, she asked him another question, 'He could never trace the thing to me?' and he reassured her with a laugh so natural and contemptuous that she, in her ingenuity, was convinced. All the while she had kept her eyes fastened on his face, on his rosylips moving amongst his beard, that she might lose no detail of his meaning or his instructions, and at one moment he had thought, 'There is something terrible in this child,' but immediately he had crushed the qualm, thinking, 'By this recovery, if indeed it is to be, I am a made man,' and thanking the fate that had cast this unforeseen chance across his path. Finally she heard his voice change from its earnest undertone to its customary platitudinous flattery, and turning round she saw that Julian had come into the room, his eyes already bent with brooding scorn upon the emissary.
She was silent that evening, so silent that Grbits, the unobservant, commented to Kato; but after they had dined, all four, by the fountain in the court, she flung aside her preoccupation, laughed and sang, forced Kato to the piano, and danced with reckless inspiration to the accompaniment of Kato's songs. Julian, leaning against a column, watched her bewildering gaiety. She had galvanised Grbits into movement—he who was usually bashful with women, especially with Eve, reserving his enthusiasm for Julian—and as she passed and re-passed before Julian in the grasp of the giant she flung at him provocative glances charged with a special meaning he could not interpret; in the turn of her dance he caught her smile and the flash of her eyes, and smiled in response, but his smile was grave, for his mind ran now upon the crisis with Herakleion, and, moreover, he suffered to see Eve so held by Grbits, her turbulent head below the giant's shoulder, and regretted that her gaiety should not be reserved for him alone. Across the court, through the open door of the drawing-room, he could see Kato at the piano, full of delight, her broad little fat hands and wrists racing above the keyboard, her short torso swaying to the rhythm, her rich voice humming, and the gold wheat ears shaking in her hair. She called to him, and, drawing a chair close to the piano, he sat beside her, but through the door he continued to stare at Eve dancing in the court. Kato said as she played, her perception sharpened by the tormented watch she kept on him,—
'Eve celebrates your victory of yesterday,' to whichhe replied, deceived by the kindly sympathy in her eyes,—
'Eve celebrates her own high spirits and the enjoyment of a new partner; my doings are of the last indifference to her.'
Kato played louder; she bent towards him,—
'You love her so much, Julian?'
He made an unexpected answer,—
'I believe in her.'
Kato, a shrewd woman, observed him, thinking,—'He does not; he wants to convince himself.'
She said aloud, conscientiously wrenching out the truth as she saw it,—
'She loves you; she is capable of love such as is granted to few; that is the sublime in her.'
He seized upon this, hungrily, missing meanwhile the sublime in the honesty of the singer,—
'Since I am given so much, I should not exact more. The Islands.... She gives all to me. I ought not to force the Islands upon her.'
'Grapes of thistles,' Kato said softly.
'You understand,' he murmured with gratitude. 'But why should she hamper me, Anastasia? Are all women so irrational? What am I to believe?'
'We are not so irrational as we appear,' Kato said, 'because our wildest sophistry has always its roots in the truth of instinct.'
Eve was near them, crying out,—
'A tarantella, Anastasia!'
Julian sprang up; he caught her by the wrist,—
'Gipsy!'
'Come with the gipsy?' she whispered.
Her scented hair blew near him, and her face was upturned, with its soft, sweet mouth.
'Away from Aphros?' he said, losing his head.
'All over the world!'
He was suddenly swept away by the full force of her wild, irresponsible seduction.
'Anywhere you choose, Eve.'
She triumphed, close to him, and wanton.
'You'd sacrifice Aphros to me?'
'Anything you asked for,' he said desperately.
She laughed, and danced away, stretching out her hands towards him,—
'Join in the saraband, Julian?'
She was alone in her room. Her emotion and excitement were so intense that they drained her of physical strength, leaving her faint and cold; her eyes closed now and then as under the pressure of pain; she yawned, and her breath came shortly between her lips; she sat by the open window, rose to move about the room, sat again, rose again, passed her hand constantly over her forehead, or pressed it against the base of her throat. The room was in darkness; there was no moon, only the stars hung over the black gulf of the sea. She could see the long, low lights of Herakleion, and the bright red light of the pier. She could hear distant shouting, and an occasional shot. In the room behind her, her bed was disordered. She wore only her Spanish shawl thrown over her long nightgown; her hair hung in its thick plait. Sometimes she formed, in a whisper, the single word, 'Julian!'
She thought of Julian. Julian's rough head and angry eyes. Julian when he said, 'I shall break you,' like a man speaking to a wild young supple tree. (Her laugh of derision, and her rejoicing in her secret fear!) Julian in his lazy ownership of her beauty. Julian when he allowed her to coax him from his moroseness. Julian when she was afraid of him and of the storm she had herself aroused: Julian passionate....
Julian whom she blindly wanted for herself alone.
That desire had risen to its climax. The light of no other consideration filtered through into her closely shuttered heart. She had waited for Julian, schemed for Julian, battled for Julian; this was the final battle. She had not foreseen it. She had tolerated and even welcomed the existence of the Islands until she began to realise that they took part of Julian from her. Then she hated them insanely, implacably; including Kato, whom Julian had called their tutelary deity, in that hatred. Had Julian possessed a dog, she would have hated that too.
The ambitions she had vaguely cherished for him had not survived the test of surrendering a portion of her own inordinate claim.
She had joined battle with the Islands as with a malignant personality. She was fighting them for the possession of Julian as she might have fought a woman she thought more beautiful, more unscrupulous, more appealing than herself, but with very little doubt of ultimate victory. Julian would be hers, at last; more completely hers than he had been even in those ideal, uninterrupted days before Grbits and Kato came, the days when he forgot his obligations, almost his life's dream for her. Love all-eclipsing.... She stood at the window, oppressed and tense, but in the soft silken swaying of her loose garments against her limbs she still found a delicately luxurious comfort.
Julian had been called away, called by the violent hammering on the house-door; it had then been after midnight. Two hours had passed since then. No one had come to her, but she had heard the tumult of many voices in the streets, and by leaning far out of the window she could see a great flare burning up from the market-place. She had thought a house might be on fire. She could not look back over her dispositions; they had been completed in a dream, as though underdirect dictation. It did not occur to her to be concerned as to their possible miscarriage; she was too ignorant of such matters, too unpractical, to be troubled by any such anxiety. She had carried out Malteios' instructions with intense concentration; there her part had ended. The fuse which she had fired was burning.... If Julian would return, to put an end to her impatience!
(Down in the market-place the wooden school-buildings flamed and crackled, redly lighting up the night, and fountains of sparks flew upward against the sky. The lurid market-place was thronged with sullen groups of islanders, under the guard of the soldiers of Herakleion. In the centre, on the cobbles, lay the body of Tsigaridis, on his back, arms flung open, still, in the enormous pool of blood that crept and stained the edges of his spread white fustanelle. Many of the islanders were not fully dressed, but had run out half-naked from their houses, only to be captured and disarmed by the troops; the weapons which had been taken from them lay heaped near the body of Tsigaridis, the light of the flames gleaming along the blades of knives and the barrels of rifles, and on the bare bronzed chests of men, and limbs streaked with trickles of bright red blood. They stood proudly, contemptuous of their wounds, arms folded, some with rough bandages about their heads. Panaïoannou, leaning both hands on the hilt of his sword, and grinning sardonically beneath his fierce moustaches, surveyed the place from the steps of the assembly-room).
Eve in her now silent room realised that all sounds of tumult had died away. A shivering came over her, and, impelled by a suddenly understood necessity, she lit the candles on her dressing-table and, as the room sprang into light, began flinging the clothes out of the drawers into a heap in the middle of the floor. They fluttered softly from her hands, falling together in alltheir diverse loveliness of colour and fragility of texture. She paused to smile to them, friends and allies. She remembered now, with the fidelity of a child over a well-learnt lesson, the final words of Malteios, 'A boat ready for you both to-night, secret and without delay,' as earlier in the evening she had remembered his other words, 'Midnight, at the creek at the back of the islands ...'; she had acted upon her lesson mechanically, and in its due sequence, conscientious, trustful.
She stood amongst her clothes, the long red sari which she had worn on the evening of Julian's first triumph drooping from her hand. They foamed about her feet as she stood doubtfully above them, strangely brilliant herself in her Spanish shawl. They lay in a pool of rich delicacy upon the floor. They hung over the backs of chairs, and across the tumbled bed. They pleased her; she thought them pretty. Stooping, she raised them one by one, and allowed them to drop back on to the heap, aware that she must pack them and must also dress herself. But she liked their butterfly colours and gentle rustle, and, remembering that Julian liked them too, smiled to them again. He found her standing there amongst them when after a knock at her door he came slowly into her room.
He remained by the door for a long while looking at her in silence. She had made a sudden, happy movement towards him, but inexplicably had stopped, and with the sari still in her hand gazed back at him, waiting for him to speak. He looked above all, mortally tired. She discovered no anger in his face, not even sorrow; only that mortal weariness. She was touched; she to whom those gentler emotions were usually foreign.
'Julian?' she said, seized with doubt.
'It is all over,' he began, quite quietly, and he put his hand against his forehead, which was still bandaged, raising his arm with the same lassitude; 'they landedwhere young Zapantiotis was on guard, and he let them through; they were almost at the village before they were discovered. There was very little fighting. They have allowed me to come here. They are waiting for me downstairs. I am to leave.'
'Yes,' she said, and looked down at her heap of clothes.
He did not speak again, and gradually she realised the implication of his words.
'Zapantiotis....' she said.
'Yes,' he said, raising his eyes again to her face, 'yes, you see, Zapantiotis confessed it all to me when he saw me. He was standing amongst a group of prisoners, in the market-place, but when I came by he broke away from the guards and screamed out to me that he had betrayed us. Betrayed us. He said he was tempted, bribed. He said he would cut his own throat. But I told him not to do that.'
She began to tremble, wondering how much he knew. He added, in the saddest voice she had ever heard,—
'Zapantiotis, an islander, could not be faithful.'
Then she was terrified; she did not know what was coming next, what would be the outcome of this quietness. She wanted to go towards him, but she could only remain motionless, holding the sari up to her breast as a means of protection.
'At least,' he said, 'old Zapantiotis is dead, and will never know about his son. Where can one look for fidelity? Tsigaridis is dead too, and Grbits. I am ashamed of being alive.'
She noticed then that he was disarmed.
'Why do you stand over there, Julian?' she said timidly.
'I wonder how much you promised Zapantiotis?' he said in a speculative voice; and next, stating a fact, 'You were, of course, acting on Malteios' suggestion.'
'You know?' she breathed. She was quite sure now that he was going to kill her.
'Zapantiotis tried to tell me that too—in a strange jumble of confessions. But they dragged him away before he could say more than your bare name. That was enough for me. So I know, Eve.'
'Is that all you were going to say?'
He raised his arms and let them fall.
'What is there to say?'
Knowing him very well, she saw that his quietness was dropping from him; she was aware of it perhaps before he was aware of it himself. His eyes were losing their dead apathy, and were travelling round the room; they rested on the heap of clothes, on her own drawing of himself hanging on the wall, on the disordered bed. They flamed suddenly, and he made a step towards her.
'Why? why? why?' he cried out with the utmost anguish and vehemence, but stopped himself, and stood with clenched fists. She shrank away. 'All gone—in an hour!' he said, and striding towards her he stood over her, shaken with a tempest of passion. She shrank farther from him, retreating against the wall, but first she stooped and gathered her clothes around her again, pressing her back against the wall and cowering with the clothes as a rampart round her feet. But as yet full realisation was denied her; she knew that he was angry, she thought indeed that he might kill her, but to other thoughts of finality she was, in all innocence, a stranger.
He spoke incoherently, saying, 'All gone! All gone!' in accents of blind pain, and once he said, 'I thought you loved me,' putting his hands to his head as though walls were crumbling. He made no further reproach, save to repeat, 'I thought the men were faithful, and that you loved me,' and all the while he trembled with the effort of his self-control, and his twitching handsreached out towards her once or twice, but he forced them back. She thought, 'How angry he is! but he will forget, and I shall make up to him for what he has lost.' So, between them, they remained almost silent, breathing hard, and staring at one another.
'Come, put up your clothes quickly,' he said at last, pointing; 'they want us off the island, and if we do not go of our own accord they will tie our hands and feet and carry us to the boat. Let us spare ourselves that ludicrous scene. We can marry in Athens to-morrow.'
'Marry?' she repeated.
'Naturally. What else did you suppose? That I should leave you? now? Put up your clothes. Shall I help you? Come!'
'But—marry, Julian?'
'Clearly: marry,' he replied in a harsh voice, and added, 'Let us go. For God's sake, let us go now! I feel stunned, I mustn't begin to think. Let us go.' He urged her towards the door.
'But we had nothing to do with marriage,' she whispered.
He cried, so loudly and so bitterly that she was startled,—
'No, we had to do only with love—love and rebellion! And both have failed me. Now, instead of love, we must have marriage; and instead of rebellion, law. I shall help on authority, instead of opposing it.' He broke down and buried his face in his hands.
'You no longer love me,' she said slowly, and her eyes narrowed and turned slightly inwards in the way Malteios had noticed. 'Then the Islands....'
He pressed both hands against his temples and screamed like one possessed, 'But they were all in all in all! It isn't the thing, it's the soul behind the thing. In robbing me of them you've robbed me of more thanthem—you've robbed me of all the meaning that lay behind them.' He retained just sufficient self-possession to realise this. 'I knew you were hostile, how could I fail to know it? but I persuaded myself that you were part of Aphros, part of all my beliefs, even something beyond all my beliefs. I loved you, so you and they had to be reconciled. I reconciled you in secret. I gave up mentioning the Islands to you because it stabbed me to see your indifference. It destroyed the illusion I was cherishing. So I built up fresh, separate illusions about you. I have been living on illusions, now I have nothing left but facts. I owe this to you, to you, to you!'
'You no longer love me,' she said again. She could think of nothing else. She had not listened to his bitter and broken phrases. 'You no longer love me, Julian.'
'I was so determined that I would be deceived by no woman, and like every one else I have fallen into the trap. Because you were you, I ceased to be on my guard. Oh, you never pretended to care for Aphros; I grant you that honesty; but I wanted to delude myself and so I was deluded. I told myself marvellous tales of your rarity; I thought you were above even Aphros. I am punished for my weakness in bringing you here. Why hadn't I the strength to remain solitary? I reproach myself; I had not the right to expose my Islands to such a danger. But how could I have known? how could I have known?'
'Clearly you no longer love me,' she said for the third time.
'Zapantiotis sold his soul for money—was it money you promised him?' he went on. 'So easily—just for a little money! His soul, and all of us, for money. Money, father's god; he's a wise man, father, to serve the only remunerative god. Was it money you promised Zapantiotis?' he shouted at her, seizing her by thearm, 'or was he, perhaps, like Paul, in love with you? Did you perhaps promise him yourself? How am I to know? There may still be depths in you—you woman—that I know nothing about. Did you give yourself to Zapantiotis? Or is he coming to-night for his reward? Did you mean to ship me off to Athens, you and your accomplices, while you waited here in this room—ourroom—for your lover?'
'Julian!' she cried—he had forced her on to her knees—'you are saying monstrous things.'
'You drive me to them,' he replied; 'when I think that while the troops were landing you lay in my arms, here, knowing all the while that you had betrayed me—I could believe anything of you. Monstrous things! Do you know what monstrous things I am thinking? That you shall not belong to Zapantiotis, but to me. Yes, to me. You destroy love, but desire revives, without love; horrible, but sufficient. That's what I am thinking. I dare say I could kiss you still, and forget. Come!'
He was beside himself.
'Your accusations are so outrageous,' she said, half-fainting, 'your suggestions are obscene, Julian; I would rather you killed me at once.'
'Then answer me about Zapantiotis. How am I to know?' he repeated, already slightly ashamed of his outburst, 'I'm readjusting my ideas. Tell me the truth; I scarcely care.'
'Believe what you choose,' she replied, although he still held her, terrified, on the ground at his feet, 'I have more pride than you credit me with—too much to answer you.'
'It was money,' he said after a pause, releasing her. She stood up; reaction overcame her, and she wept.
'Julian, that you should believe that of me! You cut me to the quick—and I gave myself to youwith such pride and gladness' she added almost inaudibly.
'Forgive me; I suppose you, also, have your own moral code; I have speculated sufficiently about it, Heaven knows, but that means very little to me now,' he said, more quietly, and with even a spark of detached interest and curiosity. But he did not pursue the subject. 'What do you want done with your clothes? We have wasted quite enough time.'
'You want me to come with you?'
'You sound incredulous; why?'
'I know you have ceased to love me. You spoke of marrying me. Your love must have been a poor flimsy thing, to topple over as it has toppled! Mine is more tenacious, alas. It would not depend on outside happenings.'
'How dare you accuse me?' he said,' You destroy and take from me all that I care for' ('Yes,' she interpolated, as much bitterness in her voice as in his own—but all the time they were talking against one another—'you cared for everything but me'), 'then you brand my love for you as a poor flimsy thing. If you have killed it, you have done so by taking away the one thing....'
'That you cared for more than for me,' she completed.
'With which I would have associated you. You yourself made that association impossible. You hated the things I loved. Now you've killed those things, and my love for you with them. You've killed everything I cherished and possessed.'
'Dead? Irretrievably?' she whispered.
'Dead.'
He saw her widened and swimming eyes, and added, too much stunned for personal malice, yet angry because of the pain he was suffering,—
'You shall never be jealous of me again. I think I've loved all women, loving you—gone through the wholeof love, and now washed my hands of it; I've tested and plumbed your vanity, your hideous egotism'—she was crying like a child, unreservedly, her face hidden against her arm—'your lack of breadth in everything that was not love.'
As he spoke, she raised her face and he saw light breaking on her—although it was not, and never would be, precisely the light he desired. It was illumination and horror; agonised horror, incredulous dismay. Her eyes were streaming with tears, but they searched him imploringly, despairingly, as in a new voice she said,—
'I've hurt you, Julian ... how I've hurt you! Hurt you! I would have died for you. Can't I put it right? oh, tell me! Will you kill me?' and she put her hand up to her throat, offering it. 'Julian, I've hurt you ... my own, my Julian. What have I done? What madness made me do it? Oh, what is there now for me to do? only tell me; I do beseech you only to tell me. Shall I go—to whom?—to Malteios? I understand nothing; you must tell me. I wanted you so greedily; you must believe that. Anything, anything you want me to do.... It wasn't sufficient, to love you, to want you; I gave you all I had, but it wasn't sufficient. I loved you wrongly, I suppose; but I loved you, I loved you!'
He had been angry, but now he was seized with a strange pity; pity of her childish bewilderment: the thing that she had perpetrated was a thing she could not understand. She would never fully understand.... He looked at her as she stood crying, and remembered her other aspects, in the flood-time of her joy, careless, radiant, irresponsible; they had shared hours of illimitable happiness.
'Eve! Eve!' he cried, and through the wrenching despair of his cry he heard the funeral note, the tear of cleavage like the downfall of a tree.
He took her in his arms and made her sit upon the bed; she continued to weep, and he sat beside her, stroking her hair. He used terms of endearment towards her, such as he had never used in the whole course of their passionate union, 'Eve, my little Eve'; and he kept on repeating, 'my little Eve,' and pressing her head against his shoulder.
They sat together like two children. Presently she looked up, pushing back her hair with a gesture he knew well.
'We both lose the thing we cared most for upon earth, Julian: you lose the Islands, and I lose you.'
She stood up, and gazed out of the window towards Herakleion. She stood there for some time without speaking, and a fatal clearness spread over her mind, leaving her quite strong, quite resolute, and coldly armoured against every shaft of hope.
'You want me to marry you,' she said at length.
'You must marry me in Athens to-morrow, if possible, and as soon as we are married we can go to England.'
'I utterly refuse,' she said, turning round towards him.
He stared at her; she looked frail and tired, and with one small white hand held together the edges of her Spanish shawl. She was no longer crying.
'Do you suppose,' she went on, 'that not content with having ruined the beginning of your life for you—I realise it now, you see—I shall ruin the rest of it as well? You may believe me or not, I speak the truth like a dying person when I tell you I love you to the point of sin; yes, it's a sin to love as I love you. It's blind, it's criminal. It's my curse, the curse of Eve, to love so well that one loves badly. I didn't see. I wanted you too blindly. Even now I scarcely understand how you can have ceased to love me.—No, don't speak. I do understand it—in a way; and yet I don'tunderstand it. I don't understand that an idea can be dearer to one than the person one loves.... I don't understand responsibilities; when you've talked about responsibilities I've sometimes felt that I was made of other elements than you.... But you're a man, and I'm a woman; that's the rift. Perhaps it's a rift that can never be bridged. Never mind that. Julian, you must find some more civilised woman than myself; find a woman who will be a friend, not an enemy. Love makes me into an enemy, you see. Find somebody more tolerant, more unselfish. More maternal. Yes, that's it,' she said, illuminated, 'more maternal; I'm only a lover, not a mother. You told me once that I was of the sort that sapped and destroyed. I'll admit that, and let you go. You mustn't waste yourself on me. But, oh, Julian,' she said, coming close to him, 'if I give you up—because in giving you up I utterly break myself—grant me one justice: never doubt that I loved you. Promise me, Julian. I shan't love again. But don't doubt that I loved you; don't argue to yourself, "She broke my illusions, therefore she never loved me," let me make amends for what I did, by sending you away now without me.'
'I was angry; I was lying; I wanted to hurt you as you had hurt me,' he said desperately. 'How can I tell what I have been saying to you? I've been dazed, struck.... It's untrue that I no longer love you. I love you, in spite, in spite.... Love can't die in an hour.'
'Bless you,' she said, putting her hand for a moment on his head, 'but you can't deceive me. Oh,' she hurried on, 'you might deceive yourself; you might persuade yourself that you still loved me and wanted me to go with you; but I know better. I'm not for you. I'm not for your happiness, or for any man's happiness. You've said it yourself: I am different. I let you gobecause you are strong and useful—oh, yes, useful! so disinterested and strong, all that I am not—too good for me to spoil. You have nothing in common with me. Who has? I think I haven't any kindred. I love you! I love you better than myself!'
He stood up; he stammered in his terror and earnestness, but she only shook her head.
'No, Julian.'
'You're too strong,' he cried, 'you little weak thing; stronger than I.'
She smiled; he was unaware of the very small reserve of her strength.
'Stronger than you,' she repeated; 'yes.'
Again he implored her to go with him; he even threatened her, but she continued to shake her head and to say in a faint and tortured voice,—
'Go now, Julian; go, my darling; go now, Julian.'
'With you, or not at all.' He was at last seriously afraid that she meant what she said,
'Without me.'
'Eve, we were so happy. Remember! Only come; we shall be as happy again.'
'You mustn't tempt me; it's cruel,' she said, shivering. 'I'm human.'
'But I love you!' he said. He seized her hands, and tried to drag her towards the door.
'No,' she answered, putting him gently away from her. 'Don't tempt me, Julian, don't; let me make amends in my own way.'
Her gentleness and dignity were such that he now felt reproved, and, dimly, that the wrong done was by him towards her, not by her towards him.
'You are too strong—magnificent, and heartbreaking,' he said in despair.
'As strong as a rock,' she replied, looking straight at him and thinking that at any moment she mustfall. But still she forced her lips to a smile of finality.
'Think better of it,' he was beginning, when they heard a stir of commotion in the court below.
'They are coming for you!' she cried out in sudden panic. 'Go; I can't face any one just now....'
He opened the door on to the landing.
'Kato!' he said, falling back. Eve heard the note of fresh anguish in his voice.
Kato came in; even in that hour of horror they saw that she had merely dragged a quilt round her shoulders, and that her hair was down her back. In this guise her appearance was indescribably grotesque.
'Defeated, defeated,' she said in lost tones to Julian. She did not see that they had both involuntarily recoiled before her; she was beyond such considerations.
'Anastasia,' he said, taking her by the arm and shaking her slightly to recall her from her bemusement, 'here is something more urgent—thank God, you will be my ally—Eve must leave Aphros with me; tell her so, tell her so; she refuses.' He shook her more violently with the emphasis of his words.
'If he wants you....' Kato said, looking at Eve, who had retreated into the shadows and stood there, half fainting, supporting herself against the back of a chair. 'If he wants you....' she repeated, in a stupid voice, but her mind was far away.
'You don't understand, Anastasia,' Eve answered; 'it was I that betrayed him.' Again she thought she must fall.
'She is lying!' cried Julian.
'No,' said Eve. She and Kato stared at one another, so preposterously different, yet with currents of truth rushing between them.
'You!' Kato said at last, awaking.
'I am sending him away,' said Eve, speaking as before to the other woman.
'You!' said Kato again. She turned wildly to Julian. 'Why didn't you trust yourself to me, Julian, my beloved?' she cried; 'I wouldn't have treated you so, Julian; why didn't you trust yourself to me?' She pointed at Eve, silent and brilliant in her coloured shawl; then, her glance falling upon her own person, so sordid, so unkempt, she gave a dreadful cry and looked around as though seeking for escape. The other two both turned their heads away; to look at Kato in that moment was more than they could bear.
Presently they heard her speaking again; her self-abandonment had been brief; she had mastered herself, and was making it a point of honour to speak with calmness.
'Julian, the officers have orders that you must leave the island before dawn; if you do not go to them, they will fetch you here. They are waiting below in the courtyard now. Eve,'—her face altered,—'Eve is right: if she has indeed done as she says, she cannot go with you. She is right; she is more right, probably, than she has ever been in her life before or ever will be again. Come, now; I will go with you.'
'Stay with Eve, if I go,' he said.
'Impossible!' replied Kato, instantly hardening, and casting upon Eve a look of hatred and scorn.
'How cruel you are, Anastasia!' said Julian, making a movement of pity towards Eve.
'Take him away, Anastasia,' Eve murmured, shrinking from him.
'See, she understands me better than you do, and understands herself better too,' said Kato, in a tone of cruel triumph; 'if you do not come, Julian, I shall send up the officers.' As she spoke she went out of the room,her quilt trailing, and her heel-less slippers clacking on the boards.
'Eve, for the last time....'
A cry was wrenched from her,—
'Go! if you pity me!'
'I shall come back.'
'Oh, no, no!' she replied, 'you'll never come back. One doesn't live through such things twice.' She shook her head like a tortured animal that seeks to escape from pain. He gave an exclamation of despair, and, after one wild gesture towards her, which she weakly repudiated, he followed Kato. Eve heard their steps upon the stairs, then crossing the courtyard, and the tramp of soldiers; the house-door crashed massively. She stooped very slowly and mechanically, and began to pick up the gay and fragile tissue of her clothes.