Part 2

But to-morrow meant nothing to Zacharia.

"What, 'Attina? What? Give it to me!"

"Not now. To-morrow. Come then! Come and see all the little boats!"

When they reached the square, Mattina sat down to rest for a moment on the deep stone trough built round the fountain under the old eucalyptus tree. Most of the women had already filled their red earthen pitchers and were carrying them away on their shoulders.

Only one old woman was still leaning against the trunk of the tree, waiting for her pitcher to fill itself. As she saw Mattina she stepped forward.

"It is well I find you. Tell your aunt that the clothes are finished. She can send you to take them."

"I will tell it to her."

"It is to-morrow you leave?"

"Yes, it is to-morrow."

"And who takes you?"

"I go with Yanni, the messenger."

"Listen, Mattina," said the old woman, "I have stitched you a pocket into the brown frock. In the town it is not like here; sometimes you may have some money, or someone may send you a letter; you must have somewhere to put things."

Mattina's eyes brightened.

"A pocket!" she exclaimed, "like the big maids have!"

"You are well nigh a big maid now!"

The word pocket reminded Mattina of her sugared almonds.

"Kyra Sophoula," she begged, "see, I have some sweets here. A sailor gave them to me, he said they were from a christening. Take them, you, and hide them away, and to-morrow after I go, take this little one to your house for a while, and give them to him. He cries when I leave him; and the others at the house, they torment him always. Do this for me, and may your children live to you!"

The old woman took the twist of muslin and put it into her apron pocket.

"Surely, I will, my daughter, surely I will." Then she lifted her pitcher which had filled, gurgled, and overflowed, set it carefully on the ledge, and turned to Zacharia who was struggling for what remained of his koulouri, with a woolly black puppy.

"Come here, you little one!"

Kyra Sophoula was a funny old woman, as brown and as wrinkled as a quince that has been hung up too long, but children never ran away from her, even the tiny ones. Zacharia successfully rescued the last remnant of the koulouri from the puppy's teeth, and came, looking up at her with round black baby eyes.

"If a good little boy who does not cry ... a golden little boy, comes with me to my house to-morrow, I shall have ... two sugar comfits, and a whole dried fig to give him! And if this golden little child never cries at all, there will be some more comfits the next day! I wonder if I shall find a good little boy, like that?"

Zacharia rubbed his black curls confidingly against the old woman's skirts, and murmured:--

"Me!"

"Ah, we shall see fine things, that golden boy and I!" then turning to Mattina:--

"Tell me; your uncle Anastasi and his wife, have they found a good house in which you may serve?"

"Not yet; my uncle sent a letter to say that it would be better if I did not go till September, because there are more people who change servants at that time, but my uncle Yoryi here, he says that I must go to my uncle Anastasi's now at once, and let them find a house for me to serve, when they can. He says he will keep the little one, but that I am a big girl, and that he has fed me long enough. It is true," she added gravely, "that my hunger is great."

Kyra Sophoula nodded her head.

"Yoryi is a poor man," she said, "also, he has daughters to marry."

"Is it far to Athens?" asked Mattina.

"Myself--I have never been there, but Metro has told me that one does not reach the town till long after noon."

"Kyra Sophoula, do you think that after some time, when I earn money and can pay the fare on the steamer myself, that where I serve they will let me return for a few days to see if the little one be well?"

The old woman shrugged her shoulders.

"Do I know?"

"But if I tell them how little he is, and that we have no mother?"

"Listen, my daughter!" said Kyra Sophoula, as both she and Mattina shouldered their pitchers and turned towards the dark arch, Zacharia pattering behind them on little bare brown feet, "listen! there is one thing that you must put well into your head, that in the town it is not like here on the island, where everyone knows you and who your father and mother were. I know, because Andriana served, and Calliope served, and my Maroussa served also for a time. In the town when they take you as a servant and pay you a wage for serving, it is work that they want from you, as much as they can get. They do not know you, nor do they mind whether you like to work, nor whether you are well or ill, as long as your legs will hold you; neither do they care whether your heart be glad or troubled. But you, you must remember always that your father was a good man, and that your mother was a hard-working housewife who always kept her floors well scrubbed, and kneaded her own bread, and for whom all had a good word; and you must do the work that they give you, and not be thinking all day long of when you can leave it. As for the child, be easy! Kyra Kanella has not a bad heart, and I will see him often, and perhaps some time when the schoolmaster has leisure I will ask him to send you a letter. But you, be a good girl in the town, and mind well that you never touch aught without it be given to you, even if you have to go hungry, for as they say, 'Better to lose your eye than your good name.'"

II

It was a forlorn little figure that knelt on a bench of the out-going steamer next morning. A little figure clad for the journey in a short outgrown print frock, with an old gray jacket which had once belonged to her aunt, tightly buttoned over it.

Mattina was looking with wide open eyes at all the familiar landmarks as they seemed to glide past her; at the big clock tower of the Naval School with its waving flag, at the little coffee-house of the White Cat down on the shore, at the Red House on the hill, at the Garden on the mainland where she had often been with her mother to help in the picking of the lemons, at the white blur far away in the hills, which was the village of Damala. But when the steamer turned round the corner by the lighthouse and Poros was hidden from her sight, she twisted herself round and sat down on the bench, her back huddled up like an old woman's, and her eyes fixed on the deck.

When the steamer stopped at Methana,[6] she stood up and watched the shore, but it already seemed strange and foreign to her; the gray rocks, bare of pine trees, the line of bathing houses, the bright yellow colour of the water close to the land, which someone said came from the sulphur of the baths, the big white hotel, the strange boatmen rowing backwards and forwards; all was new and in some curious way terrifying. The boatmen shouting to each other seemed to be shouting at her, and the sun shining on the sea made so many glittering little pinpricks of light that she closed her eyes not to see them.

After Methana, the steamer began to move a great deal more than it had done at first, and she went back to her bench for fear she should fall. For a short time she was interested in a little toddling boy belonging to a woman who seemed asleep, her kerchief shadowing the upper part of her face. The boy was not at all like Zacharia, being much fatter, and with hair which was almost yellow, but he took bites out of his koulouri all round, just as Zacharia did. Mattina made timid advances to him, but he ran away from her to a white-bearded old priest on the next bench, and began to wipe his wet little mouth and hands, all over koulouri crumbs, on the black robes. Mattina expected that the old priest would be angry, but he only smiled and patted the little yellow head.

While she watched them, the priest's black figure seemed to mount up, up, up, against the glittering sea, and then to sink down again as though it were never coming up. It hurt her to look at it, and she folded her arms on the back of the bench and laid her head on them. Perhaps she was going to sleep; she had been up very early that morning; but she did not feel at all sleepy, only very hot and miserable. She began to long for a drink of water; perhaps she was thirsty, but she felt afraid to move. Her uncle Yoryi when he had put her on board had said, "Do not leave your seat, or someone may take it."

The woman with the child had a pitcher with her; it stood on the deck beside a big bundle and a little shining green trunk, studded with brass nails; and the mouth of the pitcher was stopped by a bunch of myrtle leaves. Mattina ventured to nudge the woman's elbow.

"Kyra," she asked, "may I drink from your 'stamna'?"

The woman opened her eyes with a little groan and, thrusting her arm into an opening of the big bundle, pulled out a short thick tumbler and handed it to her. Mattina poured some water into it and drank, but somehow it tasted bitter, not like Poros water. She put the tumbler back without even wiping it, and sank back on her bench.

How hot it was, and how miserable she felt!

She bent forward and hid her head in her arms.

It was so, that Yanni the messenger found her a little later when they were outside Ægina.[7]

"Bah!" he exclaimed, pulling her head back, "what a colour is this? You are as yellow as a Good Friday candle! The sea has spoiled you, I see! Your head is giddy. Here, lie down! Put your head back on this bundle! You will be better so."

Mattina made no resistance, but as she fell back she murmured:--

"It is not my head, it is my stomach which is giddy."

It went on getting so much giddier that when at last they arrived at Piræus[8] Yanni had to carry her down the side of the steamer to the little boat and when she was lifted out on the quay she could scarcely stand. However, the fresh air and the walk to the railway station revived her.

The railway carriage in which they traveled up to Athens was very crowded, and the fat woman sitting next to Mattina seemed very cross.

"Why do they not put more carriages?" she enquired of no one in particular. "We are jammed as flat here as squashed mosquitoes." But to Mattina who had never even ridden in a cart in her life, it was wonderful. The swift rushing, the bump, bump of the carriages, the man with a gold band on his cap who looked at the tickets and gave them back again, and who said to Yanni while he was searching for theirs, "Come, now; hurry! The new day will dawn by the time you find it!" ... the stopping at Phalerum[9] and at the Theseum[10] before they got out at the Monastiraki[11] Station.

Then there was the street-car; the rush through narrow streets at first, and then through wider and wider ones, till they stopped at a wonderful big square full of people. In all her eleven years, Mattina had never imagined so many men and women and children and horses and carriages together. The square seemed to her surrounded by palaces, till Yanni showed her the one in which the King lived, and over which the flag was flying.

Then the car went on again, and the streets got narrower again, and at last Yanni got off the little platform at the back of the car and Mattina scrambled after him.

"Come!" he said, "your uncle's oven is quite close by here and I have work to do after I leave you."

Up one narrow steep street, a turn to the left, along a still narrower street almost like a Poros one but far, far dustier, and they came to a stop before a small baker's shop. On the open slab of the window were quantities of ring-shaped loaves, and heaped up piles of oven-cakes covered with squares of pink muslin. A man was counting some smaller loaves in the dimness of the back of the shop, and a tidy stout woman in a big blue apron was standing at the door.

"Good day to you," said Yanni, "I bring you your niece from Poros."

"Bah!" exclaimed the woman, "has she come to-day? I thought they said on Saturday."

Yanni shrugged his shoulders.

"Do I know what they said? Yoryi gave her to me this morning, to bring straight to you. What I am told, I do."

"It does not matter," said the woman quickly, "it does not matter at all. Welcome, my girl! Come in! Come in!" Then turning towards the back of the shop, "Anastasi, your niece has arrived!"

Her husband started, left his loaves and came forward. He was a thin man with stooping shoulders, and a look in his eyes which reminded Mattina of her mother and made a lump come into her throat so that she could scarcely answer when he spoke to her.

"Welcome, my maid, for your mother's sake," he said. "When I saw you in Poros you were so high only; now you have grown a big maid! And Kanella, and Yoryi, and their children, and the little one, are they well? How did you leave them?"

"They are well," stammered Mattina, "they salute you."

Her uncle Anastasi turned to his wife:--

"Demetroula," he said, "take the child in; she will be hungry; look to her while I pay Yanni for his trouble."

Her aunt took Mattina into a little room which opened on the courtyard, and taking her bundle from her, pushed it under a big bed in the corner. Mattina had never seen her before. The poor do not take journeys for pleasure, or for the sake of visiting their relations. But her new aunt had a kind round face and pretty shiny brown hair which one could see quite well, as she did not wear a kerchief; and when she spoke she smiled very often, so that Mattina did not feel shy with her.

"Come here to the window," she said, "and let me look better at you. Ah, yes; it is your poor father that your face brings back to one, not your mother at all. Now, my girl," and she let her hand fall on Mattina's shoulder as she spoke, "let us say things clearly! You did well to come, and it is with joy that your uncle and I would keep you to live here with us. How should it not be so, since God has given us no children? A piece of bread and a mattress there would always be for you. But we are poor people, and, ... that would be all; so it would be a sin to keep you with us. It is myself I injure when I say this, for you would be a great help to me in the house. But that you should work, and get only your bread for it!--no, that must not be! We have spoken with your uncle, and he thinks as I do. What do you say also? Do you not wish to earn money?"

"Yes, my aunt."

"Well, then, see what good luck you have! We thought that not till September could a house be found, but only yesterday the boy from the grocer's round the street, told me that his brother who works for a butcher in the Piræus Road, knows a house where they are looking for a serving maid. It is a good house, he says, where they buy meat every day; there are only two small children, and the master has a shop of his own in the big street of shops. The lady, he said, prefers a girl from the islands who has not as yet served, and she will give ten drachmæ[12] a month and dress her. So that you will have naught to spend and we can put all your money in the People's Bank for you. Will not that be well?"

"Yes, my aunt."

"Good!" said Kyra Demetroula, "I will take you there to-morrow early, to speak with the lady. Now come and eat! There is plenty left of the artichoke stew, and I will warm it up for you."

III

So, early the next morning, after the boy from the grocer's round the street had given the necessary directions, they found themselves in the neighbourhood of the Piræus Road, and Mattina toiled after her aunt, up narrow dusty streets in search of the house where a new serving maid was wanted.

She was very hot and uncomfortable, for her aunt had insisted on her wearing her new brown frock with the pocket in it, as being by far the best in her bundle. This it certainly was, but also very thick and warm and the heat was coming fast that year. Though the Saint's day of St. Constantine and St. Helen was till some time off, the May wreaths--which are hung over all balconies or front doors of houses in Athens on the first day of May and left hanging there until replaced by the fresh wreath, the following year--were already hanging withered and yellow from the house doors and balconies. After many wrong turnings, and many inquiries at neighbouring grocers' and bakers' shops, the aunt and the niece stopped before the wide open door of a house in a street behind the Piræus Road. The narrow entry certainly looked as if it were a long time since the last serving maid had scrubbed it. A woman with a long face and a fat body was standing just inside with a packet of macaroni in her hands.

"What do you want?" she called out sharply.

Kyra Demetroula advanced a step.

"Good day to you, Kyria," and as she said it she pushed Mattina a little forward. "They told us that you wanted a girl to serve you, and because we have heard much good of your house, I have brought you my niece."

"Your niece! What? That child! Much work she can do! Who sent you?"

"It was the butcher in the big road here, who told us that...."

"Come inside! Let me see her better! I should never think of such a small maid but that it is a bad season for servants, and that I have been three days without one." Then turning to Mattina, "How old are you?"

Now no one had ever thought of telling Mattina her age; she was a big girl, since her mother had often trusted her of late to make the bread, and that was all she knew about it. She looked up at the woman and noticed that she had little black eyes like currants, a nose that went in before it came out, and a mouth that had no lips; then she quietly answered her question by another one.

"How should I know my years?"

Her aunt interposed hurriedly:--

"She must be fourteen, Kyria."

"Fourteen! Vegetable marrows! She is not even twelve! From where is she?"

"From Poros."

"Poros! I have had many serving-maids from Andros, and some from Tenos, and one came from Crete, but from Poros ... h'm...."

"It is a beautiful island!" returned Mattina, flushing angrily that anyone should "H'm" at her island. "It has hills and trees down to the sea, and lemon woods, and big fig trees, and the Sleeper, such a high mountain as you never saw, and the sea all round everywhere."

"How should the sea not be round everywhere on an island? Is the girl an idiot?" and the woman looked at Kyra Demetroula.

"She has but just come from there," ventured the latter. "Have sympathy with her; she has not yet learned town speech."

The woman sniffed.

"Well, what can you do?"

"I can do much."

"What?"

"I can scrub boards till they are quite white, I can wash clothes, I can knead three okes[13] of dough at a time, I can weave yarn at the loom and I can row in a big boat with both oars together."

The woman laughed.

"Truly, that will be very useful here! You can row the master to the shop, every morning."

Mattina looked at her pityingly; she had never before heard people say things that meant something else.

"That is foolish talk, ..." she began, but her aunt pushed her aside hurriedly:--

"She is very strong, Kyria; when her poor mother, God rest her soul, lay for three months on her mattress, Mattina here kept all the house clean and looked after her little brother as well. Take her, and you will never repent it."

Just at that moment a hand organ stopped outside in the street, and began to play the valse from the Dollar Princess. Mattina, with never a look at the two women, who went on talking, ran out of the passage to the open street door. All the music she had ever heard in her life had been the harsh tuneless tunes which men sang sometimes in Poros at the tavern after they had been drinking, or at best the little folk songs which the officers of the Naval School sang to the accompaniment of a guitar on moonlight nights. This beautiful swinging tune coming out of the tall box when the man turned a handle, was quite new, and she stood there listening with wide open eyes, her arms hanging loosely on either side of her, and her lips apart. So intent was she that at first she did not hear her aunt calling her.

"Mattina! Mattina! Where has the child gone? Mattina! Mattina, I tell you! Do you not hear?"

"I hear," she answered at last, retracing her steps reluctantly.

"Come, my child; all is arranged. This good Kyria says she will take you and teach you many things. She gives only eight drachmæ a month now, because she wanted a bigger girl. I do not know, that is to say, whether your uncle will like you to come for so little, but...."

"Of course," put in the fat woman, "she will have her shoes, a woolen dress in the winter, two print ones in summer, and her present at New Year."

As she walked back to the baker's shop with her aunt, Mattina was busy thinking. The dresses did not interest her very much, though she hoped that one of them might be a pink one, but the present at New Year, that was another thing! She knew all about presents, though she had never received one herself. When Panouria, old Lenio's Panouria, had been married to Theophani the shoemaker, did not her father make her a present of a big mirror with a broad gold frame all round it? This mirror had been brought from Piræus, and Mattina had seen the men taking it carefully out of its wooden case, and had heard the neighbours who were standing around, saying that it was a present to Panouria from her father. Did not Stavro, the son of Pappa Thanassi, send a present to his mother from America, a big rocking chair all covered with red velvet? Did not the little ladies from the Red House on the hill once give a present to Antigone, who lived in the small house near their gate, when she was so ill, a wonderful doll with yellow hair, that opened and shut its eyes like a real Christian? Yes, she knew all about presents! They were beautiful things which were not really necessary to every-day life, but which people who had much money gave you to make your heart joyful. Later on, when her aunt related to her uncle all that the new Kyria had said, adding:--

"I could not get more from her than eight drachmæ for the child; she looks of the kind that counts every lepton,"[14] Mattina had said:--

"But there will also be a present at New Year!"

And her aunt had replied in a funny voice,--"Oh, yes! And a fine present that will be I am sure!"

Then Mattina's joy was complete. Not only was she to have a present, but her aunt had said she was sure it would be a fine one; and surely she knew all about town ways, and the kind of presents that are given there. Mattina, you see, was not used to people who said one thing, in fun, and meant another. She often thought of that present, and of what she would like it to be, if she might choose. And certainly the poor maid required the comfort of this thought in the long dreary days which followed the one when she had been left with her bundle at the house where she was to serve.

It was not the hard work she minded. She had had plenty of that in Poros; scrubbing, weaving, bread-making which makes the arms so tired, carrying heavy burdens till one's back feels as if it would break in two; all this she knew, but it had been at home in her own island in Poros, surrounded by people who knew her and had known her father and mother, and who had a good word for her now and then. And when work was over, she had been free to run wild among the pines and on the sea-shore. But work in town never seemed to be over.