PART I--JULIAN

I

On Sunday, after the races were over, the diplomatic, indigenous, and cosmopolitan society of Herakleion, by virtue of a custom they never sought to dispute, streamed through the turnstiles of the race-course to regain their carriages and to drive for an hour in the ilex avenue consecrated to that purpose outside the suburbs of the town. Like the angels on Jacob's ladder, the carriages went up one side and down the other, at a slow walk, the procession invariably headed by the barouche of the French Legation, containing M. Lafarge, chief of the mission, his beard spread fan-like over his frock-coat, but so disposed as to reveal the rosette in his button-hole, peeping with a coy red eye at the passing world; Madame Lafarge, sitting erect and bowing stiffly from her unassailable position as dictator to social Herakleion; and, on the _strapontin_, Julie Lafarge, repressed, sallow-faced daughter of the emissaries of France. Streaming after the barouche came mere humanity, some in victorias, some in open cabs, all going at a walk, and down the centre rode the young men of the place, and down the centre Alexander Christopoulos, who dared all and to whom all was forgiven, drove his light buggy and American trotter at a rattling pace and in a cloud of dust.

The diplomatic carriages were distinguished by the presence of a chasseur on the box, though none so gorgeous as the huge scarlet-coated chasseur of the French Legation. It was commonly said that the Danish Minister and his wife, who were poor, denied themselves food in order to maintain their carriage for the Sunday drive. The rich Greeks, on the other hand, from generation to generation, inherited the family brake, which was habitually driven by the head of the clan on the box, his wife beside him, and his sons and unmarried daughters sitting two by two, on the six remaining seats behind. There had been a rush of scandal when Alexander Christopoulos had appeared for the first time alone in his buggy, his seat in the family brake conspicuously empty. There remained, however, his four sisters, the Virgins of Herakleion, whose ages ranged from thirty-five to forty, and whose batteries were unfailingly directed against the latest arrival. The fifth sister had married a banker in Frankfort, and was not often mentioned. There were, besides the brakes of the rich Greeks, the wagonettes of the English Davenants, who always had English coachmen, and frequently absented themselves from the Sunday drive to remind Herakleion that, although resident, they were neither diplomatic, indigenous, nor cosmopolitan, but unalterably English. They were too numerous and too influential to be disregarded, but when the name of Davenant was mentioned in their absence, a murmur was certain to make itself heard, discreet, unvindictive, but none the less remorseless, 'Ah yes, the English Levantines.'

Sunshades were lowered in the ilex avenue, for the shadows of the ancient trees fell cool and heavy across the white dust. Through the ilexes, the sea glimmered on a lower level, washing idly on the shore; vainly blue, for Herakleion had no eyes for the sea. The sea was always there, always blue, just as Mount Mylassa was always there, behind the town, monotonous and immovable. The sea was made for the transport of merchandise and to provide man with fish. No one had ever discovered a purpose in Mount Mylassa.

When the French barouche had reached the end of the avenue, it turned gravely in a wide circle and took its place at the head of the descending carriages. When it had reached its starting-point, the entrance to the avenue, it detached itself from the procession and continued on its way towards the town. The procession did not follow it. Another turn up and down the avenue remained for the procession, and the laughter became perceptibly brighter, the smiles of greeting more cordial, with the removal of Madame Lafarge's influence. It was known that the barouche would pass the race-course at its former dignified walk, but that, once out of sight, Madame Lafarge would say, '_Grigora_, Vassili!' to the chasseur, that the horses would be urged into a shambling trot and that the ladies in the carriage would open their sunshades to keep off the glare of the sun which beat down from heaven and reverberated from the pavements and the white walls of the houses as they drove through the streets of the deserted town.

Deserted, for that part of the population which was not within doors strolled in the ilex avenue, looking at the carriages. A few lean dogs slept on door-steps where the shadow of the portico fell sharply dividing the step into a dark and a sunny half. The barouche rolled along the wide quay, where here and there the parapet was broken by a flight of steps descending to the water; passed the casino, white, with palms and cacti growing hideously in the forecourt; rolled across the square _platia_, where a group of men stood lounging within the cool and cavernous passage-way of the club.

Madame Lafarge stopped the barouche.

A young man detached himself from the group with a slightly bored and supercilious expression. He was tall beyond the ordinary run of Frenchmen; had dark eyes under meeting eyebrows in an ivory face, and an immensely high, flat, white brow, from which the black wavy hair grew straight back, smoothed to the polish of a black greyhound. 'Our Persian miniature,' the fat American wife of the Danish Minister, called him, establishing herself as the wit of Herakleion, where any one with sufficient presumption could establish him or herself in any chosen rôle. The young man had accepted the title languidly, but had taken care that it should not die forgotten.

Madame Lafarge said to him in a tone which conveyed a command rather than proffered a favour, 'If you like, we can drive you to the Legation.'

She spoke in a booming voice that burst surprisingly out of the compression of a generously furnished bust. The young man, accepting the offer, seated himself beside Julie on the _strapontin_ opposite his chief, who sat silent and majestically bearded. The immense chasseur stood stiffly by the side of the carriage, his eyes gazing unblinkingly across the _platia_, and the tips of his long drooping whiskers obscuring the braid of his scarlet collar. Madame Lafarge addressed herself to the group of men,--

'I did not see you at the races?'

Her graciousness did not conceal the rebuke. She continued,--

'I shall hope to welcome you presently at the Legation.'

With a bow worthy of Theodora, whom she had once been told that she resembled, she gave the order to drive on. The loaded barouche, with the splendid red figure on the box, rolled away across the dazzling square. The French Legation stood back behind a grille in the main street of the town, built of white stucco like the majority of the houses. Inside, it was cool and dark, the Venetian blinds were drawn, and the lighted candles in the sconces on the walls reflected pleasantly, and with a curious effect of freshening night, in the polished floors. Gilt chairs were arranged in circles, and little tables stood about, glitteringly laden with tall tumblers and bottles of coloured sirops. Madame Lafarge surveyed these things as she had surveyed them every Sunday evening since Julie could remember. The young man danced attendance in his languid way.

'The chandeliers may be lighted,' her Excellency said to the chasseur, who had followed.

The three stood watching while the candles sprang into little spears of light under the touch of the taper, Madame Lafarge contrasting displeasedly the lemon sallowness of her daughter's complexion with the warm magnolia-like pallor of the secretary's face. The contrast caused her to speak sharply,--

'Julie, you had better go now and take off your hat.'

When her submissive daughter had gone, she said,--

'Julie is looking ill. The summer does not suit her. But what is to be done? I cannot leave Herakleion.'

'Obviously,' murmured the secretary, 'Herakleion would fall all to pieces. Your Sunday evenings,' he continued, 'the races ... your picnics....'

'Impossible,' she cried with determination. 'One owes a duty to the country one represents, and I have always said that, whereas politics are the affairs of men, the woman's social obligation is no less urgent. It is a great career, Armand, and to such a career one must be prepared to sacrifice one's personal convenience.'

'And one's health ... the health of one's children,' he added, looking down at his almond nails.

'If need be,' she replied with a sigh, and, fanning herself, repeated, 'If need be.'

The rooms began to fill. A little middle-aged Greek, his wrinkled saffron face curiously emphasised by the beautiful whiteness of his hair and moustaches, took his stand near Madame Lafarge, who in speaking to him looked down on the top of his head over the broad plateau of her bust.

'These cool rooms of yours,' he murmured, as he kissed her hand. 'One cannot believe in the heat of the sun outside.'

He made this remark every other Sunday.

Lafarge came up and took the little Greek banker by the arm.

'I hear,' he said, 'that there is fresh trouble in the Islands.'

'We can leave it to the Davenants,' said Christopoulos with an unpleasant smile.

'But that is exactly what I have always urged you not to do,' said the French Minister, drawing the little Greek into a corner. 'You know the proverbial reputation of the English: you do not see them coming, but they insinuate themselves until one day you open your eyes to the fact that they are there. You will be making a very great mistake, my dear friend, if you allow the Davenants to settle disputes in the Islands. Have you forgotten that in the last generation a Davenant caused himself to be elected President?'

'Considering that they are virtually kings, I do not see that the nominal title of President can make a vast difference.'

Lafarge sent his eyes round the room and through the doorway into the room beyond; he saw the familiar, daily faces, and returned to the charge.

'You are pleased to be sarcastic, I know. Nevertheless allow me to offer you my advice. It is not a question of Kingship or Presidency. It is a question of a complete break on the part of the Islands. They are small, but their strategic value is self-evident. Remember Italy has her eye upon them.... The Davenants are democrats, and have always preached liberty to the islanders. The Davenant wealth supports them. Can you calmly contemplate the existence of an independent archipelago a few miles from your shore?'

A dull red crept under the banker's yellow skin, giving him a suffused appearance.

'You are very emphatic.'

'The occasion surely warrants emphasis.'

The rooms were by now quite full. Little centres of laughter had formed themselves, and were distinguishable. Alexander Christopoulos had once boasted that he could, merely by looking round a room and arguing from the juxtaposition of conversationalists, give a fairly accurate _résumé_ of what every one was saying. He also claimed to tell from the expression of the Danish Excellency whether she was or was not arriving primed with a new epigram. He was now at the side of the Danish Excellency, fat, fair, and foolish, but good-natured, and having a fund of veritable humanity which was lacking in most of her colleagues. The careful English of Alexander reached his father's ears through the babel,--

'The Empress Eugénie set the fashion of wearing _décolleté_ in the shape the water in your bath makes round your shoulders....'

Lafarge went on,--

'The Davenants are sly; they keep apart; they mix with us, but they do not mingle. They are like oil upon water. Where is William Davenant now, do you know?'

'He is just arriving,' said Christopoulos.

Lafarge saw him then, bowing over his hostess's hand, polite, but with absent eyes that perpetually strayed from the person he was talking to. Behind him came a tall, loose-limbed boy, untidy, graceful; he glanced at the various groups, and the women looked at him with interest. A single leap might carry him at any moment out of the room in which his presence seemed so incongruous.

The tall mirrors on the walls sent back the reflection of the many candles, and in them the same spectral company came and went that moved and chattered in the rooms.

'At least he is not on the Islands,' said Christopoulos.

'After all,' said Lafarge, with a sudden weariness, 'perhaps I am inclined to exaggerate the importance of the Islands. It is difficult to keep a true sense of proportion. Herakleion is a little place. One forgets that one is not at the centre of the world.'

He could not have tracked his lassitude to its origin, but as his eyes rested again on the free, generous limbs of the Davenant boy, he felt a slight revolt against the babble, the coloured sirops, and the artificially lighted rooms from which the sun was so carefully excluded. The yellow skin of little Christopoulos gave him the appearance of a plant which has been deprived of light. His snowy hair, too, soft and billowy, looked as though it had been deliberately and consistently bleached.

He murmured a gentle protest to the Minister's words,--

'Surely not, dear Excellency, surely you do not exaggerate the importance of the Islands. We could not, as you say, tolerate the existence of an independent archipelago a few miles from our shores. Do not allow my sarcasm to lead you into the belief that I underestimate either their importance, or the value, the compliment of your interest in the politics of our country. The friendship of France....'

His voice died away into suave nothings. The French Minister emerged with an effort from his mood of temporary discontent, endeavouring to recapture the habitual serenity of his life.

'And you will remember my hint about the Davenants?'

Christopoulos looked again at William Davenant, who, perfectly courteous but incorrigibly absent-minded, was still listening to Madame Lafarge.

'It is a scandal,' she was saying, resuming her conversation in the intervals of interruption occasioned by newly-arriving guests, 'a scandal that the Museum should remain without a catalogue....'

'I will remember,' said Christopoulos. 'I will tell Alexander to distract that youth's attention; one Davenant the less, you follow me, to give us any trouble.'

'Pooh! a schoolboy,' interjected the Minister.

Christopoulos pursed his lips and moved his snowy head portentously up and down.

'A schoolboy, but nevertheless he probably shares the enthusiasms of his age. The Islands are sufficiently romantic to appeal to his imagination. Remember, his grandfather ruled there for a year.'

'His grandfather? _un farceur!_' said Lafarge.

Christopoulos assented, and the two men, smiling tolerantly, continued to look across at the unconscious boy though their minds were already occupied by other things. Madame Lafarge, catching sight of them, was annoyed by her husband's aloofness from the social aspect of her weekly reception. It pleased her--in fact, she exacted--that a certain political atmosphere should pervade any gathering in her drawing-rooms, but at the same time she resented a political interview which deprived, at once, her guests of a host and herself of a _cavalier servente_. She accordingly stared at Christopoulos while continuing her conversation with William Davenant, until the little Greek became aware of her gaze, and crossed the room obediently to the unspoken summons.

William Davenant moved away in relief; he knew his duty to Madame Lafarge, but performed it wearily and without pleasure. It was now over for a month, he thought, deciding that he would not be expected to attend the three succeeding Sundays. He paused beside his son, who had been captured by two of the sisters Christopoulos and who, with two Russian secretaries, was being forced to join in a round game. The sisters gave little shrieks and peals of laughter; it was their idea of merriment. They sat one on each side of Julian Davenant, on a small gilt sofa covered with imitation tapestry. Near by, listening to the game with a gentle and languorous smile upon his lips, stood the Persian Minister, who understood very little French, his fine Oriental figure buttoned into the traditional frock-coat, and a black lamb's-wool fez upon his head. He was not very popular in Herakleion; he did not know enough French to amuse the women, so, as at present, he silently haunted the circles of the younger generation, with mingled humility and dignity.

William Davenant paused there for a moment, met his son's eyes with a gleam of sympathy, then passed on to pay his monthly duty to influence and fashion. The Danish Excellency whispered behind her fan to Alexander Christopoulos as he passed, and the young man screwed in his eyeglass to examine the retreating back of the Englishman. The red-coated chasseur came round, gravely offering sandwiches on a tray.

'Uneatable,' said Alexander Christopoulos, taking one and hiding it beneath his chair.

The courage of the young man! the insolence!

'Julie will see you,' giggled the Danish Excellency.

'And what if she does?' he retorted.

'You have no respect, no veneration,' she chided him.

'For _maman_ Lafarge? _la bonne bourgeoise!_' he exclaimed, but not very loudly.

'Alexander!' she said, but her tone said, 'I adore you.'

'One must be something,' the young Christopoulos had once told himself; 'I will be insolent and contemptuous; I will impose myself upon Herakleion; my surroundings shall accept me with admiration and without protest.'

He consequently went to Oxford, affected to speak Greek with difficulty, interlarded his English with American slang, instituted a polo club, and drove an American trotter. He was entirely successful. Unlike many a greater man, he had achieved his ambition. He knew, moreover, that Madame Lafarge would give him her daughter for the asking.

'Shall I make Julie sing?' he said suddenly to the Danish Excellency, searching among the moving groups for the victim of this classic joke of Herakleion.

'Alexander, you are too cruel,' she murmured.

He was flattered; he felt himself an irresistible autocrat and breaker of hearts. He tolerated the Danish Excellency, as he had often said in the club, because she had no other thought than of him. She, on the other hand, boasted in her fat, good-humoured way to her intimates,--

'I may be a fool, but no woman is completely a fool who has realised the depths of man's vanity.'

Julie Lafarge, who was always given to understand that one day she would marry the insolent Alexander, was too efficiently repressed to be jealous of the Danish Excellency. Under the mischievous influence of her friend, Eve Davenant, she would occasionally make an attempt to attract the young man; a pitiable, grotesque attempt, prompted by the desire to compel his homage, to hear herself called beautiful--which she was not. So far she did not delude herself that she had succeeded, but she did delude herself that it gave him pleasure to hear her sing. She stood now beside a little table, dispensing sirops in tall tumblers, very sallow in her white muslin, with a locket on a short gold chain hanging between the bones of her neck. Her very thin brown arms, which were covered with small black hairs, protruded ungracefully from the short sleeves of her dress.

Alexander presented himself before her; she had seen him coming in one of the mirrors on the walls. Madame Lafarge cherished an affection for these mirrors, because thanks to them her drawing-rooms always appeared twice as crowded as they really were.

Alexander uttered his request in a tone at once beseeching and compelling; she thought him irresistible. Nevertheless, she protested: there were too many people present, her singing would interrupt all conversation, her mother would be annoyed. But those standing near by seconded Alexander, and Madame Lafarge herself bore down majestically upon her daughter, so that all protest was at an end.

Julie stood beside the open piano with her hands loosely folded in a rehearsed and approved attitude while the room disposed itself to listen, and Alexander, who was to accompany her, let his fingers roam negligently over the keyboard. Chairs were turned to face the piano, people drifted in from the farther drawing-room, young men leaned in the doorways and against the walls. Lafarge folded his arms across his chest, freeing his imprisoned beard by an upward movement of his chin, and smiled encouragingly and benignly at his daughter. Speech dropped into whispers, whispers into silence. Alexander struck a few preliminary chords. Julie sang; she sang, quite execrably, romantic German music, and out of the roomful of people only three, herself, her father, and her mother, thought that she sang well. Despite this fact she was loudly applauded, congratulated, and pressed for more.

Julian Davenant, taking advantage of the diversion to escape from the sisters Christopoulos, slipped away to one of the window recesses where he could partly conceal himself behind the stiff, brocaded curtain. Horizontal strings of sunlight barred the Venetian blind, and by peeping between its joints he could see the tops of the palms in the Legation forecourt, the iron grille which gave on to the main street, and a victoria standing near the grille, in the shade, the horse covered over with a flimsy, dust-coloured sheet, and the driver asleep inside the carriage, a fly-whisk drooping limply in his hand. He could hear the shrill squeaking of the tram as it came round the corner, and the clang of its bell. He knew that the sea lay blue beyond the white town, and that, out in the sea, lay the Islands, where the little grapes were spread, drying into currants, in the sun. He returned to the darkened, candle-lit room, where Julie Lafarge was singing 'Im wunderschönen Monat Mai.'

Looking across the room to the door which opened on to the landing at the top of the stairs, he saw a little stir of arrival, which was suppressed in order to avoid any interruption to the music. He distinguished the new-comer, a short, broad, middle-aged woman, out of breath after mounting the stairs, curiously draped in soft copper-coloured garments, with gold bangles on her bare arms, and a wreath of gold leaves round her dark head. He knew this woman, a singer. He neither liked nor disliked her, but had always thought of her as possessing a strangely classical quality, all the stranger because of her squat, almost grotesque ugliness; although not a dwarf, her great breadth gave her the appearance of one; but at the same time she was for him the embodiment of the wealth of the country, a kind of Demeter of the Islands, though he thought of Demeter as having corn-coloured hair, like the crops over which she presided, and this woman had blue-black hair, like the purple of the grapes that grew on the Islands. He had often heard her sing, and hoped now that she was arriving in her professional capacity, which seemed probable, both from her dress, and from the unlikelihood that she, a singer and a woman of the native people, would enter Madame Lafarge's house as a guest, renowned though she was, and fêted, in the capitals of Europe. He saw Lafarge tiptoe out to receive her, saw Madame Lafarge follow, and noted the faintly patronising manner of the Minister's wife in shaking hands with the artist.

Applause broke out as Julie finished her song. The Greek singer was brought forward into the room amid a general movement and redistribution of groups. Alexander Christopoulos relinquished his place at the piano, and joined the Davenant boy by the window. He appeared bored and languid.

'It is really painful ... as well listen to a macaw singing,' he said. 'You are not musical, are you, Julian? You can scarcely imagine what I endured. Have you heard this woman, Kato?'

Julian said that he had.

'Quite uneducated,' Christopoulos said loftily. 'Any woman in the fields sings as well. It was new to Paris, and Paris raved. You and I, my dear Julian, have heard the same thing a hundred times. Shall we escape?'

'I must wait for my father,' said Julian, who detested his present companion; 'he and I are going to dine with my uncle.'

'So am I,' Christopoulos answered, and, leaning over to the English boy, he began to speak in a confidential voice.

'You know, my dear Julian, in this society of ours your father is not trusted. But, after all, what is this society? _un tas de rastas._ Do you think I shall remain here long? not I. _Je me fiche des Balcans._ And you? Are you going to bury yourself on those Islands of yours, growing grapes, ripening olives? What? That satisfied the old generations. What have I to do with a banking house in Herakleion, you with a few vineyards near the coast? I shall marry, and spend the rest of my life in Paris.'

'You're ambitious to-day,' Julian said mildly.

'Ambitious! shall I tell you why? Yesterday was my twenty-fifth birthday. I've done with Herakleion....'

'Conquered it, you mean,' said Julian, 'squeezed it dry.'

The other glanced at him suspiciously.

'Are you laughing at me? Confound your quiet manner, Julian, I believe my family is right to mistrust your family. Very well, then: conquered it. Believe me, it isn't worth conquering. Don't waste your youth on your vineyards, but come with me. Let the Islands go. They are always in trouble, and the trouble is getting more acute. They are untidy specks on the map. Don't you hear the call of Paris and the world?'

Julian, looking at him, and seeing the laughable intrigue, was mercifully saved from replying, for at that moment Madame Kato began to sing. She sang without accompaniment, songs of the people, in a curiously guttural voice with an occasionally nasal note, songs no different from those sung in the streets or, as Christopoulos had said, in the fields, different only in that, to this peasant music, half melancholy, half emotional, its cadence born of physical labour, she brought the genius of a great artist. As she stood there, singing, Julian reflected that her song emphasised the something classical, something massive, something monumental, about her, which overshadowed what might have been slightly grotesque in her appearance. She was, indeed, a Demeter of the vineyards. She should have stood singing in the sun, not beneath the pale mockery of the candles.

'Entirely uneducated,' Christopoulos said again, shifting his shoulders as he leaned against the wall. 'That is why Paris liked her: as a contrast. She was clever enough to know that. Contrasts are always artistically effective.'

He went off, pleased, to repeat his facile epigram to the Danish Excellency. Madame Lafarge was looking round to see whether the audience had approved of the innovation. The audience was waiting to hear the expression of an opinion which it might safely follow. Presently the word, 'Uneducated' was on every lip. Julian remained at the window, chained there by his natural reserve and shyness; he looked up at the lighted chandeliers, and down at their reflection in the floors; he saw the faces of people turned towards him, and the back of their heads in the mirrors; he saw Armand, the French secretary, with the face of a Persian prince, offering red sirop to Madame Kato. He wished to go and speak to her, but his feet would not carry him forward. He felt himself apart from the talk and the easy laughter.

Presently Mlle Lafarge, seeing him there alone, came to him with her awkward and rather touching grace as a hostess.

'You know, I suppose,' she said to him, 'that Madame Kato is a friend of Eve's? Will you not come and speak to her?'

Released, he came. The singer was drinking her red sirop by the piano. The Persian Minister in the black fez was standing near, smiling gently at her with his usual mournful smile.

'You will not remember me, Julian Davenant,' the boy said in a low, shy voice. He spoke in Greek involuntarily, feeling that French would be an outrage in the presence of this so splendidly Hellenic woman. Armand had moved away, and they stood isolated, caressed by the vague smile of the Persian Minister.

Kato set down her glass of red sirop on the top of the piano. She leaned against the piano talking to the English boy, her arms akimbo, as a peasant woman might lean in the doorway of her house gossiping in the cool of the evening, her little eyes keen and eager. The muscles of her arms and of her magnificent neck curved generously beneath her copper draperies, mocking the flimsy substance, and crying out for the labour of the vineyards. Her speech was tinged with the faint accent of the Islands, soft and slurring. It was more familiar to Julian Davenant than the harsher Greek of the town, for it was the speech of the women who had brought him up as a child, women of the Islands, his nurses in his father's big house in the _platia_ of Herakleion. It murmured to him now in the rich voice of the singer beneath the chandelier.

'Eve; I have not seen her yet. You must tell her that I have returned and that she must come to my concert on Wednesday. Tell her that I will sing one song for her, but that all the other songs must be for my audience. I have brought back a new repertoire from Munich, which will please Herakleion better, I hope, than the common music it despises.'

She laughed a little.

'It has taken me thirty years to discover that mankind at large despises the art of its own country. Only the exotic catches the ear of fashion. But Eve has told me that you do not care for music?'

'I like your music,' he said.

'I will tell you why: because you are musically uneducated.'

He looked at her; she was smiling. He wondered whether she had overheard a whisper in the humming room.

'I speak without sarcasm,' she added; 'I envy you your early ignorance. In fact, I believe I have uttered a paradox, and that the words education and music are incompatible. Music is the emotional art, and where education steps in at the door emotion flies out at the window. We should keep education for literature, painting, architecture, and sculpture. Music is the medium to which we turn when these more intellectual mediums fail us.'

Julian listened with only half his brain. This peasant, this artist, spoke to him with the superficial ease of drawing-rooms; she employed words that matched ill with her appearance and with the accent of her speech. The native songs were right upon her lips, as the names of architecture and sculpture were wrong. He was offended in his sensitiveness. Demeter in analysis of the arts!

She was watching him.

'Ah, my young friend,' she said, 'you do not understand. I spoke to you as the cousin of Eve, who is a child, but who always understands. She is purely sentient, emotional.'

He protested,--

'I have always thought of Eve as exceptionally sophisticated.'

Kato said,--

'You are right. We are both right. Eve is childlike in many ways, but she is also wise beyond her years. She will grow, believe me, into a woman of exceptional attraction, and to such women existence is packed with danger. It is one of Providence's rare pieces of justice that they should be provided with a natural weapon of self-defence. To a lion his claws,' she said, smiling, 'and to the womanly woman the gift of penetration. Tell me, are you fond of Eve?'

Julian was surprised. He replied, naïf again and like a schoolboy,--

'She's my cousin. I haven't thought much about her. She's only a child. I haven't seen her yet either. I arrived from England this morning.'

They were more than ever isolated from the rest of the room. Madame Lafarge, talking to Don Rodrigo Valdez, the Spanish Minister, who had a birdlike head above his immensely high white collar, glanced now and then resentfully at the singer, but otherwise the room was indifferent. The sunlight between the cracks of the Venetian blinds had grown fainter, and the many candles were coming into their own. A few people had already taken their leave. An excited group of men had gathered round little Christopoulos, and the words 'local politics' shrieked from every gesture.

'I shall not be expected to sing again,' said Kato with a slight return to her ironical manner. 'Will you not come with Eve to my concert on Wednesday? Or, better, will you come to my house on Wednesday evening after the concert? I shall be alone, and I should like to talk to you.'

'To me?' broke from him, independently of his will.

'Remember,' she said, 'I am from the Islands. That is my country, and when my country is in trouble I am not indifferent. You are very young, Mr Davenant, and you are not very often in Herakleion, but your future, when you have done with Oxford and with England'--she made a large gesture--'lies in the Islands. You will hear a great deal about them; a little of this I should like you to hear from me. Will you come?'

The patriot beneath the artist! He would come, flattered, important; courted, at his nineteen years, by a singer of European reputation. Popularity was to him a new experience. He expanded beneath its warmth.

'I will come to the concert first with Eve.'

William Davenant, in search of his son, and light-hearted in his relief at the end of the monthly duty, was bowing to Madame Kato, whom he knew both as a singer and as a figure of some importance in the troubled politics of the tiny State. They had, in their lives, spent many an hour in confabulation, when his absent-minded manner left the man, and her acquired polish the woman. He deferred to her as a controlling agent in practical affairs, spoke of her to his brother with admiration.

'A remarkable woman, Robert, a true patriot; sexless, I believe, so far as her patriotism lies. Malteios, you say? well, I know; but, believe me, she uses him merely as a means to her end. Not a sexless means? Damn it, one picks up what weapons come to one's hand. She hasn't a thought for him, only for her wretched country. She is a force, I tell you, to be reckoned with. Forget her sex! Surely that is easy, with a woman who looks like a toad. You make the mistake of ignoring the people when it is with the people that you have to deal. Hear them speak about her: she is an inspiration, a local Joan of Arc. She works for them in Paris, in Berlin, and in London; she uses her sex, for them and for them alone. All her life is dedicated to them. She gives them her voice, and her genius.'

Madame Kato did not know that he said these things about her behind her back. Had she known, she would have been surprised neither at the opinions he expressed nor at the perception which enabled him to express them, for she had seen in him a shrewd, deliberate intellect that spoke little, listened gravely, and settled soberly down at length upon a much tested and corroborated opinion. Madame Lafarge, and the women to whom he paid his courtly, rather pompous duty in public, thought him dull and heavy, a true Englishman. The men mistrusted him in company with his brother Robert, silence, in the South, breeding mistrust as does volubility in the North.

The rooms were emptier now, and the candles, burning lower, showed long icicles of wax that overflowed on to the glass of the chandeliers. The tall tumblers had been set down, here and there, containing the dregs of the coloured sirops. Madame Lafarge looked hot and weary, drained of her early Sunday energy, and listening absently to the parting compliments of Christopoulos. From the other room, however, still came the laughter of the Christopoulos sisters, who were winding up their round game.

'Come, Julian,' said William Davenant, after he had spoken and made his farewells to Madame Kato.

Together they went down the stairs and out into the forecourt, where the hotter air of the day greeted them after the coolness of the house, though the heat was no longer that of the sun, but the closer, less glaring heat of the atmosphere absorbed during the grilling hours of the afternoon. The splendid chasseur handed them their hats, and they left the Legation and walked slowly down the crowded main street of the town.

II

The town house of the Davenants stood in the _platia_, at right angles to the club. On the death of old Mr Davenant--'President Davenant,' as he was nicknamed--the town and the country properties had been divided between the two inheriting brothers; Herakleion said that the brothers had drawn lots for the country house, but in point of fact the matter had been settled by amicable arrangement. William Davenant, the elder of the brothers, widowed, with an only son away for three-quarters of the year at school in England, was more conveniently installed in the town, within five minutes reach of the central office, than Robert, who, with a wife and a little girl, preferred the distance of his country house and big garden. The two establishments, as time went on, became practically interchangeable.

The rue Royale--Herakleion was so cosmopolitan as to give to its principal thoroughfare a French name--was at this hour crowded with the population that, imprisoned all day behind closed shutters, sought in the evening what freshness it could find in the cobbled streets between the stucco houses. The street life of the town began between five and six, and the Davenants, father and son, were jostled as they walked slowly along the pavements, picking their way amongst the small green tables set outside the numerous cafés. At these tables sat the heterogenous elements that composed the summer population of the place, men of every nationality: old gamblers too disreputable for Monte Carlo; young Levantines, natives, drinking absinthe; Turks in their red fezzes; a few rakish South Americans. The trams screamed discordantly in their iron grooves, and the bells of the cinema tinkled unceasingly. Between the tramlines and the kerb dawdled the hired victorias, few empty at this time of day, but crowded with families of Levantines, the men in straw hats, the women for the most part in hot black, very stout, and constantly fanning their heavily powdered faces. Now and then a chasseur from some diplomatic house passed rapidly in a flaming livery.

Mr Davenant talked to his son as they made their way along.

'How terrible those parties are. I often wish I could dissociate myself altogether from that life, and God knows that I go merely to hear what people are saying. They know it, and of course they will never forgive me. Julian, in order to conciliate Herakleion, you will have to marry a Greek.'

'Alexander Christopoulos attacked me to-day,' Julian said. 'Wanted me to go to Paris with him and see the world.'

He did not note in his own mind that he refrained from saying that Madame Kato had also, so to speak, attacked him on the dangerous subject of the Islands.

They turned now, having reached the end of the rue Royale, into the _platia_, where the cavernous archway of the club stained the white front of the houses with a mouth of black. The houses of the _platia_ were large, the hereditary residences of the local Greek families. The Christopoulos house stood next to the club, and next to that was the house of the Premier, His Excellency Platon Malteios, and next to that the Italian Consulate, with the arms of Italy on a painted hatchment over the door. The centre of the square was empty, cobbled in an elaborate pattern which gave the effect of a tessellated pavement; on the fourth side of the square were no houses, for here lay the wide quay which stretched right along above the sea from one end of the town to the other.

The Davenant house faced the sea, and from the balcony of his bedroom on the second floor Julian could see the Islands, yellow with little white houses on them; in the absolute stillness and limpidity of the air he could count the windows on Aphros, the biggest island, and the terraces on the slope of the hills. The first time he had arrived from school in England he had run up to his bedroom, out on to the balcony, to look across the _platia_ with its many gaudily striped sunblinds, at the blue sea and the little yellow stains a few miles out from the shore.

At the door of the Davenant house stood two horses ready saddled in the charge of the door-keeper, fat Aristotle, an islander, who wore the short bolero and pleated fustanelle, like a kilt, of his country. The door-keepers of the other houses had gathered round him, but as Mr Davenant came up they separated respectfully and melted away to their individual charges.

The way lay along the quays and down the now abandoned ilex avenue. The horses' hoofs padded softly in the thick dust. The road gleamed palely beneath the thick shadows of the trees, and the water, seen between the ancient trunks, was almost purple. The sun was gone, and only the last bars of the sunset lingered in the sky. At the tip of the pier of Herakleion twinkled already the single light of phosphorescent green that daily, at sunset, shone out, to reflect irregularly in the water.

They passed out of the avenue into the open country, the road still skirting the sea on their left, while on their right lay the strip of flat country crowded in between Mount Mylassa and the sea, carefully cultivated by the labourers of the Davenants, where the grapes hung on the festooned branches looped from pole to pole. William Davenant observed them critically, thinking to himself, 'A good harvest.' Julian Davenant, fresh from an English county, saw as with a new eye their beauty and their luxuriance. He rode loosely in the saddle, his long legs dangling, indisputably English, though born in one of the big painted rooms overlooking the _platia_ of Herakleion, and reared in the country until the age of ten. He had always heard the vintage discussed since he could remember. He knew that his family for three generations had been the wealthiest in the little state, wealthier than the Greek banking-houses, and he knew that no move of the local politics was entirely free from the influence of his relations. His grandfather, indeed, having been refused a concession he wanted from the government, had roused his Islands to a declaration of independence under his own presidency--a state of affairs which, preposterous as it was, had profoundly alarmed the motley band that made up the Cabinet in Herakleion. What had been done once, could be repeated.... Granted his concession, Julian's grandfather had peaceably laid down the dignity of his new office, but who could say that his sons might not repeat the experiment?

These things had been always in the boy's scheme of life. He had not pondered them very deeply. He supposed that one day he would inherit his father's share in the concern, and would become one of the heads of the immense family which had spread like water over various districts of the Mediterranean coasts. Besides the Davenants of Herakleion, there were Davenants at Smyrna, Davenants at Salonica, Davenants at Constantinople. Colonies of Davenants. It was said that the Levant numbered about sixty families of Davenants. Julian was not acquainted with them all. He did not even know in what degree of relationship they stood to him.

Every time that he passed through London on his way to school, or, now, to Oxford, he was expected to visit his great-uncle, Sir Henry, who lived in an immense house in Belgrave Square, and had a business room downstairs where Julian was interviewed before luncheon. In this room hung framed plans of the various Davenant estates, and Julian, as he stood waiting for Sir Henry, would study the plan of Herakleion, tracing with his finger the line of the quays, the indent of the _platia_, the green of the race-course, the square which indicated the country house; in a corner of this plan were the Islands, drawn each in separate detail. He became absorbed, and did not notice the entrance of Sir Henry till the old man's hand fell on his shoulder.

'Ha! Looking at the plan, are you? Familiar to you, what? So it is familiar to me, my boy. Never been there, you know. Yet I know it. I know my way about. Know it as though I had seen it.'

He didn't really know it, Julian thought--he didn't feel the sun hot on his hands, or see the dazzling, flapping sunblinds, or the advertisements written up in Greek characters in the streets.

Sir Henry went on with his sermon.

'You don't belong there, boy; don't you ever forget that. You belong here. You're English. Bend the riches of that country to your own purpose, that's all right, but don't identify yourself with it. Impose yourself. Make 'em adopt your methods. That's the strength of English colonisation.'

The old man, who was gouty, and leaned his hands on the top of a stick, clapped the back of one hand with the palm of the other and blew out his lips, looking at his great-nephew.

'Yes, yes, remember that. Impose yourself. On my soul, you're a well-grown boy. What are you? nineteen? Great overgrown colt. Get your hair cut. Foreign ways; don't approve of that. Big hands you've got; broad shoulders. Loosely put together. Hope you're not slack. Can you ride?'

'I ride all day out there,' said Julian softly, a little bewildered.

'Well, well. Come to luncheon. Keep a head on your shoulders. Your grandfather lost his once; very foolish man. Wonder he didn't lose it altogether. President indeed! stuff and nonsense. Not practical, sir, not practical.' Sir Henry blew very hard. 'Let's have no such rubbish from you, boy. What'll you drink? Here, I'll give you the best: Herakleion, 1895. Best year we ever had. Hope you appreciate good wine; you're a wine-merchant, you know.'

He cackled loudly at his joke. Julian drank the wine that had ripened on the slopes of Mount Mylassa, or possibly on the Islands, and wished that the old man had not so blatantly called him a wine-merchant. He liked Sir Henry, although after leaving him he always had the sensation of having been buffeted by spasmodic gusts of wind.

He was thinking about Sir Henry now as he rode along, and pitying the old man to whom those swags of fruit meant only a dusty bottle, a red or a blue seal, and a date stamped in gold numerals on a black label. The light was extraordinarily tender, and the air seemed almost tangible with the heavy, honeyed warmth that hung over the road. Julian took off his gray felt hat and hung it on the high peak of his saddle.

They passed through a little village, which was no more than a score of tumbledown houses sown carelessly on each side of the road; here, as in the rue Royale, the peasants sat drinking at round tables outside the café to the harsh music of a gramophone, with applause and noisy laughter. Near by, half a dozen men were playing at bowls. When they saw Mr Davenant, they came forward in a body and laid eager hands on the neck of his horse. He reined up.

Julian heard the tumult of words: some one had been arrested, it was Vassili's brother. Vassili, he knew, was the big chasseur at the French Legation. He heard his father soothing, promising he would look into the matter; he would, if need be, see the Premier on the morrow. A woman flung herself out of the café and clasped Julian by the knee. They had taken her lover. Would he, Julian, who was young, be merciful? Would he urge his father's interference? He promised also what was required of him, feeling a strange thrill of emotion and excitement. Ten days ago he had been at Oxford, and here, to-day, Kato had spoken to him as to a grown man, and here in the dusk a sobbing woman was clinging about his knee. This was a place in which anything, fantastic or preposterous, might come to pass.

As they rode on, side by side, his father spoke, thinking aloud. An absent-minded man, he gave his confidence solely in this, so to speak, unintentional manner. Long periods, extending sometimes over months, during which his mind lay fallow, had as their upshot an outbreak of this audible self-communion. Julian had inherited the trait; his mind progressed, not regularly, but by alternate stagnation and a forward bound.

'The mistake that we have made lies in the importation of whole families of islanders to the mainland. The Islands have always considered themselves as a thing apart, as, indeed, historically, they always were. A hundred years is not sufficient to make them an intrinsic part of the State of Herakleion. I cannot wonder that the authorities here dislike us. We have introduced a discontented population from the Islands to spread sedition among the hitherto contented population of the mainland. If we were wise, we should ship the whole lot back to the Islands they came from. Now, a man is arrested on the Islands by the authorities, and what happens? He is the brother of Vassili, an islander living in Herakleion. Vassili spreads the news, it flies up and down the town, and out into the country. It has greeted us out here already. In every café of the town at this moment the islanders are gathered together, muttering; some will get drunk, perhaps, and the municipal police will intervene; from a drunken row the affair will become political; some one will raise the cry of "Liberty!", heads will be broken, and to-morrow a score of islanders will be in jail. They will attribute their imprisonment to the general hostility to their nationality, rather than to the insignificant brawl. Vassili will come to me in Herakleion to-morrow. Will I exercise my influence with Malteios to get his brother released? I shall go, perhaps, to Malteios, who will listen to me suavely, evasively.... It has all happened a hundred times before. I say, we ought to ship the whole lot back to where they came from.'

'I suppose they are really treated with unfairness?' Julian said, more speculation than interest in his tone.

'I suppose a great many people would think so. The authorities are certainly severe, but they are constantly provoked. And, you know, your uncle and I make it up to the islanders in a number of private ways. Ninety per cent. of the men on the Islands are employed by us, and it pays us to keep them devoted to us by more material bonds than mere sentiment; also it alleviates their discontent, and so obviates much friction with Herakleion.'

'But of course,' said Julian quickly, 'you don't allow Malteios to suspect this?'

'My dear boy! what do you suppose? Malteios is President of Herakleion. Of course, we don't mention such things. But he knows it all very well, and winks at it--perforce. Our understanding with Malteios is entirely satisfactory, entirely. He is on very wholesome terms of friendly respect to us.'

Julian rarely pronounced himself; he did so now.

'If I were an islander--that is, one of a subject race--I don't think I should be very well content to forgo my liberty in exchange for underhand compensation from an employer whose tactics it suited to conciliate my natural dissatisfaction.'

'What a ridiculous phrase. And what ridiculous sentiments you occasionally give vent to. No, no, the present arrangement is as satisfactory as we can hope to make it, always excepting that one flaw, that we ought not to allow islanders in large numbers to live upon the mainland.'

They turned in between the two white lodges of the country house, and rode up the drive between the tall, pungent, untidy trees of eucalyptus. The house, one-storied, low, and covered with wistaria and bougainvillea, glimmered white in the uncertain light. The shutters were flung back and the open windows gaped, oblong and black, at regular intervals on the upper floor. On the ground level, a broad veranda stretched right along the front of the house, and high French windows, opening on to this, yellow with light, gave access to the downstairs rooms.

'Holà!' Mr Davenant called in a loud voice.

'Malista, Kyrie,' a man's voice answered, and a servant in the white fustanelle of the Islands, with black puttees wound round his legs, and red shoes with turned-up toes and enormous rosettes on the tip, came running to hold the horses.

'They have taken Vassili's brother, Kyrie,' he said as Mr Davenant gave him the reins.

Julian was already in the drawing-room, among the chintz-covered sofas, loaded little tables, and ubiquitous gilt chairs. Four fat columns, painted to represent lapis-lazuli, divided the room into two halves, and from their Corinthian capitals issued flames made of red tinsel and painted gray smoke, which dispersed itself realistically over the ceiling.

He stood in the window, absently looking out into the garden across the veranda, where the dinner table was laid for six. Pots of oleander and agapanthus stood along the edge of the veranda, between the fat white columns, with gaps between them through which one might pass out into the garden, and beyond them in the garden proper the fruit gleamed on the lemon-trees, and, somewhere, the sea whispered in the dusk. The night was calm and hot with the serenity of established summer weather, the stars big and steady like sequins in the summer sky. The spirit of such serenity does not brood over England, where to-day's pretence of summer will be broken by the fresh laughter of to-morrow's shower. The rose must fall to pieces in the height of its beauty beneath the fingers of sudden and capricious storm. But here the lemons hung, swollen and heavily pendulous, among the metallic green of their leaves, awaiting the accomplished end of their existence, the deepening of their gold, the fuller curve of their ripened luxuriance, with the complacency of certainty; fruit, not for the whim of the elements, but progressing throughout the year steadfastly towards the hand and the basket of the picker. Here and there the overburdened stem would snap, and the oblong ball of greenish-gold would fall with a soft and melancholy thud, like a sigh of regret, upon the ground beneath the tree; would roll a little way, and then be still. The little grove stretched in ordered lines and spaces, from the veranda, where the windows of the house threw rectangles of yellow light on to the ground in the blackness, to the bottom of the garden, where the sea washed indolently against the rocks.

Presently he would see Eve, his eyes would meet her mocking eyes, and they would smile at one another out of the depths of their immemorial friendship. She was familiar to him, so familiar that he could not remember the time when, difficult, intractable, exasperating, subtle, incomprehensible, she had not formed part of his life. She was as familiar to him as the house in the _platia_, with its big, empty drawing-room, the walls frescoed with swinging monkeys, broken columns, and a romantic land and seascape; as the talk about the vintage; as the preposterous politics, always changing, yet always, monotonously, nauseatingly, pettishly, the same. She was not part of his life in England, the prosaic life; she was part of his life on the Greek seaboard, unreal and fantastic, where the most improbable happenings came along with an air of ingenuousness, romance walking in the garments of every day. After a week in Herakleion he could not disentangle the real from the unreal.

It was the more baffling because those around him, older and wiser than he, appeared to take the situation for granted and to treat it with a seriousness that sometimes led him, when, forgetful, he was off his guard, to believe that the country was a real country and that its statesmen, Platon Malteios, Gregori Stavridis, and the rest, were real statesmen working soberly towards a definite end. That its riots were revolutions; that its factions were political parties; that its discordant, abusive, wrangling Chamber was indeed a Senate. That its four hundred stout soldiers, who periodically paraded the _platia_ under the command of a general in a uniform designed by a theatrical costumier in Buda-Pesth, were indeed an army. That the _platia_ itself was a forum. That the society was brilliant; that its liaisons had the dignity of great passions. That his aunt, who talked weightily and contradicted every one, including herself--the only person who ever ventured to do such a thing--was indeed a political figure, an Egeria among the men in whose hands lay the direction of affairs. In his more forgetful moments, he was tempted to believe these things, when he saw his father and his Uncle Robert, both unbending, incisive, hard-headed business men, believing them. As a rule, preserving his nice sense of perspective, he saw them as a setting to Eve.

He was beginning to adjust himself again to the life which faded with so extraordinary a rapidity as the express or the steamer bore him away, three times a year, to England. It faded always then like a photographic proof when exposed to the light. The political jargon was the first to go--he knew the sequence--'civil war,' 'independent archipelago,' 'overthrow of the Cabinet,' 'a threat to the Malteios party,' 'intrigues of the Stavridists,' the well-known phrases that, through sheer force of reiteration, he accepted without analysis; then, after the political jargon, the familiar figures that he saw almost daily, Sharp, his father's chief clerk; Aristotle, the door-keeper, his tussore fustanelle hanging magisterially from the rotundity of his portentous figure; Madame Lafarge, erect, and upholstered like a sofa, driving in her barouche; the young men at the club, languid and insolent and licentious; then, after the familiar figures, the familiar scenes; and lastly Eve herself, till he could no longer recall the drowsy tones of her voice, or evoke her eyes, that, though alive with malice and mockery, were yet charged with a mystery to which he could give no name. He was sad when these things began to fade. He clung on to them, because they were dear, but they slipped through his fingers like running water. Their evanescence served only to convince him the more of their unreality.

Then, England, immutable, sagacious, balanced; Oxford, venerable and self-confident, turning the young men of the nation as by machinery out of her mould. Law-abiding England, where men worked their way upwards, attaining power and honour in the ripeness of years. London, where the houses were of stone. Where was Herakleion, stucco-built and tawdry, city of perpetually-clanging bells, revolutions, and Prime Ministers made and unmade in a day? Herakleion of the yellow islands, washed by too blue a sea. Where?

Eve had never been to England, nor could he see any place in England for her. She should continue to live as she had always lived, among the vines and the magnolias, attended by a fat old woman who, though English, had spent so many years of her life in Herakleion that her English speech was oddly tainted by the southern lisp of the native Greek she had never been able to master; old Nana, who had lost the familiarity of one tongue without acquiring that of another; the ideal duenna for Eve.

Then with a light step across the veranda a young Greek priest came into the room by one of the French windows, blinking and smiling in the light, dressed in a long black soutane and black cap, his red hair rolled up into a knob at the back of his head according to the fashion of his church. He tripped sometimes over his soutane as he walked, muscular and masculine inside that feminine garment, and when he did this he would gather it up impatiently with a hand on which grew a pelt of wiry red hairs. Father Paul had instituted himself as a kind of private chaplain to the Davenants. Eve encouraged him because she thought him picturesque. Mrs Robert Davenant found him invaluable as a lieutenant in her campaign of control over the peasants and villagers, over whom she exercised a despotic if benevolent authority. He was therefore free to come and go as he pleased.

The population, Julian thought, was flowing back into his recovered world.

England and Oxford were put aside; not forgotten, not indistinct, not faded like Herakleion was wont to fade, but merely put aside, laid away like winter garments in summer weather. He was once more in the kingdom of stucco and adventure. Eve was coming back to him, with her strange shadowy eyes and red mouth, and her frivolity beneath which lay some force which was not frivolous. There were women who were primarily pretty; women who were primarily motherly; women who, like Mrs Robert Davenant, were primarily efficient, commanding, successful, metallic; women who, like Kato, were consumed by a flame of purpose which broke, hot and scorching, from their speech and burned relentlessly in their eyes; women who were primarily vain and trifling; he found he could crowd Eve into no such category. He recalled her, spoilt, exquisite, witty, mettlesome, elusive, tantalising; detached from such practical considerations as punctuality, convenience, reliability. A creature that, from the age of three, had exacted homage and protection....

He heard her indolent voice behind him in the room, and turned expectantly for their meeting.

III

It was, however, during his first visit to the singer's flat that he felt himself again completely a citizen of Herakleion; that he felt himself, in fact, closer than ever before to the beating heart of intrigue and aspiration. Kato received him alone, and her immediate comradely grasp of his hand dispelled the shyness which had been induced in him by the concert; her vigorous simplicity caused him to forget the applause and enthusiasm he had that afternoon seen lavished on her as a public figure; he found in her an almost masculine friendliness and keenness of intellect, which loosened his tongue, sharpened his wits, set him on the path of discovery and self-expression. Kato watched him with her little bright eyes, nodding her approval with quick grunts; he paced her room, talking.

'Does one come, ever, to a clear conception of one's ultimate ambitions? Not one's personal ambitions, of course; they don't count.' ('How young he is,' she thought.) 'But to conceive clearly, I mean, exactly what one sets out to create, and what to destroy. If not, one must surely spend the whole of life working in the dark? Laying in little bits of mosaic, without once stepping back to examine the whole scheme of the picture.... One instinctively opposes authority. One struggles for freedom. Why? Why? What's at the bottom of that instinct? Why are we, men, born the instinctive enemies of order and civilisation, when order and civilisation are the weapons and the shields we, men, have ourselves instituted for our own protection? It's illogical.

'Why do we, every one of us, refute the experience of others, preferring to gain our own? Why do we fight against government? why do I want to be independent of my father? or the Islands independent of Herakleion? or Herakleion independent of Greece? What's this instinct of wanting to stand alone, to be oneself, isolated, free, individual? Why does instinct push us towards individualism, when the great wellbeing of mankind probably lies in solidarity? when the social system in its most elementary form starts with men clubbing together for comfort and greater safety? No sooner have we achieved our solidarity, our hierarchy, our social system, our civilisation, than we want to get away from it. A vicious circle; the wheel revolves, and brings us back to the same point from which we started.'

'Yes,' said Kato, 'there is certainly an obscure sympathy with the rebel, that lies somewhere dormant in the soul of the most platitudinous advocate of law and order.' She was amused by his generalisations, and was clever enough not to force him back too abruptly to the matter she had in mind. She thought him ludicrously, though rather touchingly, young, both in his ideas and his phraseology; but at the same time she shrewdly discerned the force which was in him and which she meant to use for her own ends. 'You,' she said to him, 'will argue in favour of society, yet you will spend your life, or at any rate your youth, in revolt against it. Youth dies, you see, when one ceases to rebel. Besides,' she added, scrutinising him, 'the time will very soon come when you cease to argue and begin to act. Believe me, one soon discards one's wider examinations, and learns to content oneself with the practical business of the moment. One's own bit of the mosaic, as you said.'

He felt wholesomely sobered, but not reproved; he liked Kato's penetration, her vivid, intelligent sympathy, and her point of view which was practical without being cynical.

'I have come to one real conclusion,' he said, 'which is, that pain alone is intrinsically evil, and that in the lightening or abolition of pain one is safe in going straight ahead; it is a bit of the mosaic worth doing. So in the Islands....' he paused.

Kato repressed a smile; she was more and more touched and entertained by his youthful, dogmatic statements, which were delivered with a concentration and an ardour that utterly disarmed derision. She was flattered, too, by his unthinking confidence in her; for she knew him by report as morose and uncommunicative, with relapses into rough high spirits and a schoolboy sense of farce. Eve had described him as inaccessible....

'When you go, as you say, straight ahead,' he resumed, frowning, his eyes absent.

Kato began to dwell, very skilfully, upon the topic of the Islands....

Certain events which Madame Kato had then predicted to Julian followed with a suddenness, an unexpectedness, that perplexed the mind of the inquirer seeking, not only their origin, but their chronological sequence. They came like a summer storm sweeping briefly, boisterously across the land after the inadequate warning of distant rumbles and the flash of innocuous summer lightning. The thunder had rumbled so often, it might be said that it had rumbled daily, and the lightning had twitched so often in the sky, that men remained surprised and resentful long after the rough little tornado had passed away. They remained staring at one another, scratching their heads under their straw hats, or leaning against the parapet on the quays, exploring the recesses of their teeth with the omnipresent toothpick, and staring across the sea to those Islands whence the storm had surely come, as though by this intense, frowning contemplation they would finally provide themselves with enlightenment. Groups of men sat outside the cafés, their elbows on the tables, advancing in tones of whispered vehemence their individual positive theories and opinions, beating time to their own rhetoric and driving home each cherished point with the emphatic stab of a long cigar. In the casino itself, with the broken windows gaping jaggedly on to the forecourt, and the red curtains of the atrium hanging in rags from those same windows, men stood pointing in little knots. 'Here they stood still,' and 'From here he threw the bomb,' and those who had been present on the day were listened to with a respect they never in their lives had commanded before and never would command again.

There was no sector of society in Herakleion that did not discuss the matter with avidity; more, with gratitude. Brigandage was brigandage, a picturesque but rather _opéra bouffe_ form of crime, but at the same time an excitement was, indubitably, an excitement. The Ministers, in their despatches to their home governments, affected to treat the incident as the work of a fortuitous band rather than as an organised expedition with an underlying political significance, nevertheless they fastened upon it as a pretext for their wit in Herakleion, where no sardonic and departmental eye would regard them with superior tolerance much as a grown-up person regards the facile amusement of a child. At the diplomatic dinner parties very little else was talked of. At tea parties, women, drifting from house to house, passed on as their own the witticisms they had most recently heard, which became common property until reclaimed from general circulation by the indignant perpetrators. From the drawing-rooms of the French Legation, down to village cafés where the gramophone grated unheard and the bowls lay neglected on the bowling alley, one topic reigned supreme. What nobody knew, and what everybody wondered about, was the attitude adopted by the Davenants in the privacy of their country house. What spoken or unspoken understanding existed between the inscrutable brothers? What veiled references, or candid judgments, escaped from William Davenant's lips as he lay back in his chair after dinner, a glass of wine--wine of his own growing--between his fingers? What indiscretions, that would have fallen so delectably upon the inquisitive ears of Herakleion, did he utter, secure in the confederacy of his efficient and vigorous sister-in-law, of the more negligible Robert, the untidy and taciturn Julian, the indifferent Eve?

It was as universally taken for granted that the outrage proceeded from the islanders as it was ferociously regretted that the offenders could not, from lack of evidence, be brought to justice. They had, at the moment, no special grievance; only their perennial grievances, of which everybody was tired of hearing. The brother of Vassili, a quite unimportant labourer, had been released; M. Lafarge had interested himself in his servant's brother, and had made representations to the Premier, which Malteios had met with his usual urbane courtesy. An hour later the fellow had been seen setting out in a rowing boat for Aphros. All, therefore, was for the best. Yet within twenty-four hours of this proof of leniency....

The élite were dining on the evening of these unexpected occurrences at the French Legation to meet two guests of honour, one a distinguished Albanian statesman who could speak no language but his own, and the other an Englishman of irregular appearances and disappearances, an enthusiast on all matters connected with the Near East. In the countries he visited he was considered an expert who had the ear of the English Cabinet and House of Commons, but by these institutions he was considered merely a crank and a nuisance. His conversation was after the style of the more economical type of telegram, with all prepositions, most pronouns, and a good many verbs left out; it gained thereby in mystery what it lost in intelligibility, and added greatly to his reputation. He and the Albanian had stood apart in confabulation before dinner, the Englishman arguing, expounding, striking his open palm with the fingers of the other hand, shooting out his limbs in spasmodic and ungraceful gestures, the Albanian unable to put in a word, but appreciatively nodding his head and red fez.

Madame Lafarge sat between them both at dinner, listening to the Englishman as though she understood what he was saying to her, which she did not, and occasionally turning to the Albanian to whom she smiled and nodded in a friendly and regretful way. Whenever she did this he made her a profound bow and drank her health in the sweet champagne. Here their intercourse perforce ended.

Half-way through dinner a note was handed to M. Lafarge. He gave an exclamation which silenced all his end of the table, and the Englishman's voice was alone left talking in the sudden hush.

'Turkey!' he was saying. 'Another matter! Ah, ghost of Abdul Hamid!' and then, shaking his head mournfully, 'world-treachery--world-conspiracy....'

'Ah, yes,' said Madame Lafarge, rapt, 'how true that is, how right you are.'

She realised that no one else was speaking, and raised her head interrogatively.

Lafarge said,--

'Something has occurred at the casino, but there is no cause for alarm; nobody has been hurt. I am sending a messenger for further details. This note explicitly says'--he consulted it again--'that no one is injured. A mere question of robbery; an impudent and successful attempt. A bomb has been thrown,'--('_Mais ils sont donc tous apaches?_' cried Condesa Valdez. Lafarge went on)--'but they say the damage is all in the atrium, and is confined to broken windows, torn hangings, and mirrors cracked from top to bottom. Glass lies plentifully scattered about the floor. But I hope that before very long we may be in possession of a little more news.' He sent the smile of a host round the table, reassuring in the face of anxiety.

A little pause, punctuated by a few broken ejaculations, followed upon his announcement.

'How characteristic of Herakleion,' cried Alexander Christopoulos, who had been anxiously searching for something noteworthy and contemptuous to say, 'that even with the help of a bomb we can achieve only a disaster that tinkles.'

The Danish Excellency was heard to say tearfully,--

'A robbery! a bomb! and practically in broad daylight! What a place, what a place!'

'Those Islands again, for certain!' Madame Delahaye exclaimed, with entire absence of tact; her husband, the French Military Attaché, frowned at her across the table; and the diplomatists all looked down their noses.

Then the Englishman, seeing his opportunity, broke out,--

'Very significant! all of a piece--anarchy--intrigue--no strong hand--free peoples. Too many, too many. Small nationalities. Chips! Cut-throats, all. So!'--he drew his fingers with an expressive sibilant sound across his own throat. 'Asking for trouble. Yugo-Slavs--bah! Poles--pfui! Eastern empire, that's the thing. Turks the only people'--the Albanian, fortunately innocent of English, was smiling amiably as he stirred his champagne--'great people. Armenians, wash-out. Quite right too. Herakleion, worst of all. Not even a chip. Only the chip of a chip.'

'And the Islands,' said the Danish Excellency brightly, 'want to be the chip of a chip of a chip.'

'Yes, yes,' said Madame Lafarge, who had been getting a little anxious, trying to provoke a laugh, 'Fru Thyregod has hit it as usual--_elle a trouvé le mot juste_,' she added, thinking that if she turned the conversation back into French it might check the Englishman's truncated eloquence.

Out in the town, the quay was the centre of interest. A large crowd had collected there, noisy in the immense peace of the evening. Far, far out, a speck on the opal sea, could still be distinguished the little boat in which the three men, perpetrators of the outrage, had made good their escape. Beyond the little boat, even less distinct, the sea was dotted with tiny craft, the fleet of fishing-boats from the Islands. The green light gleamed at the end of the pier. On the quay, the crowd gesticulated, shouted, and pointed, as the water splashed under the ineffectual bullets from the carbines of the police. The Chief of Police was there, giving orders. The police motor-launch was to be got out immediately. The crowd set up a cheer; they did not know who the offenders were, but they would presently have the satisfaction of seeing them brought back in handcuffs.

It was at this point that the entire Lafarge dinner-party debouched upon the quay, the women wrapped in their light cloaks, tremulous and excited, the men affecting an amused superiority. They were joined by the Chief of Police, and by the Christopoulos, father and son. It was generally known, though never openly referred to, that the principal interest in the casino was held by them, a fact which explained the saffron-faced little banker's present agitation.

'The authorities must make better dispositions,' he kept saying to Madame Lafarge. 'With this example before them, half the blackguards of the country-side will be making similar attempts. It is too absurdly easy.'

He glared at the Chief of Police.

'Better dispositions,' he muttered, 'better dispositions.'

'This shooting is ridiculous,' Alexander said impatiently, 'the boat is at least three miles away. What do they hope to kill? a fish? Confound the dusk. How soon will the launch be ready?'

'It will be round to the steps at any moment now,' said the Chief of Police, and he gave an order in an irritable voice to his men, who had continued to let off their carbines aimlessly and spasmodically.

In spite of his assurance, the launch did not appear. The Englishman was heard discoursing at length to Madame Lafarge, who, at regular intervals, fervently agreed with what he had been saying, and the Danish Excellency whispered and tittered with young Christopoulos. Social distinctions were sharply marked: the diplomatic party stood away from the casual crowd, and the casual crowd stood away from the rabble. Over all the dusk deepened, one or two stars came out, and the little boat was no longer distinguishable from the fishing fleet with its triangular sails.

Finally, throbbing, fussing, important, the motor-launch came churning to a standstill at the foot of the steps. The Chief of Police jumped in, Alexander followed him, promising that he would come straight to the French Legation on his return and tell them exactly what had happened.

In the mirrored drawing-rooms, three hours later, he made his recital. The gilt chairs were drawn round in a circle, in the middle of which he stood, aware that the Danish Excellency was looking at him, enraptured, with her prominent blue eyes.

'Of course, in spite of the start they had had, we knew that they stood no chance against a motor-boat, no chance whatsoever. They could not hope to reach Aphros before we overtook them. We felt quite confident that it was only a question of minutes. We agreed that the men must have been mad to imagine that they could make good their escape in that way. Sterghiou and I sat in the stern, smoking and talking. What distressed us a little was that we could no longer see the boat we were after, but you know how quickly the darkness comes, so we paid very little attention to that.

'Presently we came up with the fishing smacks from Aphros, and they shouted to us to keep clear of their tackle--impudence. We shut off our engines while we made inquiries from them as to the rowing-boat. Rowing-boat? they looked blank. They had seen no rowing-boat--no boat of any sort, other than their own. The word was passed, shouting, from boat to boat of the fleet; no one had seen a rowing-boat. Of course they were lying; how could they not be lying? but the extraordinary fact remained'--he made an effective pause--'there was no sign of a rowing-boat anywhere on the sea.'

A movement of appreciative incredulity produced itself among his audience.

'Not a sign!' Alexander repeated luxuriously. 'The sea lay all round us without a ripple, and the fishing smacks, although they were under full sail, barely moved. It was so still that we could see their reflection unbroken in the water. There might have been twenty of them, dotted about--twenty crews of bland liars. We were, I may as well admit it, nonplussed. What can you do when you are surrounded by smiling and petticoated liars, leaning against their masts, and persisting in idiotic blankness to all your questions? Denial, denial, was all their stronghold. They had seen nothing. But they must be blind to have seen nothing? They were very sorry, they had seen nothing at all. Would the gentlemen look round for themselves, they would soon be satisfied that nothing was in sight.

'As for the idea that the boat had reached Aphros in the time at their disposal, it was absolutely out of the question.

'I could see that Sterghiou was getting very angry; I said nothing, but I think he was uncomfortable beneath my silent criticism. He and his police could regulate the traffic in the rue Royale, but they could not cope with an emergency of this sort. From the very first moment they had been at fault. And they had taken at least twenty minutes to get out the motor-launch. Sterghiou hated me, I feel sure, for having accompanied him and seen his discomfiture.

'Anyway, he felt he must take some sort of action, so he ordered his men to search all the fishing smacks in turn. We went the round, a short throbbing of the motors, and then silence as we drew alongside and the men went on board. Of course, they found nothing. I watched the faces of the islanders during this inspection; they sat on the sides of their boats, busy with their nets, and pretending not to notice the police that moved about, turning everything over in their inefficient way, but I guessed their covert grins, and I swear I caught two of them winking at one another. If I had told this to Sterghiou, I believe he would have arrested them on the spot, he was by then in such a state of exasperation, but you can't arrest a man on a wink, especially a wink when darkness has very nearly come.

'And there the matter remains. We had found nothing, and we were obliged to turn round and come back again, leaving that infernally impudent fleet of smacks in possession of the battle-ground. Oh, yes, there is no doubt that they got the best of it. Because, naturally, we have them to thank.'

'Have you a theory, Alexander?' some one asked, as they were intended to ask.

Alexander shrugged.

'It is so obvious. A knife through the bottom of the boat would very quickly send her to the bottom, and a shirt and a fustanelle will very quickly transform a respectable bank-thief into an ordinary islander. Who knows that the two ruffians I saw winking were not the very men we were after? A sufficiently ingenious scheme altogether--too ingenious for poor Sterghiou.'

IV

These things came, made their stir, passed, and were forgotten, leaving only a quickened ripple upon the waters of Herakleion, of which Julian Davenant, undergraduate, aged nineteen, bordering upon twenty, was shortly made aware. He had arrived from England with no other thought in his mind than of his riding, hawking, and sailing, but found himself almost immediately netted in a tangle of affairs of which, hitherto, he had known only by the dim though persistent echoes which reached him through the veils of his deliberate indifference. He found now that his indifference was to be disregarded. Men clustered round him, shouting, and tearing with irascible hands at his unsubstantial covering. He was no longer permitted to remain a boy. The half-light of adolescence was peopled for him by a procession of figures, fortunately distinct by virtue of their life-long familiarity, figures that urged and upbraided him, some indignant, some plaintive, some reproachful, some vehement, some dissimulating and sly; many vociferous, all insistent; a crowd of human beings each playing his separate hand, each the expounder of his own theory, rooted in his own conviction; a succession of intrigues, men who took him by the arm, and, leading him aside, discoursed to him, a strange medley of names interlarding their discourse with concomitant abuse or praise; men who flattered him; men who sought merely his neutrality, speaking of his years in tones of gentle disparagement. Men who, above all, would not leave him alone. Who, by their persecution, even those who urged his youth as an argument in favour of his neutrality, demonstrated to him that he had, as a man, entered the arena.

For his part, badgered and astonished, he took refuge in a taciturnity which only tantalised his pursuers into a more zealous aggression. His opinions were unknown in the club where the men set upon him from the first moment of his appearance. He would sit with his legs thrown over the arm of a leather arm-chair, loose-limbed and gray-flannelled, his mournful eyes staring out of the nearest window, while Greek, diplomat, or foreigner argued at him with gesture and emphasis. They seemed to him, had they but known, surprisingly unreal for all their clamour, pompous and yet insignificant.

His father was aware of the attacks delivered on his son, but, saying nothing, allowed the natural and varied system of education to take its course. He saw him standing, grave and immovable, in the surging crowd of philosophies and nationalities, discarding the charlatan by some premature wisdom, and assimilating the rare crumbs of true worldly experience. He himself was ignorant of the thoughts passing in the boy's head. He had forgotten the visionary tumult of nineteen, when the storm of life flows first over the pleasant, easy meadows of youth. Himself now a sober man, he had forgotten, so completely that he had ceased to believe in, the facile succession of convictions, the uprooting of beliefs, the fanatical acceptance of newly proffered creeds. He scarcely considered, or he might perhaps not so readily have risked, the possible effect of the queer systems of diverse ideals picked up, unconsciously, and put together from the conversation of the mountebank administrators of that tiny state, the melodramatic champions of the oppressed poor, and the professional cynicism of dago adventurers. If, sometimes, he wondered what Julian made of the talk that had become a jargon, he dismissed his uneasiness with a re-affirmation of confidence in his impenetrability.

'Broaden his mind,' he would say. 'It won't hurt him. It doesn't go deep. Foam breaking upon a rock.'

So might Sir Henry have spoken, to whom the swags of fruit were but the vintage of a particular year, put into a labelled bottle.

Julian had gone more than once out of a boyish curiosity to hear the wrangle of the parties in the Chamber. Sitting up in the gallery, and leaning his arms horizontally on the top of the brass railing, he had looked down on the long tables covered with red baize, whereon reposed, startlingly white, a square sheet of paper before the seat of each deputy, and a pencil, carefully sharpened, alongside. He had seen the deputies assemble, correctly frock-coated, punctiliously shaking hands with one another, although they had probably spent the morning in one another's company at the club--the club was the natural meeting-place of the Greeks and the diplomats, while the foreigners, a doubtful lot, congregated either in the gambling-rooms or in the _jardin anglais_ of the casino. He had watched them taking their places with a good deal of coughing, throat-clearing, and a certain amount of expectoration. He had seen the Premier come in amid a general hushing of voices, and take his seat in the magisterial arm-chair in the centre of the room, behind an enormous ink-pot, pulling up the knees of his trousers and smoothing his beard away from his rosy lips with the tips of his fingers as he did so. Julian's attention had strayed from the formalities attendant upon the opening of the session, and his eyes had wandered to the pictures hanging on the walls: Aristidi Patros, the first Premier, after the secession from Greece, b. 1760, d. 1831, Premier of the Republic of Herakleion from 1826 to 1830; Pericli Anghelis, general, 1774-1847; Constantine Stavridis, Premier from 1830 to 1835, and again from 1841 to 1846, when he died assassinated. The portraits of the other Premiers hung immediately below the gallery where Julian could not see them. At the end of the room, above the doors, hung a long and ambitious painting executed in 1840 and impregnated with the romanticism of that age, representing the Declaration of Independence in the _platia_ of Herakleion on the 16th September--kept as an ever memorable and turbulent anniversary--1826. The Premier, Patros, occupied the foreground, declaiming from a scroll of parchment, and portrayed as a frock-coated young man of godlike beauty; behind him stood serried ranks of deputies, and in the left-hand corner a group of peasants, like an operatic chorus, tossed flowers from baskets on to the ground at his feet. The heads of women clustered at the windows of the familiar houses of the _platia_, beneath the fluttering flags with the colours of the new Republic, orange and green.

Julian always thought that a portrait of his grandfather, for twelve months President of the collective archipelago of Hagios Zacharie, should have been included among the notables.

He had tried to listen to the debates which followed upon the formal preliminaries; to the wrangle of opponents; to the clap-trap patriotism which so thinly veiled the desire of personal advancement; to the rodomontade of Panaïoannou, Commander-in-Chief of the army of four hundred men, whose sky-blue uniform and white breeches shone among all the black coats with a resplendency that gratified his histrionic vanity; to the bombastic eloquence which rolled out from the luxuriance of the Premier's beard, with a startling and deceptive dignity in the trappings of the ancient and classic tongue. Malteios used such long, such high-sounding words, and struck his fist upon the red baize table with such emphatic energy, that it was hard not to believe in the authenticity of his persuasion. Julian welcomed most the moments when, after a debate of an hour or more, tempers grew heated, and dignity--that is to say, the pretence of the sobriety of the gathering--was cast aside in childish petulance.

'The fur flew,' said Julian, who had enjoyed himself. 'Christopoulos called Panaïoannou a fire-eater, and Panaïoannou called Christopoulos a money-grubber. "Where would you be without my money?" "Where would you be without my army?" "Army! can the valiant general inform the Chamber how many of his troops collapsed from exhaustion on the _platia_ last Independence Day, and had to be removed to the hospital?" And so on and so forth. They became so personal that I expected the general at any moment to ask Christopoulos how many unmarried daughters he had at home.'

Malteios himself, president of the little republic, most plausible and empiric of politicians, was not above the discussion of current affairs with the heir of the Davenants towards whom, it was suspected, the thoughts of the islanders were already turning. The President was among those who adopted the attitude of total discouragement. The interference of a headstrong and no doubt Quixotic schoolboy would be troublesome; might become disastrous. Having dined informally with the Davenant brothers at their country house, he crossed the drawing-room after dinner, genial, a long cigar protruding from his mouth, to the piano in the corner where Eve and Julian were turning over some sheets of music.

'May an old man,' he said with his deliberate but nevertheless charming suavity, 'intrude for a moment upon the young?'

He sat down, removing his cigar, and discoursed for a little upon the advantages of youth. He led the talk to Julian's Oxford career, and from there to his future in Herakleion.

'A knotty little problem, as you will some day find--not, I hope, for your own sake, until a very remote some day. Perhaps not until I and my friend and opponent Gregori Stavridis are figures of the past,' he said, puffing smoke and smiling at Julian; 'then perhaps you will take your place in Herakleion and bring your influence to bear upon your very difficult and contrary Islands. Oh, very difficult, I assure you,' he continued, shaking his head. 'I am a conciliatory man myself, and not unkindly, I think I may say; they would find Gregori Stavridis a harder taskmaster than I. They are the oldest cause of dispute, your Islands, between Gregori Stavridis and myself. Now see,' he went on, expanding, 'they lie like a belt of neutral territory, your discontented, your so terribly and unreasonably discontented Islands, between me and Stavridis. We may agree upon other points; upon that point we continually differ. He urges upon the Senate a policy of severity with which I cannot concur. I wish to compromise, to keep the peace, but he is, alas! perpetually aggressive. He invades the neutral zone, as it were, from the west--periodical forays--and I am obliged to invade it from the east; up till now we have avoided clashing in the centre.' Malteios, still smiling, sketched the imaginary lines of his illustration on his knee with the unlighted tip of his cigar. 'I would coax, and he would force, the islanders to content and friendliness.'

Julian listened, knowing well that Malteios and Stavridis, opponents from an incorrigible love of opposition for opposition's sake, rather than from any genuine diversity of conviction, had long since seized upon the Islands as a convenient pretext. Neither leader had any very definite conception of policy beyond the desire, respectively, to remain in, or to get himself into, power. Between them the unfortunate Islands, pulled like a rat between two terriers, were given ample cause for the discontent of which Malteios complained. Malteios, it was true, adopted the more clement attitude, but for this clemency, it was commonly said, the influence of Anastasia Kato was alone responsible.

Through the loud insistent voices of the men, Julian was to remember in after years the low music of that woman's voice, and to see, as in a vignette, the picture of himself in Kato's flat among the cushions of her divan, looking again in memory at the photographs and ornaments on the shelf that ran all round the four walls of the room, at the height of the top of a dado. These ornaments appeared to him the apotheosis of cosmopolitanism. There were small, square wooden figures from Russia, a few inches high, and brightly coloured; white and gray Danish china; little silver images from Spain; miniature plants of quartz and jade; Battersea snuff-boxes; photographs of an Austrian archduke in a white uniform and a leopard-skin, of a Mexican in a wide sombrero, mounted on a horse and holding a lasso, of Mounet-Sully as the blinded OEdipus. Every available inch of space in the singer's room was crowded with these and similar trophies, and the shelf had been added to take the overflow. Oriental embroideries, heavily silvered, were tacked up on the walls, and on them again were plates and brackets, the latter carrying more ornaments; high up in one corner was an ikon, and over the doors hung open-work linen curtains from the bazaars of Constantinople. Among the many ornaments the massive singer moved freely and spaciously, creating havoc as she moved, so that Julian's dominating impression remained one of setting erect again the diminutive objects she had knocked over. She would laugh good-humouredly at herself, and would give him unequalled Turkish coffee in little handleless cups, like egg-cups, off a tray of beaten brass set on a small octagonal table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and all the while she would talk to him musically, earnestly, bending forward, and her restless fingers would turn the bangles round and round upon her arms.

He could not think Kato unreal, though many of the phrases upon her lips were the same as he heard from the men in the club; he could not think her unreal, when her voice broke over the words 'misery' and 'oppression,' and when her eyes burned their conviction into his. He began to believe in the call of the Islands, as he listened to the soft, slurring speech of their people in her voice, and discovered, listening to her words with only half his mind, the richness of the grapes in the loose coils of her dark hair, and the fulvous colouring of the Islands in the copper draperies she always affected. It seemed to Julian that, at whatever time of day he saw her, whether morning, afternoon, or evening, she was always wearing the same dress, but he supposed vaguely that this could not actually be so. Like his father, he maintained her as a woman of genuine patriotic ardour, dissociating her from Herakleion and its club and casino, and associating her with the Islands where injustice and suffering, at least, were true things. He lavished his enthusiasm upon her, and his relations learned to refrain, in his presence, from making the usual obvious comments on her appearance. He looked upon her flat as a sanctuary and a shrine. He fled one day in disgust and disillusionment when the Premier appeared with his ingratiating smile in the doorway. Julian had known, of course, of the liaison, but was none the less distressed and nauseated when it materialised beneath his eyes.

He fled to nurse his soul-sickness in the country, lying on his back at full length under the olive-trees on the lower slopes of Mount Mylassa, his hands beneath his head, his horse moving near by and snuffing for pasture on the bare terraces. The sea, to-day of the profoundest indigo, sparkled in the sun below, and between the sea and the foot of the mountain, plainly, as in an embossed map, stretched the strip of flat cultivated land where he could distinguish first the dark ilex avenue, then the ribbon of road, then the village, finally the walled plantation which was his uncle's garden, and the roofs of the low house in the centre. The bougainvillea climbing over the walls and roof of his uncle's house made a warm stain of magenta.

Herakleion was hidden from sight, on the other hand, by the curve of the hill, but the Islands were visible opposite, and, caring only for them, he gazed as he had done many times, but now their meaning and purport crystallised in his mind as never before. There was something symbolical in their detachment from the mainland--in their clean remoteness, their isolation; all the difference between the unfettered ideal and the tethered reality. An island land that had slipped the leash of continents, forsworn solidarity, cut adrift from security and prudence! One could readily believe that they made part of the divine, the universal discontent, that rare element, dynamic, life-giving, that here and there was to be met about the world, always fragmentary, yet always full and illuminating, even as the fragments of beauty.

This was a day which Julian remembered, marked, as it were, with an asterisk in the calendar of his mind, by two notes which he found awaiting him on his return to the house in the _platia_. Aristotle handed them to him as he dismounted at the door.

The first he opened was from Eve.

'I am so angry with you, Julian. What have you done to my Kato? I found her in tears. She says you were with her when the Premier came, and that you vanished without a word.

'I know your _sauts de gazelle_; you are suddenly bored or annoyed, and you run away. Very naïf, very charming, very candid, very fawn-like--or is it, hideous suspicion, a pose?'

He was surprised and hurt by her taunt. One did not wish to remain, so one went away; it seemed to him very simple.

The second note was from Kato.

'Julian, forgive me,' it ran; 'I did not know he was coming. Forgive me. Send me a message to say when I shall see you. I did not know he was coming. Forgive me.'

He read these notes standing in the drawing-room with the palely-frescoed walls. He looked up from reading them, and encountered the grinning faces of the painted monkeys and the perspective of the romantic landscape. The colours were faint, and the rough grain of the plaster showed through in tiny lumps. Why should Kato apologise to him for the unexpected arrival of her lover? It was not his business. He sat down and wrote her a perfectly polite reply to say that he had nothing to forgive and had no intention of criticising her actions. The sense of unreality was strong within him.

It seemed that he could not escape the general determination to involve him, on one side or the other, in the local affairs. Besides the men at the club, Sharp, the head clerk at the office, spoke to him--'The people look to you, Mr Julian; better keep clear of the Islands if you don't want a crowd of women hanging round kissing your hands--, murmured to him in the hall when he went to dine at the French Legation; Walters, the _Times_ correspondent in Herakleion, winked to him with a man to man expression that flattered the boy.

'I know the Balkans inside out, mind you; nearly lost my head to the Bulgars and my property to the Serbs; I've been held to ransom by Albanian brigands, and shot at in the streets of Athens on December the second; I've had my rooms ransacked by the police, and I could have been a rich man now if I'd accepted half the bribes that I've had offered me. So you can have my advice, if you care to hear it, and that is, hold your tongue till you're sure you know your own mind.'

The women, following the lead, chattered to him. He had never known such popularity. It was hard, at times, to preserve his non-committal silence, yet he knew, ignorant and irresolute, that therein lay his only hope of safety. They must not perceive that they had taken him unawares, that he was hopelessly at sea in the mass of names, reminiscences, and prophecies that they showered upon him. They must not suspect that he really knew next to nothing about the situation....

He felt his way cautiously and learnt, and felt his strength growing.

In despite of Sharp's warning, he went across to the Islands, taking with him Father Paul. Eve exclaimed that he took the priest solely from a sense of the suitability of a retinue, and Julian, though he denied the charge, did not do so very convincingly. He had certainly never before felt the need of a retinue. He had always spent at least a week of his holidays on Aphros, taking his favourite hawk with him, and living either in his father's house in the village, or staying with the peasants. When he returned, he was always uncommunicative as to how he had passed his time.

Because he felt the stirring of events in the air, and because he knew from signs and hints dropped to him that his coming was awaited with an excited expectancy, he chose to provide himself with the dignity of an attendant. He had, characteristically, breathed no word of his suspicions, but moved coldly self-reliant in the midst of his uncertainties. Father Paul only thought him more than usually silent as he busied himself with the sail of his little boat and put out to sea from the pier of Herakleion. Aphros lay ahead, some seven or eight miles--a couple of hours' sailing in a good breeze.

His white sails were observed some way off by the villagers, who by chance were already assembled at the weekly market in the village square. They deserted the pens and stalls to cluster round the top of the steps that descended, steep as an upright ladder, and cut in the face of the rock, from the market place straight down to the sea, where the white foam broke round the foot of the cliff. Julian saw the coloured crowd from his boat; he distinguished faces as he drew nearer, and made out the flutter of handkerchiefs from the hands of the women. The village hung sheerly over the sea, the face of the white houses flat with the face of the brown rocks, the difference of colour alone betraying where the one began and the other ended, as though some giant carpenter had planed away all inequalities of surface from the eaves down to the washing water. The fleet of fishing-boats, their bare, graceful masts swaying a little from the perpendicular as the boats ranged gently at their moorings with the sigh of the almost imperceptible waves, lay like resting seagulls in the harbour.

'They are waiting to welcome you--feudal, too feudal,' growled Father Paul, who, though himself the creature and dependent of the Davenants, loudly upheld his democratic views for the rest of mankind.

'And why?' muttered Julian. 'This has never happened before. I have been away only four months.'

Three fishermen wearing the white kilted fustanelle and tasselled shoes were already on the jetty with hands outstretched to take his mooring-rope. Eager faces looked down from above, and a hum went through the little crowd as Julian sprang on to the jetty, the boat rocking as his weight released it--a hum that died slowly, like the note of an organ, fading harmoniously into a complete silence. Paul knew suddenly that the moment was significant. He saw Julian hesitate, faltering as it were between sea and land, his dark head and broad shoulders framed in an immensity of blue, the cynosure of the crowd above, still silent and intent upon his actions. He hesitated until his hesitation became apparent to all. Paul saw that his hands were shut and his face stern. The silence of the crowd was becoming oppressive, when a woman's voice rang out like a bell in the pellucid air,--

'Liberator!'

Clear, sudden, and resonant, the cry vibrated and hung upon echo, so that the mind followed it, when it was no more heard, round the island coast, where it ran up into the rocky creeks, and entered upon the breeze into the huts of goat-herds on the hill. Julian slowly raised his head as at a challenge. He looked up into the furnace of eyes bent upon him, lustrous eyes in the glow of faces tanned to a golden brown, finding in all the same query, the same expectancy, the same breathless and suspended confidence. For a long moment he gazed up, and they gazed down, challenge, acceptance, homage, loyalty, devotion, and covenant passing unspoken between them; then, his hesitation a dead and discarded thing, he moved forward and set his foot firmly upon the lowest step. The silence of the crowd was broken by a single collective murmur.

The crowd--which consisted of perhaps not more than fifty souls, men and women--parted at the top as his head and shoulders appeared on the level of the market-place. Paul followed, tripping over his soutane on the ladder-like stairs. He saw Julian's white shoes climbing, climbing the flight, until the boy stood deliberately upon the market-place. A few goats were penned up for sale between wattled hurdles, bleating for lost dams or kids; a clothes-stall displayed highly-coloured handkerchiefs, boleros for the men, silk sashes, puttees, tasselled caps, and kilted fustanelles; a fruit-stall, lined with bright blue paper, was stacked from floor to ceiling with oranges, figs, bunches of grapes, and scarlet tomatoes. An old woman, under an enormous green umbrella, sat hunched on the back of a tiny gray donkey.

Julian stood, grave and moody, surveying the people from under lowered brows. They were waiting for him to speak to them, but, as a contrast to the stifled volubility seething in their own breasts, his stillness, unexpected and surprising, impressed them more than any flow of eloquence. He seemed to have forgotten about them, though his eyes dwelt meditatively on their ranks; he seemed remote, preoccupied; faintly disdainful, though tolerant, of the allegiance they had already, mutely, laid at his feet, and were prepared to offer him in terms of emotional expression. He seemed content to take this for granted. He regarded them for a space, then turned to move in the direction of his father's house.

The people pressed forward after him, a whispering and rustling bodyguard, disconcerted but conquered and adoring. Their numbers had been increased since the news of his landing had run through the town. Fishermen, and labourers from olive-grove and vineyard, men whose lives were lived in the sun, their magnificent bare throats and arms glowed like nectarines in the white of the loose shirts they wore. Knotted handkerchiefs were about their heads, and many of them wore broad hats of rough straw over the handkerchief. Ancestrally more Italian than Greek, for the original population of the archipelago of Hagios Zacharie had, centuries before, been swamped by the settlements of colonising Genoese, they resembled the peasants of southern Italy.

The headman of the village walked with them, Tsantilas Tsigaridis, sailor and fisherman since he could remember, whose skin was drawn tightly over the fine bony structure of his face, and whose crisp white hair escaped in two bunches over his temples from under the red handkerchief he wore; he was dressed, incongruously enough, in a blue English jersey which Mrs Davenant had given him, and a coffee-coloured fustanelle. Behind the crowd, as though he were shepherding them, Nico Zapantiotis, overseer of the Davenant vineyards, walked with a long pole in his hand, a white sheepdog at his heels, and a striped blue and white shirt fluttering round his body, open at the throat, and revealing the swelling depth of his hairy chest. Between these two notables pressed the crowd, bronzed and coloured, eyes eager and attentive and full of fire, a gleam of silver ear-rings among the shiny black ringlets. Bare feet and heelless shoes shuffled alike over the cobbles.

At the end of the narrow street, where the children ran out as in the story of the Pied Piper to join in the progress, the doorway of the Davenant house faced them.

It was raised on three steps between two columns. The monastery had been a Genoese building, but the Greek influence was unmistakable in the columns and the architrave over the portico. Julian strode forward as though unconscious of his following. Paul became anxious. He hurried alongside.

'You must speak to these people,' he whispered.

Julian mounted the steps and turned in the dark frame of the doorway. The people had come to a standstill, filling the narrow street. It was now they who looked up to Julian, and he who looked down upon them, considering them, still remote and preoccupied, conscious that here and now the seed sown in the club-rooms must bear its fruit, that life, grown impatient of waiting for a summons he did not give, had come to him of its own accord and ordered him to take the choice of peace or war within its folded cloak. If he had hoped to escape again to England with a decision still untaken, that hope was to be deluded. He was being forced and hustled out of his childhood into the responsibilities of a man. He could not plead the nebulousness of his mind; action called to him, loud and insistent. In vain he told himself, with the frown deepening between his brows, and the people who watched him torn with anxiety before that frown--in vain he told himself that the situation was fictitious, theatrical. He could not convince himself of this truth with the fire of the people's gaze directed upon him. He must speak to them; they were silent, expectant, waiting. The words broke from him impelled, as he thought, by his terror of his own helplessness and lack of control, but to his audience they came as a command, a threat, and an invitation.

'What is it you want of me?'

He stood on the highest of the three steps, alone, the back of his head pressed against the door, and a hand on each of the flanking columns. The black-robed priest had taken his place below him, to one side, on the ground level. Julian felt a sudden resentment against these waiting people, that had driven him to bay, the resentment of panic and isolation, but to them, his attitude betraying nothing, he appeared infallible, dominating, and inaccessible.

Tsantilas Tsigaridis came forward as spokesman, a gold ring hanging in the lobe of one ear, and a heavy silver ring shining dully on the little finger of his brown, knotted hand.

'Kyrie,' he said, 'Angheliki Zapantiotis has hailed you. We are your own people. By the authorities we are persecuted as though we were Bulgars, we, their brothers in blood. Last week a score of police came in boats from Herakleion and raided our houses in search of weapons. Our women ran screaming to the vineyards. Such weapons as the police could find were but the pistols we carry for ornament on the feast-days of church, and these they removed, for the sake, as we know, not being blind, of the silver on the locks which they will use to their own advantage. By such persecutions we are harried. We may never know when a hand will not descend on one of our number, on a charge of sedition or conspiracy, and he be seen no more. We are not organised for resistance. We are blind beasts, leaderless.'

A woman in the crowd began to sob, burying her face in her scarlet apron. A man snarled his approval of the spokesman's words, and spat violently into the gutter.

'And you demand of me?' said Julian, again breaking his silence. 'Championship? leadership? You cannot say you are unjustly accused of sedition! What report of Aphros could I carry to Herakleion?'

He saw the people meek, submissive, beneath his young censure, and the knowledge of his power surged through him like a current through water.

'Kyrie,' said the old sailor, reproved, but with the same inflexible dignity, 'we know that we are at your mercy. But we are your own people. We have been the people of your people for four generations. The authorities have torn even the painting of your grandfather from the walls of our assembly room....'

'Small blame to them,' thought Julian; 'that shows their good sense.'

Tsantilas pursued,--

' ... we are left neither public nor private liberty. We are already half-ruined by the port-dues which are directed against us islanders and us alone.' A crafty look came into his eyes. 'Here, Kyrie, you should be in sympathy.'

Julian's moment of panic had passed; he was now conscious only of his complete control. He gave way to the anger prompted by the mercenary trait of the Levantine that marred the man's natural and splendid dignity.

'What sympathy I may have,' he said loudly, 'is born of compassion, and not of avaricious interest.'

He could not have told what instinct urged him to rebuke these people to whose petition he was decided to yield. He observed that with each fresh reproof they cringed the more.

'Compassion, Kyrie, and proprietary benevolence,' Tsantilas rejoined, recognising his mistake. 'We know that in you we find a disinterested mediator. We pray to God that we may be allowed to live at peace with Herakleion. We pray that we may be allowed to place our difficulties and our sorrows in your hands for a peaceful settlement.'

Julian looked at him, majestic as an Arab and more cunning than a Jew, and a slightly ironical smile wavered on his lips.

'Old brigand,' he thought, 'the last thing he wants is to live at peace with Herakleion; he's spoiling for a stand-up fight. Men on horses, himself at their head, charging the police down this street, and defending our house like a beleaguered fort; rifles cracking from every window, and the more police corpses the better. May I be there to see it!'

His mind flew to Eve, whom he had last seen lying in a hammock, drowsy, dressed in white, and breathing the scent of the gardenia she held between her fingers. What part would she, the spoilt, the exquisite, play if there were to be bloodshed on Aphros?

All this while he was silent, scowling at the multitude, who waited breathless for his next words.

'Father will half kill me,' he thought.

At that moment Tsigaridis, overcome by his anxiety, stretched out his hands towards him, surrendering his dignity in a supreme appeal,--

'Kyrie? I have spoken.'

He dropped his hands to his sides, bowed his head, and fell back a pace.

Julian pressed his shoulders strongly against the door; it was solid enough. The sun, striking on his bare hand, was hot. The faces and necks and arms of the people below him were made of real flesh and blood. The tension, the anxiety in their eyes was genuine. He chased away the unreality.

'You have spoken,' he said, 'and I have accepted.'

The woman named Angheliki Zapantiotis, who had hailed him as liberator, cast herself forward on to the step at his feet, as a stir and a movement, that audibly expressed itself in the shifting of feet and the releasing of contained breaths, ruffled through the crowd. He lifted his hand to enjoin silence, and spoke with his hand raised high above the figure of the woman crouching on the step.

He told them that there could now be no going back, that, although the time of waiting might seem to them long and weary, they must have hopeful trust in him. He exacted from them trust, fidelity, and obedience. His voice rang sharply on the word, and his glance circled imperiously, challenging defiance. It encountered none. He told them that he would never give his sanction to violence save as a last resort. He became intoxicated with the unaccustomed wine of oratory.

'An island is our refuge; we are the garrison of a natural fortress, that we can hold against the assault of our enemies from the sea. We will never seek them out, we will be content to wait, restrained and patient, until they move with weapons in their hands against us. Let us swear that our only guilt of aggression shall be to preserve our coasts inviolate.'

A deep and savage growl answered him as he paused. He was flushed with the spirit of adventure, the prerogative of youth. The force of youth moved so strongly within him that every man present felt himself strangely ready and equipped for the calls of the enterprise. A mysterious alchemy had taken place. They, untutored, unorganised, scarcely knowing what they wanted, much less how to obtain it, had offered him the formless material of their blind and chaotic rebellion, and he, having blown upon it with the fire of his breath, was welding it now to an obedient, tempered weapon in his hands. He had taken control. He might disappear and the curtains of silence close together behind his exit; Paul, watching, knew that these people would henceforward wait patiently, and with confidence, for his return.

He dropped suddenly from his rhetoric into a lower key.

'In the meantime I lay upon you a charge of discretion. No one in Herakleion must get wind of this meeting; Father Paul and I will be silent, the rest lies with you. Until you hear of me again, I desire you to go peaceably about your ordinary occupations.'

'Better put that in,' he thought to himself.

'I know nothing, nor do I wish to know,' he continued, shrewdly examining their faces, 'of the part you played in the robbery at the casino. I only know that I will never countenance the repetition of any such attempt; you will have to choose between me and your brigandage.' He suddenly stamped his foot. 'Choose now! which is it to be?'

'Kyrie, Kyrie,' said Tsigaridis, 'you are our only hope.'

'Lift up your hands,' Julian said intolerantly.

His eyes searched among the bronzed arms that rose at his command like a forest of lances; he enjoyed forcing obedience upon the crowd and seeing their humiliation.

'Very well,' he said then, and the hands sank, 'see to it that you remember your promise. I have no more to say. Wait, trust, and hope.'

He carried his hand to his forehead and threw it out before him in a gesture of farewell and dismissal.

He suspected himself of having acted and spoken in a theatrical manner, but he knew also that through the chaos of his mind an unextinguishable light was dawning.

V

Julian in the candour of his inexperience unquestioningly believed that the story would not reach Herakleion. Before the week was out, however, he found himself curiously eyed in the streets, and by the end of the week, going to dinner at the French Legation, he was struck by the hush that fell as his name was announced in the mirrored drawing-rooms. Madame Lafarge said to him severely,--

'Jeune homme, vous avez été très indiscret,' but a smile lurked in her eyes beneath her severity.

An immense Serbian, almost a giant, named Grbits, with a flat, Mongolian face, loomed ominously over him.

'Young man, you have my sympathy. You have disquieted the Greeks. You may count at any time upon my friendship.'

His fingers were enveloped and crushed in Grbits' formidable handshake.

The older diplomatists greeted him with an assumption of censure that was not seriously intended to veil their tolerant amusement.

'Do you imagine that we have nothing to do,' Don Rodrigo Valdez said to him, 'that you set out to enliven the affairs of Herakleion?'

Fru Thyregod, the Danish Excellency, took him into a corner and tapped him on the arm with her fan with that half flirtatious, half friendly familiarity she adopted towards all men.

'You are a dark horse, my dark boy,' she said meaningly, and, as he pretended ignorance, raising his brows and shaking his head, added, 'I'm much indebted to you as a living proof of my perception. I always told them; I always said, "Carl, that boy is an adventurer," and Carl said, "Nonsense, Mabel, your head is full of romance," but I said, "Mark my words, Carl, that boy will flare up; he's quiet now, but you'll have to reckon with him."'

He realised the extent of the gratitude of social Herakleion. He had provided a flavour which was emphatically absent from the usual atmosphere of these gatherings. Every Legation in turn, during both the summer and the winter season, extended its hospitality to its colleagues with complete resignation as to the lack of all possibility of the unforeseen. The rules of diplomatic precedence rigorously demanding a certain grouping, the Danish Excellency, for example, might sit before her mirror fluffing out her already fluffy fair hair with the complacent if not particularly pleasurable certainty that this evening, at the French Legation, she would be escorted in to dinner by the Roumanian Minister, and that on her other hand would sit the Italian Counsellor, while to-morrow, at the Spanish Legation, she would be escorted to dinner by the Italian Counsellor and would have upon her other hand the Roumanian Minister--unless, indeed, no other Minister's wife but Madame Lafarge was present, in which case she would be placed on the left hand of Don Rodrigo Valdez. She would have preferred to sit beside Julian Davenant, but he, of course, would be placed amongst the young men--secretaries, young Greeks, and what not--at the end of the table. These young men--'les petits jeunes gens du bout de la table,' as Alexander Christopoulos, including himself in their number, contemptuously called them--always ate mournfully through their dinner without speaking to one another. They did not enjoy themselves, nor did their host or hostess enjoy having them there, but it was customary to invite them.... Fru Thyregod knew that she must not exhaust all her subjects of conversation with her two neighbours this evening, but must keep a provision against the morrow; therefore, true to her little science, she refrained from mentioning Julian's adventure on Aphros to the Roumanian, and discoursed on it behind her fan to the Italian only. Other people seemed to be doing the same. Julian heard whispers, and saw glances directed towards him. Distinctly, Herakleion and its hostesses would be grateful to him.

He felt slightly exhilarated. He noticed that no Greeks were present, and thought that they had been omitted on his account. He reflected, not without a certain apprehensive pleasure, that if this roomful knew, as it evidently did, the story would not be long in reaching his father. Who had betrayed him? Not Paul, he was sure, nor Kato, to whom he had confided the story. (Tears had come into her eyes, she had clasped her hands, and she had kissed him, to his surprise, on his forehead.) He was glad on the whole that he had been betrayed. He had come home in a fever of exaltation and enthusiasm which had rendered concealment both damping and irksome. Little incidents, of significance to him alone, had punctuated his days by reminders of his incredible, preposterous, and penetrating secret; to-night, for instance, the chasseur in the hall, the big, scarlet-coated chasseur, an islander, had covertly kissed his hand....

His father took an unexpected view. Julian had been prepared for anger, in fact he had the countering phrases already in his mind as he mounted the stairs of the house in the _platia_ on returning from the French Legation. His father was waiting, a candle in his hand, on the landing.

'I heard you come in. I want to ask you, Julian,' he said at once, 'whether the story I have heard in the club to-night is true? That you went to Aphros, and entered into heaven knows what absurd covenant with the people?'

Julian flushed at the reprimanding tone.

'I knew that you would not approve,' he said. 'But one must do something. Those miserable, bullied people, denied the right to live....'

'Tut,' said his father impatiently. 'Have they really taken you in? I thought you had more sense. I have had a good deal of trouble in explaining to Malteios that you are only a hot-headed boy, carried away by the excitement of the moment. You see, I am trying to make excuses for you, but I am annoyed, Julian, I am annoyed. I thought I could trust you. Paul, too. However, you bring your own punishment on your head, for you will have to keep away from Herakleion in the immediate future.'

'Keep away from Herakleion?' cried Julian.

'Malteios' hints were unmistakable,' his father said dryly. 'I am glad to see you are dismayed. You had better go to bed now, and I will speak to you to-morrow.'

Mr Davenant started to go upstairs, but turned again, and came down the two or three steps, still holding his candle in his hand.

'Come,' he said in a tone of remonstrance, 'if you really take the thing seriously, look at it at least for a moment with practical sense. What is the grievance of the Islands? That they want to be independent from Herakleion. If they must belong to anybody, they say, let them belong to Italy rather than to Greece or to Herakleion. And why? Because they speak an Italian rather than a Greek patois! Because a lot of piratical Genoese settled in them five hundred years ago! Well, what do you propose to do, my dear Julian? Hand the Islands over to Italy?'

'They want independence,' Julian muttered. 'They aren't even allowed to speak their own language,' he continued, raising his voice. 'You know it is forbidden in the schools. You know that the port-dues in Herakleion ruin them--and are intended to ruin them. You know they are oppressed in every petty as well as in every important way. You know that if they were independent they wouldn't trouble Herakleion.'

'Independent! independent!' said Mr Davenant, irritable and uneasy. 'Still, you haven't told me what you proposed to do. Did you mean to create a revolution?'

Julian hesitated. He did not know. He said boldly,--

'If need be.'

Mr Davenant snorted.

'Upon my word,' he cried sarcastically, 'you have caught the emotional tone of Aphros to perfection. I suppose you saw yourself holding Panaïoannou at bay? If these are your ideas, I shall certainly support Malteios in keeping you away. I am on the best of terms with Malteios, and I cannot afford to allow your Quixotism to upset the balance. I can obtain almost any concession from Malteios,' he added thoughtfully, narrowing his eyes and rubbing his hand across his chin.

Julian watched his father with distaste and antagonism.

'And that is all you consider?' he said then.

'What else is there to consider?' Mr Davenant replied. 'I am a practical man, and practical men don't run after chimeras. I hope I'm not more cynical than most. You know very well that at the bottom of my heart I sympathise with the Islands. Come,' he said, with a sudden assumption of frankness, seeing that he was creating an undesirable rift between himself and his son, 'I will even admit to you, in confidence, that the republic doesn't treat its Islands as well as it might. You know, too, that I respect and admire Madame Kato; she comes from the Islands, and has every right to hold the views of an islander. But there's no reason why you should espouse those views, Julian. We are foreigners here, representatives of a great family business, and that business, when all's said and done, must always remain our first consideration.'

'Yet people here say,' Julian argued, still hoping for the best against the cold disillusionment creeping over him, 'that no political move can be made without allowing for your influence and Uncle Robert's. And my grandfather, after all....'

'Ah, your grandfather!' said Mr Davenant, 'your grandfather was an extremely sagacious man, the real founder of the family tradition, though I wouldn't like Malteios to hear me say so. He knew well enough that in the Islands he held a lever which gave him, if he chose to use it, absolute control over Herakleion. He only used it once, when he wanted something they refused to give him; they held out against him for a year, but ultimately they came to heel. A very sagacious man.... Don't run away with the idea that he was inspired by anything other than a most practical grasp--though I don't say it wasn't a bold one--a most practical grasp of the situation. He gave the politicians of Herakleion a lesson they haven't yet forgotten.

He paused, and, as Julian said nothing, added--

'We keep very quiet, your uncle Robert and I, but Malteios, and Stavridis himself, know that in reality we hold them on a rope. We give them a lot of play, but at any moment we choose, we can haul them in. A very satisfactory arrangement. Tacit agreements, to my mind, are always the most satisfactory. And so you see that I can't tolerate your absurd, uneducated interference. Why, there's no end to the harm you might do! Some day you will thank me.'

As Julian still said nothing, he looked at his son, who was standing, staring at the floor, a deep frown on his forehead, thunderous, unconvinced. Mr Davenant, being habitually uncommunicative, felt aggrieved that his explanatory condescension had not been received with a more attentive deference. He also felt uneasy. Julian's silences were always disquieting.

'You are very young still,' he said, in a more conciliatory tone, 'and I ought perhaps to blame myself for allowing you to go about so freely in this very unreal and bewildering place. Perhaps I ought not to have expected you to keep your head. Malteios is quite right: Herakleion is no place for a young man. Don't think me hard in sending you away. Some day you will come back with, I hope, a better understanding.'

He rested his hand kindly for a moment on Julian's shoulder, then turned away, and the light of his candle died as he passed the bend of the stairs.

On the following evening Julian, returning from the country-house where he had spent the day, was told that the Premier was with Mr Davenant and would be glad to see him.

He had ridden out to the country, regardless of the heat, turning instinctively to Eve in his strange and rebellious frame of mind. For some reason which he did not analyse, he identified her with Aphros--the Aphros of romance and glamour to which he so obstinately clung. To his surprise she listened unresponsive and sulky.

'You are not interested, Eve?'

Then the reason of her unreasonableness broke out.

'You have kept this from me for a whole week, and you confide in me now because you know the story is public property. You expect me to be interested. Grand merci!'

'But, Eve, I had pledged myself not to tell a soul.'

'Did you tell Kato?'

'Damn your intuition!' he said angrily.

She lashed at him then, making him feel guilty, miserable, ridiculous, though as he sat scowling over the sea--they were in their favourite place at the bottom of the garden, where under the pergola of gourds it was cool even at that time of the day--he appeared to her more than usually unmoved and forbidding.

After a long pause,--

'Julian, I am sorry.--I don't often apologise.--I said I was sorry.'

He looked coldly at her with his mournful eyes, that, green in repose, turned black in anger.

'Your vanity makes me ill.'

'You told Kato.'

'Jealousy!'

She began to protest; then, with a sudden change of front,--

'You know I am jealous. When I am jealous, I lie awake all night. I lose all sense of proportion. It's no joke, my jealousy; it's like an open wound. I put up a stockade round it to protect it. You are not considerate.'

'Can you never forget yourself? Do you care nothing for the Islands? Are you so self-centred, so empty-headed? Are all women, I wonder, as vain as you?'

They sat on the parapet, angry, inimical, with the coloured gourds hanging heavily over their heads.

Far out to sea the Islands lay, so pure and fair and delicate that Julian, beholding them, violently rejected the idea that in this possession of such disarming loveliness his grandfather had seen merely a lever for the coercion of recalcitrant politicians. They lay there as innocent and fragile as a lovely woman asleep, veiled by the haze of sunshine as the sleeper's limbs by a garment of lawn. Julian gazed till his eyes and his heart swam in the tenderness of passionate and protective ownership. He warmed towards his grandfather, the man whose generous ideals had been so cynically libelled by the succeeding generation. No man deserving the name could be guilty of so repulsive an act of prostitution....

'They will see me here again,' he exclaimed, striking his fist on the parapet.

To the startled question in Eve's eyes he vouchsafed an explanation.

'Malteios is sending me away. But when his term of office is over, I shall come back. It will be a good opportunity. We will break with Herakleion over the change of government. Kato will restrain Malteios so long as he is in power, I can trust her; but I shall make my break with Stavridis.'

In his plans for the future he had again forgotten Eve.

'You are going away?'

'For a year or perhaps longer,' he said gloomily.

Her natural instinct of defiant secrecy kept the flood of protest back from her lips. Already in her surprisingly definite philosophy of life, self-concealment held a sacred and imperious position. Secrecy--and her secrecy, because disguised under a superficial show of expansiveness, was the more fundamental, the more dangerous--secrecy she recognised as being both a shield and a weapon. Therefore, already apprehending that existence in a world of men was a fight, a struggle, and a pursuit, she took refuge in her citadel. And, being possessed of a picturesque imagination, she had upon a certain solemn occasion carried a symbolic key to the steps which led down to the sea from the end of the pergola of gourds, and had flung it out as far as she was able into the guardianship of the waters.

She remembered this now as she sat on the parapet with Julian, and smiled to herself ironically. She looked at him with the eye of an artist, and thought how his limbs, fallen into their natural grace of relaxed muscularity, suggested the sculptural ease of stone far more than the flat surfaces of canvas. Sculptural, she thought, was undoubtedly the adjective which thrust itself upon one. In one of her spasmodic outbursts of activity she had modelled him, but, disdainful of her own talents, had left the clay to perish. Then she remembered acutely that she would not see him again.

'My mythological Julian....' she murmured, smiling.

A world of flattery lay in her tone.

'You odd little thing,' he said, 'why the adjective?'

She made an expressive gesture with her hands.

'Your indifference, your determination--you're so intractable, so contemptuous, so hard--and sometimes so inspired. You're so fatally well suited to the Islands. Prince of Aphros?' she launched at him insinuatingly.

She was skilful; he flushed. She was giving him what he had, half unconsciously, sought.

'Siren!' he said.

'Am I? Perhaps, after all, we are both equally well suited to the Islands,' she said lightly.

And for some reason their conversation dropped. Yet it sufficed to send him, stimulated, from her side, full of self-confidence; he had forgotten that she was barely seventeen, a child! and for him the smile of pride in her eyes had been the smile of Aphros.

In the house, on his way through, he met Father Paul.

'Everything is known,' said the priest, wringing his hand with his usual energy.

'What am I to do? Malteios wants me to leave Herakleion. Shall I refuse? I am glad to have met you,' said Julian, 'I was on my way to find you.'

'Go, if Malteios wants you to go,' the priest replied, 'the time is not ripe yet; but are you determined, in your own mind, to throw in your lot with Hagios Zacharie? Remember, I cautioned you when we were still on Aphros: you must be prepared for a complete estrangement from your family. You will be running with the hare, no longer hunting with the hounds. Have you considered?'

'I am with the Islands.'

'Good,' said the priest, making a sign over him. 'Go, all the same, if Malteios exacts it; you will be the more of a man when you return. Malteios' party will surely fall at the next elections. By then we shall be ready, and I will see that you are summoned. God bless you.'

'Will you go out to Eve in the garden, father? She is under the pergola. Go and talk to her.'

'She is unhappy?' asked the priest, with a sharp look.

'A little, I think,' said Julian, 'will you go?'

'At once, at once,' said Paul, and he went quickly, through the grove of lemon-trees, stumbling over his soutane....

Julian returned to Herakleion, where he found his father and Malteios in the big frescoed drawing-room, standing in an embrasure of the windows. The Premier's face as he turned was full of tolerant benignity.

'Ah, here is our young friend,' he began paternally. 'What are these stories I hear of you, young man? I have been telling your father that when I was a schoolboy, a _lycéen_--I, too, tried to meddle in politics. Take my advice, and keep clear of these things till you are older. There are many things for the young: dancing, poetry, and love. Politics to the old and the middle-aged. Of course, I know your little escapade was nothing but a joke ... high spirits ... natural mischief....'

The interview was galling and humiliating to Julian; he disliked the Premier's bantering friendliness, through which he was not sufficiently experienced to discern the hidden mistrust, apprehension, and hostility. His father, compelled to a secret and resentful pride in his son, was conscious of these things. But Julian, his eyes fixed on the middle button of the Premier's frock-coat, sullen and rebellious, tried to shut his ears to the prolonged murmur of urbane derision. He wished to look down upon, to ignore Malteios, the unreal man, and this he could not do while he allowed those smooth and skilful words to flow unresisted in their suave cruelty over his soul. He shut his ears, and felt only the hardening of his determination. He would go; he would leave Herakleion, only to return with increase of strength in the hour of fulfilment.

Dismissed, he set out for Kato's flat, hatless, in a mood of thunder. His violence was not entirely genuine, but he persuaded himself, for he had lately been with Eve, and the plausible influence of Herakleion was upon him. He strode down the street, aware that people turned to gaze at him as he went. On the quay, the immense Grbits rose suddenly up from the little green table where he sat drinking vermouth outside a café.

'My young friend,' he said, 'they tell me you are leaving Herakleion?

'They are wise,' he boomed. 'You would break their toys if you remained. But _I_ remain; shall I watch for you? You will come back? I have hated the Greeks well. Shall we play a game with them? ha! ha!'

His huge laugh reverberated down the quay as Julian passed on, looking at the visiting card which the giant had just handed to him:--

SRGJÁN GRBITS.

_Attaché à la Légation de S.M. le Roi des Serbes, Croates, et Slovènes._

'Grbits my spy!' he was thinking. 'Fantastic, fantastic.'

Kato's flat was at the top of a four-storied house on the quay. On the ground floor of the house was a cake-shop, and, like every other house along the sea-front, over every window hung a gay, striped sunblind that billowed slightly like a flag in the breeze from the sea. Inside the cake-shop a number of Levantines, dressed in their hot black, were eating sweet things off the marble counter. Julian could never get Eve past the cake-shop when they went to Kato's together; she would always wander in to eat _choux à la crème_, licking the whipped cream off her fingers with a guilty air until he lent her his handkerchief, her own being invariably lost.

Julian went into the house by a side-door, up the steep narrow stairs, the walls painted in Pompeian red with a slate-coloured dado; past the first floor, where on two frosted glass doors ran the inscription: KONINKLIJKE NEDERLANDSCHE STOOMBOOT-MAATSCHAPPIJ; past the second floor, where a brass plate said: Th. Mavrudis et fils, Cie. d'assurance; past the third floor, where old Grigoriu, the money-lender, was letting himself in by a latchkey; to the fourth floor, where a woman in the native dress of the Islands admitted him to Kato's flat.

The singer was seated on one of her low, carpet-covered divans, her throat and arms, as usual, bare, the latter covered with innumerable bangles; her knees wide apart and a hand placed resolutely upon each knee; before her stood Tsigaridis, the headman of Aphros, his powerful body encased in the blue English jersey Mrs Davenant had given him, and from the compression of which his pleated skirt sprang out so ridiculously. Beside Kato on the divan lay a basket of ripe figs which he had brought her. Their two massive figures disproportionately filled the already overcrowded little room.

They regarded Julian gravely.

'I am going away,' he said, standing still before their scrutiny, as a pupil before his preceptors.

Kato bowed her head. They knew. They had discussed whether they should let him go, and had decided that he might be absent from Herakleion until the next elections.

'But you will return, Kyrie?'

Tsigaridis spoke respectfully, but with urgent authority, much in the tone a regent might adopt towards a youthful king.

'Of course I shall return,' Julian answered, and smiled and added, 'You mustn't lose faith, Tsantilas.'

The fisherman bowed with that dignity he inherited from unnamed but remotely ascending generations; he took his leave of Kato and the boy, shutting the door quietly behind him. Kato came up to Julian, who had turned away and was staring out of the window. From the height of this fourth story one looked down upon the peopled quay below, and saw distinctly the houses upon the distant Islands.

'You are sad,' she said.

She moved to the piano, which, like herself, was a great deal too big for the room, and which alone of all the pieces of furniture was not loaded with ornaments. Julian had often wondered, looking at the large expanse of lid, how Kato had so consistently resisted the temptation to put things upon it. The most he had ever seen there was a gilt basket of hydrangeas, tied with a blue ribbon, from which hung the card of the Premier.

He knew that within twenty-four hours he would be at sea, and that Herakleion as he would last have seen it--from the deck of the steamer, white, with many coloured sunblinds, and, behind it, Mount Mylassa, rising so suddenly, so threateningly, seemingly determined to crowd the man-built town off its narrow strip of coast into the water--Herakleion, so pictured, would be but a memory; within a week, he knew, he would be in England. He did not know when he would see Herakleion again. Therefore he abandoned himself, on this last evening, to Aphros, to the memory of Eve, and to romance, not naming, not linking the three that took possession of and coloured all the daylight of his youth, but quiescent, sitting on the floor, his knees clasped, and approaching again, this time in spirit, the island where the foam broke round the foot of the rocks and the fleet of little fishing-boats swayed like resting seagulls in the harbour. He scarcely noticed that, all this while, Kato was singing. She sang in a very low voice, as though she were singing a lullaby, and, though the words did not reach his consciousness, he knew that the walls of the room had melted into the warm and scented freedom of the terraces on Aphros when the vintage was at its height, and when the air, in the evening, was heavy with the smell of the grape. He felt Eve's fingers lightly upon his brows. He saw again her shadowy gray eyes, red mouth, and waving hair. He visualised the sparkle that crept into her eyes--strange eyes they were! deep-set, slanting slightly upwards, so ironical sometimes, and sometimes so inexplicably sad--when she was about to launch one of her more caustic and just remarks. How illuminating her remarks could be! they always threw a new light; but she never insisted on their value; on the contrary, she passed carelessly on to something else. But whatever she touched, she lit.... One came to her with the expectation of being stimulated, perhaps a little bewildered, and one was not disappointed. He recalled her so vividly--yet recollection of her could never be really vivid; the construction of her personality was too subtle, too varied; as soon as one had left her one wanted to go back to her, thinking that this time, perhaps, one would succeed better in seizing and imprisoning the secret of her elusiveness. Julian caught himself smiling dreamily as he conjured her up. He heard the murmur of her seductive voice,--

'I love you, Julian.'

He accepted the words, which he had heard often from her lips, dreamily as part of his last, deliberate evening, so losing himself in his dreams that he almost failed to notice when the music died and the notes of Kato's voice slid from the recitative of her peasant songs into conversation with himself. She left the music-stool and came towards him where he sat on the floor.

'Julian,' she said, looking down at him, 'your cousin Eve, who is full of perception, says you are so primitive that the very furniture is irksome to you and that you dispense with it as far as you can. I know you prefer the ground to a sofa.'

He became shy, as he instantly did when the topic of his own personality was introduced. He felt dimly that Eve, who remorselessly dragged him from the woods into the glare of sunlight, alone had the privilege. At the same time he recognised her methods of appropriating a characteristic, insignificant in itself, and of building it up, touching it with her own peculiar grace and humour until it became a true and delicate attribute, growing into life thanks to her christening of it; a method truly feminine, exquisitely complimentary, carrying with it an insinuation faintly exciting, and creating a link quite separately personal, an understanding, almost an obligation to prove oneself true to her conception....

'So you are leaving us?' said Kato, 'you are going to live among other standards, other influences, "_dont je ne connais point la puissance sur votre coeur_." How soon will it be before you forget? And how soon before you return? We want you here, Julian.'

'For the Islands?' he asked.

'For the Islands, and may I not say,' said Kato, spreading her hands with a musical clinking of all her bangles, 'for ourselves also? How soon will it be before you forget the Islands?' she forced herself to ask, and then, relapsing, 'Which will fade first in your memory, I wonder--the Islands? or Kato?'

'I can't separate you in my mind,' he said, faintly ill at ease.

'It is true that we have talked of them by the hour,' she answered, 'have we talked of them so much that they and I are entirely identified? Do you pay me the compliment of denying me the mean existence of an ordinary woman?'

He thought that by answering in the affirmative he would indeed be paying her the greatest compliment that lay within his power, for he would be raising her to the status of a man and a comrade. He said,--

'I never believed, before I met you, that a woman could devote herself so whole-heartedly to her patriotism. We have the Islands in common between us; and, as you know, the Islands mean more than mere Islands to me: a great many things to which I could never give a name. And I am glad, yes, so glad, that our friendship has been, in a way, so impersonal--as though I were your disciple, and this flat my secret school, from which you should one day discharge me, saying "Go!"'

Never had he appeared to her so hopelessly inaccessible as now when he laid his admiration, his almost religious idealisation of her at her feet.

He went on,--

'You have been so infinitely good to me; I have come here so often, I have talked so much; I have often felt, when I went away, that you, who were accustomed to clever men, must naturally....'

'Why not say,' she interrupted, 'instead of "clever men," "men of my own age? my own generation"?'

He looked at her doubtfully, checked. She was standing over him, her hands on her hips, and he noticed the tight circles of fat round her bent wrists, and the dimples in every joint of her stumpy hands.

'But why apologise?' she added, taking pity on his embarrassment, with a smile both forgiving and rueful for the ill she had brought upon herself. 'If you have enjoyed our talks, be assured I have enjoyed them too. For conversations to be as successful as ours have been, the enjoyment cannot possibly be one-sided. I shall miss them when you are gone. You go to England?'

After a moment she said,--

'Isn't it strange, when those we know so intimately in one place travel away to another place in which we have never seen them? What do I, Kato, know of the houses you will live in in England, or of your English friends? as some poet speaks, in a line I quoted to you just now, of all the influences _dont je ne connais pas la puissance sur votre coeur_! Perhaps you will even fall in love. Perhaps you will tell this imaginary woman with whom you are to fall in love, about our Islands?'

'No woman but you would understand,' he said.

'She would listen for your sake, and for your sake she would pretend interest. Does Eve listen when you talk about the Islands?'

'Eve doesn't care about such things. I sometimes think she cares only about herself,' he replied with some impatience.

'You ...' she began again, but, checking herself, she said instead, with a grave irony that was lost upon him, 'You have flattered me greatly to-day, Julian. I hope you may always find in me a wise preceptor. But I can only point the way. The accomplishment lies with you. We will work together?' She added, smiling, 'In the realms of the impersonal? A philosophic friendship? A Platonic alliance?'

When he left her, she was still, gallantly, smiling.