CHAPTER XIV.

(_From Reineke’s Note Book._)

MUTE ELOQUENCE.

Contrary to my expectations, I awoke on the morning after my arrival at Xinara refreshed, with only that sensation of fatigue in the limbs that makes it delightful to lie perfectly still and revel in the luxury of homespun and lavender-perfumed sheets. The bed was the softest I ever slept on, the room the prettiest and freshest I ever wakened in. Such light, such a cheerful display of linen as everywhere greeted my eyes! In the garden, by the drawn blind, I could see Persian lilacs, in which the birds had evidently built their nests, and down among the trees of the orchards thousands of others seemed to have congregated. The effect of their _aubade_ on this lovely winter morning was curious. It began by a soft twitter, which gradually deepened its volume, until it swelled upon mighty waves and beat frantically against the silver gates of the morning in a shower of sound. It shook the closed shutters like hail that lashes the earth outside. In the half haze of troubled sleep, I imagined, at first, that the heavens had suddenly opened in an unwonted downpour, but as soon as I was thoroughly awake, and glanced upon the dim world which slowly unfolded beneath the light of the breaking day, I understood and recognised the cause of this patter against the panes. The increasing red of the east began to sweep across the pallid sky, washed the lingering moon white, and enriched the zenith with a dash of warm blue. I got up and opened the nearest window, and then lay back to follow the movement of that impetuous swell of music, sustained with exquisite orchestral harmony. The sound seemed to travel round and round in a circle, continuously gathering force, and then burst into a flood of song. An indistinguishable tumult of wave with ever this strange, perpetual, circuitous movement, as if all the birds of all the gardens and woods had met, and were whirling round and round this spot of earth in some mad dance of wing. I think I must have slept again, or perhaps I lay in an open-eyed dream for some time. When I looked once more out of the window, I saw the bright pleasant little woman, who had welcomed me the night before, walk sturdily down the path that leads to the village, with her red water jar placed on her shoulder, one muscular brown arm flung round her head to support it. What a pleasure it was to watch her! She looked so secure, so contented, so seriously active, and there was a light in her eye which betrayed something more than cheerfulness,--a sense of humour, and a kind of still laugh just traced the faintest sympathetic line round the mouth. I supposed her to be the mother of that intolerable youth who had led my mule last night, and who served me as guide in my most memorable ride.

My restful solitude was broken by the entrance of Annunziata, carrying a little tray with coffee, an inviting roll called Koulouria, and some cigarettes. She placed it beside me, and then touched my hand softly, and stood and smiled upon me with maternal benignity.

“You are rested, Kyrie?” she asked.

“Quite fresh, and ready for another ride,” I answered, laughing.

When I had partaken of this sober fare, she begged me to be still awhile, and held a light and a cigarette for me. I am fond enough of a recumbent attitude, and nothing loth, accepted the proffered sedative. Then she trotted off with her inimitable air of sturdy serenity, and hardly had she left me to my own contented thoughts when the door opened, and in walked Aristides. Is it not unreasonable to dislike a man, for no other reason than that his exterior and certain tricks of manner revolt you? The fellow is really a decent fellow, but he has a way of lifting the pressure of his lithe frame from one foot to another, and of running his forefinger along his shapely nose, that provokes me to the verge of exasperation. I watch for these tricks with an unaccountable impatience, and when they come, I am invariably harassed with the suppressed impetuosity of physical rage, and expect before long to fling something at him. He entered the room with an air of polished familiarity, took a chair, uninvited, as if he were a prince of the blood whose condescension singularly honoured me, and smiled in large affability and tolerance as he began to roll a cigarette. After a pause he remarked casually, with a very apparent desire to set me at ease:

“Vera nice counthry, Ingland, like vera much I do Ingleesh--large place, I hear.”

I nodded, and patiently waited to learn why I should be attacked in execrable English.

“I knew Ingleeshman in Smyrna. He vera nice man, touch vera well piano. You touch piano?”

I admitted an innocent weakness that way, and continued to smoke complacently, tickled by the humour of the situation.

“You are Ingleesh, sarr?”

“I have not that honour.”

“Ah, vous êtes Français?”

I failed to claim that great and much belauded nationality, whereupon Aristides, indefatigable in the pursuit of knowledge, and anxious to confound me with his linguistic skill, burst out radiantly:

“Sie sind Deutsch.”

“If you will condescend to speak your own language and spare me your exasperating murder of Continental tongues, it may be of some slight advantage to you and me,” I cried.

My unaccustomed violence in nowise discomposed him. He proved his philosophic superiority by blandly smiling, as if to turn aside a wrath he considered childish and inconsequent, rolled another cigarette, leant forward, lit it, and observed, with an air of casual approval, that it was a pleasing surprise to meet a foreigner who could speak Greek. He then proceeded to question me with the savage candour and curiosity of his race. He was eager to learn my income, its source, the cost of the clothes I wore, if they were purchased in Paris or in London, if I admired the Greeks and Greece, if I were married, or disposed to marry a Greek, if my parents were alive, and how many brothers and sisters I had. To those singular questions I replied curtly, contemptuously resolved to see how far he would push his indiscreet investigations. Then when I grew tired, I proceeded to obtain a little information on my own account. From the communicative Aristides I learned that the amiable doctor, who so wisely recommended me the bosom of nature and innocence, is for inscrutable reasons recognised as the King of Tenos, that he is a member of King George’s Parliament, and by claim of obstruction unillumined by a rushlight of intelligence or motive, is called the Parnell of Greece.

My host, it appears, is a more interesting character. His attitude towards the moderns is that of unsparing contempt. He lives with the ancients, and entertains a very lively horror of that superior people, the French. His daughter is reputed to be a handsome and cultivated young woman, to whose hand every unmarried male of the island aspires. She has an exquisite name, Inarime. When I got rid of Aristides, I lay back and conjectured a variety of visions of the owner of such a name. In turn I dismissed from my mind the amiable maiden, the attractive peasant girl, the chill statue and the haughty pedant, the Arab, the Turk, the Italian of the Levant. Not one of these seemed to fit in with my ideal of Inarime, and the thought that she had left Xinara before my arrival fretted me strangely with a sense of baffled desire.

“Just an old pagan philosopher,” Aristides had said, speaking of Selaka, “who keeps the handsomest girl of Tenos locked away from everyone, as if a glance were a stain. He seems to regard her as a goddess, and nobody here worthy to look upon her divinity. That is why he sent her away before you came. He distrusts you and every other Christian. Now, if you happened to be a Pagan, I have not the slightest doubt he would be willing to marry you right off to Inarime.”

Why should this impertinent suggestion of Aristides have shot the blood of anger and shame into my face? And yet it did, and the heat remained after the fellow had left me to my own reflections. I do not think that I am specially nervous or sensitive, but the shock of that idea touched me with a force that made me shrink as from a prophecy. I dreaded to meet Inarime, and almost resented her exile on my account. There may be something flattering to our masculine vanity in the fact that a beautiful girl has been sent into banishment on our account, but this balsam did not heal a certain dull ache of dismay and resentment.

In this unreasonable mood Selaka found me. He inquired after my health with measured courtliness, and suggested a variety of additions to my comfort. I was dressed now, and reclining on a sofa. Without hesitation I followed his advice to breathe the air of the terrace awhile. The broad sunshine and the open-air serenity of the scene soothed and calmed me, and I felt I could have been content to sit thus for hours watching the flapping shadows of the windmills upon the sunny hills, under the spell of the noon-day silence of nature. My host sat beside me, the inevitable cigarette between his fingers, with a sharp but kindly glance turned occasionally upon me. I imagine the question of my nationality was perplexing him, and he was, perhaps, seeking an occasion to elicit direct information from me on this point. But this did not conceal from me that the normal expression of his fine dark eyes showed the glow of an impersonal enthusiasm, doubtless lit by his long devotion to the ancients. By reason of his rough-hewn and unfinished features, he looked rather a simple good-natured peasant, removed from the sordid conflict and merely animal sensations of husbandry, than a learned pedagogue or an earth-removed philosopher; a man fond of questioning the stars and his own soul, but not indifferent to the delights of shepherd-life; capable of sparing a daisy and stepping out of the way of a burdened ant, when he walked abroad with Plato or Thucydides in his hand. It struck me that Inarime could be no vulgar glittering jewel to be thus carefully shielded from the irreverent gaze by this sage of Tenos.

“I think you cannot be French,” he said, at last.

“Reineke is a German name,” I answered, evasively, for it was not my wish to court coldness by an avowal of my nationality.

“Ah, it is well. I do not like the French.”

“And yet your countrymen adore them,” I said, and laughed.

“So they do, so they do--to their sorrow and shame.”

“How can that be? Is France not admittedly the first nation of the civilised world?” I exclaimed.

“That depends upon what is understood by civilisation. If you mean humbug, vice, vanity and bluster, infamous plays and vaudevilles, immoral literature generally, you may crown France with a triple crown of shameless glory. But if you mean truth, good manners, purity, sense and honourable restraint in all things, as the old world understood it, then France is below all other countries to-day. It is because Greece is so infatuated with France that I completely despair of her future.”

“It seems to me that you are charging an innocent country with the vices of a depraved town. France is not Paris, and Paris is the sinner.”

“Paris! France! It is one. The country looks on complacently, and approves the nameless follies of the city. It makes no effort to impede her fatal career, and is not dismayed to see her, with her band of lascivious poets and novelists, dance madly towards her doom, in the degradation of decay, with a weak and dissolute smile on her worn lips.”

“Do you condemn all her writers?”

“Upon moral and artistic grounds I condemn all unreservedly. You are one of those who, perhaps, call Victor Hugo great. I do not. ‘Words, words, words,’ as Hamlet says, and nothing to come at them. Chip away all the superfluous decorations and excrescences of ‘Notre Dame,’ and measure it by the severe restrictions of Greek Art. You have twenty pages, strengthened, purified, with only essential action and speech, instead, of two long volumes of intolerable verbiage. No, sir; France’s sentence has been pronounced. One day Germany will sweep her away, with her vices and her graces, and they, I admit, are many. She is in a debilitated and anæmic state, starting up in spasms of febrile vitality, and the sooner her destiny is accomplished, the better for us and all other such feebly imitative peoples. Have you stayed long in Athens?”

“No, in fact I have seen nothing as yet of the town.”

“Ah, then you have yet to learn why I, and every true lover of Greece, should hate the name of France. The men and women in Athens speak bad Greek, though there is no reason why their speech should not be as pure as Plutarch’s. Every one chatters in bad French, with what object it would puzzle the Lord himself to discover. The women rave about Ohnet, a vulgar writer whose style even I can know to be execrable. Like the illustrious Hugo, the men read Zola, and are thereby much improved. There are French vaudevilles and _cafés-chantants_; our army is superintended by Frenchmen, who draw large salaries for the privilege of laughing at us. Paris condescends to send our women its cast-off fashions at enormously disproportionate prices. Athens is, in fact, a small, dull, feeble Paris,--Paris in caricature, without the fascination of its many-sided life.”

He stopped suddenly, half-ashamed and slightly flushed after his burst of indignation. When we had smoked a cigarette apiece, I made careless mention of his brother, and asked about his family. Constantine, he told me, had long ago married a handsome Levantine who, after a few months of conjugal discord, had attempted to shoot him, and then betaken herself to Constantinople with a native of Syra. This disaster had naturally tended to convince Constantine of the nothingness of marriage, and he had since remained in single inconsolation. Pericles himself had been blessed with a wife, picked up at Ischia, as lovely in soul as in body, but here again was demonstrated the singular fleetingness of wedded bliss. This pearl among wives melted away in the crucial test of childbirth--and Selaka was left, bereaved and truly forlorn, with a baby girl upon his hands.

Later on in the afternoon Selaka joined me, just as my senses were lazily shaking themselves out of the thrall of siesta. He asked me if I were interested in the study of ancient Greek, and upon my enthusiastic affirmative, his face brightened and his manner immediately assumed a cordiality and a pleasure that charmed me. He invited me to accompany him in his walk through his orchard and vineyard; and truly a delight it was to me to be brought face to face with a nature so simple and a mind so exquisitely cultivated as his. Perhaps it would be thought that such exclusive recognition of the past and such a profound and unutterable contempt for the present were narrow and pedantic. That it tended to lessen his interest in humanity cannot be denied. But how very precious, from sincerity and undecorated speech, were the thoughts to which he gave expression during our leisurely walk! Much as I delighted, however, in the ancients, and deeply interesting as was any discussion upon the old Greek writers, I could not get out of my head the one word “Inarime.” I was haunted with the wish, nay, almost the need, to hear something of her, and at last, after a pause in our conversation, I hazarded the question:

“Is your daughter married?”

Selaka fixed me with a quick, suspicious glance, and said, coldly,

“My daughter is young; it will be time enough yet to think of marrying her!”

“Then she does not live with you?” I persisted, with pardonable indelicacy.

“She is at present staying with her aunt at Mousoulou,” said Selaka.

I ought to have let the subject drop upon these strong hints, but I went on:

“I am told she is very beautiful.”

“You have been told the truth,” said Selaka.

I saw that further questioning would be indiscreet. However discursive he might be upon the subject of the ancient Greeks, his reticence upon the subject of Inarime was not to be shaken.

Thus passed my three first days in Xinara. Aristides invariably wounded and offended me by his impertinent freedom and his still more impertinent confidences. It appears Aristides is one of Inarime’s admirers, and being promoted to the rank of chief muleteer to his mistress, naturally regards himself as having scored above all his rivals. The early morning was generally spent by me in exploring the neighbouring hills alone. In the afternoon I accompanied Selaka round his small estate. A tranquil, healthy existence it was, and under its influences my late fever and languor left me. With recurrent health I gained in vitality and spirits, and had I not been pursued by an indefinable curiosity--a sense of baffled hope,--I should ere this have been measuring my forces for a return to Athens.

* * * * * * *

It was the fourth day since my arrival from Tenos, when I opened the door of the bright sitting-room with the intention of passing an hour or two among Selaka’s choice books. Looking out upon the desolate Castor,--seeming the more desolate because of the cruel joy of the sunshine that so ruthlessly exposed its empty flanks, my ear was attracted by the sound of hysterical sobbing and half-angry expostulation, that came from the courtyard through the opposite open window. I walked across the room, wondering what could have happened to disturb the active serenity of Annunziata. My eyes fell upon a village woman, whose withered, sunburnt face was lifted in tearful prayer to another, who sat with her back to me, leaning over a little table. There was something exquisitely youthful and gracious in the attitude,--of majestic youth in the line of the figure clad, as I could see, in some dark yellow stuff. But the small head was completely hidden in a muslin kerchief of spotless white, with a Turkish border of yellow and crimson.

There was a restraint and firmness--an unconscious grace in the pose, and I felt my pulses quicken with eagerness to see the face. Could this be a young judge measuring awful depths of iniquity in a criminal? A cold Diana reproving undue tenderness, a wise Athena rebuking folly? I listened. The villager’s brogue and voluble utterances were difficult to follow. But I gathered that there was question of a letter that had been written, and that the dictator’s mind had altered, and that she now wanted one written in an entirely different spirit.

“I am so sorry, Kyria. He will never come back to me if he gets that letter, and what does anything matter to me as long as he remains away? Tell him that I am not angry with him; that I will bear anything rather than that he should not come back to me. If he would only leave her and come away from Smyrna! Tell him anything, young lady, that will touch him,--I am so lonely, so weary of waiting for him!” I heard the woman say.

“But, my poor woman, what proof have I that, if I rewrite the letter in this new mood, you will not be sorry for the leniency in another hour, and implore me to write an angrier letter for you?” The voice was clear and soft, with a curious throat sound that somehow carried with it the idea of velvet. Something in it seemed to draw me with an ache of desire to see the speaker. I acted upon an unaccountable and irresistible impulse. It compelled me in a kind of dreamy expectation down the marble steps, and, standing with my hand upon the top of the pillar, close to her, my intense gaze was an equal compulsion to her.

She moved her head round slowly, and our eyes met. Was it the shock of recognition, the awful bliss of surprised surrender, the force of revelation, undreamed, unawaited, yet not the less complete because of its suddenness, that held our glances in a steady dismay?

I laid down my arms at once happy, contented, prone, in a sacred servitude; but she, I could divine, with the delicate instinct of maidenhood, strove to struggle and release her soul. But no effort of even her imperious will could move her eyes from mine, upon which they rested in the mute eloquence of dazzled entreaty, shining as if they were filled with light. And then slowly their golden hue faded into a wistful brown, and slowly, grudgingly drooped their lids,--and mine, as if by instinct, dropped. It was only afterwards that I could remember the glory of her resplendent youth, and dwell upon the flash of her great beauty.

She laid her hand upon the head of the kneeling, sobbing woman, and said:

“I cannot write your letter to-day, Katinko, but come to me at Mousoulou,” and then turning, looked at me again, this time with less trouble and dismay through the unfathomable tenderness of her gaze,--looked at me steadily, commandingly, unconsciously reminding me that she was sovereign lady, and that not one inch of her sovereignty would she forego for me. I humbly accepted the dismissal of her eyes, without a word of protest or prayer, though the pulses of my body rang with frantic urgence for both. I stood to let her pass me, and was strong enough to resist the temptation to touch her hand as a suppliant might, to prostrate myself before her as a servant. But no; our attitude must be that of equals, something told me. If she be queen then must I be king; sovereign, too. Not servant, Inarime. King of you, as you, beloved, are henceforth queen of me!

I went to my room and tried to think. But thought was vain as action--I could only feel. Feel that I had seen Inarime; that my soul had touched hers; that there was henceforth no life apart for either of us. While I sat thus, dismantled of reality, and full of an overpowering joy, I heard the harsh voice of Aristides checking the impetuosity of his mule, and the words “Kyria” and “Mousoulou” caught my wandering attention.

I drew near to the window in a thrill of alarm. Inarime was seated on the mule, with no other shelter from the beating sunbeams than the white kerchief bound round her head. A strong impulse swept through me to forbid this departure, to cry out passionately against the injustice of flight and desertion. But this folly would but imperil my position. What right had I to usurp authority and claim upon the surprised declaration of her eloquent eyes? And there came upon me a sense of the perfect tact of her action, its true fitness in accord with the dignity of her sex. Pursuit was for me,--not flight, but a delicate, cold aloofness was hers by divine privilege. Not other would I have her than sensitively alive to the gracelessness of serene and easy conquest. And I was not hurt, was I, by this withdrawal from the new light of day, for her will must ever now be my own.