Part 3

Her mother and Kyra Sophoula had often called her a good little worker, and strong and quick, but in Athens her mistress was always telling her she had never seen such a clumsy child in her life. Perhaps she may have been awkward at first, and did break a plate or two, when it came to washing up basins full of greasy pans, and platters, and plates, and knives, and forks all muddled up together. But necessity compelling,--and the difficulty of dodging a blow on the head, when one's arms are dipped in soap-suds, and one is standing on a shaky stool,--made her learn pretty fast how to be careful. Also, at home, Zacharia had long ago pattered after her on his little bare feet, but here in Athens, "Bebeko" the smaller of her mistress's two boys who was nearly a year older, always cried to be carried when she took them out, and Mattina found that to carry a fat, squirming, cross boy of three, and have another of five hanging heavily on her arm or skirts, was far worse than the heaviest load of sticks she had ever borne.

May melted into June, and June into July, and the days grew hotter and hotter, and longer and longer, and the longer they grew the more time there was for work, and the less for sleep. Mattina's mattress was in a little dark room half way up the stairs, and as soon as it was light in the mornings, her mistress would pound on the floor above, with a walking stick which she kept beside her bed, for the little maid to get up, sweep the rooms, brush the master's clothes, and prepare his coffee for him before he went to his shop; and in June and July it is light very early indeed.

Later on in the morning, Mattina used to bring out a big table cover to shake outside the front door, and her gesture as she shook it, had anyone cared to watch her, was strong, decided and thorough. One could see that she would grow into a strong capable woman; that she would know how to lift things, how to handle them, how to fold them; that whatever she touched would be the better for her touching. And as she shook the dust out, while the hot sun beat down upon her head, she would close her eyes and try to fancy that the whistle of the distant Kiphissia[15] train was the whistle of the morning steamer coming into the bay of Poros and that she need only open her eyes to see the glittering blue water before her, and the fishing boats with the white and red sails gliding across it; but when she opened them she only saw potato peels and pieces of old lettuce floating forlornly on the dirty stream of water beside the sidewalk. This stream was here because there was a public tap round the corner of the street, and the slatternly women who went there for water, the heels of their loose down-trodden slippers tap-tapping on the pavement as they walked, generally neglected to close it.

One evening, when the food for supper was not enough, Mattina's mistress sent her out to the grocer's in the Piræus Road to buy some sardines; and while she was waiting to be served, she noticed four men sitting outside the shop around a little table. One of the men was strumming a guitar, and suddenly very softly they began to sing all together. They sang the "tsopanoulo," that song of the "shepherd boy" which Mattina had so often heard the young officers singing as they rowed themselves about the bay on moonlit nights "at home."

She leaned against the door of the shop and closed her eyes very tight.

"I will not look," she thought, "I will only listen, and it will be for a little as if I were back in my island."

And because there is nothing like music to remind one of places, unless it be scent, a picture arose behind her closed eyelids, of the quiet dark water, of the broad golden path of the moon, and of the little boat that glided through the gold; and as she watched the picture, two tears trickled from the eyes that were shut, and ran down her cheeks.

"Now, my girl," said a voice beside her suddenly, "here are your sardines!" and a greasy paper was thrust into her hand.

Oh, how it hurt, to have to open her eyes, to take what was given to her, to pay her lepta, and to stumble out half dazed into the street.

Once there, she thought for a moment that she was still dreaming, for on the side walk, talking to a man in a straw hat, was an old sea captain in the cross-over vest and the baggy blue breeches such as she had seen hundreds of times on the quay at home.

"The wind has turned a little chilly," the man in the straw hat was saying, "and there are many clouds in the sky. It will rain I think before night."

Mattina instinctively raised her eyes to the west, and half unconsciously repeated what she had so often heard her father say:--

"If but the Western sky be clear, Though East be black, you need not fear."

then pointing with her finger where the sky was still of a dusky pink, she said, "There are no clouds there."

The captain turned suddenly, and looked at the odd little figure in her white festooned apron that hung far below her frock, with her short black plaits tied round her head.

"That is what we say in my country." Then stooping a little. "From where are you? Are you from Poros, perhaps?"

Mattina gulped down a lump in her throat.

"Yes, I am from Poros."

"Whose are you?"

"Aristoteli Dorri's, the sponge diver's."

"Ah, yes! The poor one! I heard that he had died. And did your mother send you here?"

"My mother wept much after my father died, and then she coughed more than she did before, and then she got worse, and then she died." And Mattina turned her back on the men, and twisted and untwisted the end of the paper in which the sardines were wrapped.

"Now, lately?" asked the captain.

"It was on the Thursday of the Great Week."

"Well! Well! Life to you! It is a dirty world! With whom do you live now?"

"I serve at a house."

"You have no one in Athens?"

"I have my uncle Anastasi the baker, and my Aunt Demetroula, but they live far from here near the Kolonaki."[16]

"Ah, Anastasi Mazelli, your mother's brother; I know him. A good man! When you see him give him my salutations. Say they are from Capetan Thanassi Nika of Poros, and he will know."

"I will say it to him," answered Mattina.

"Well, the good hour be with you, little compatriot!"

Mattina walked back to the house very slowly, with her eyes fixed on the pavement. The talk about her people, the sound of a Poros voice, had brought back so much to her! She thought of the good times when her "babba," as she called her father, came home from a long absence with the sponge-divers--filling the room with his laugh, the little bare clean room with the big pot of sweet basil on the window seat--telling all that had happened: how this one had not been able to stay so long under water, and that one, the lazy dog, had pretended to be ill, and how the captain had called on him again and again--"Come then, you, Aristoteli! I would rather work with you alone than with ten others; you are always ready to get your head into the helmet." And Mattina, seated on his knees, would clap her hands with pride, crying, "My Babba is always ready!" and her mother cooking a hot dinner in honor of the return, would shake her head and mutter, "Too ready; too ready," but would smile at them the next moment, as she emptied the stew from the pan to the dish and told them to get their plates ready. After her father had died, the house was never so bright again; there was no laughing in it. Still, she had had her mother then, and it was she whom Mattina missed most, for she had never been away from her.

IV

All the next day Mattina thought of the old captain, and in the afternoon she told Antigone how she had met a compatriot, and what he had said to her. This was when they sat side by side on the steps of their "houses" to take the cool of the evening, after their mistresses had gone out.

Antigone was the serving maid of the next house, which was kept by a widow who let the rooms out to different lodgers. This maid was much older than Mattina and puffed out her hair at the sides, besides wearing a hat with pink flowers on it when she went out on Sundays.

"Your heart seems to hold very much to that island of yours!" she was saying. "What is there different in it to other places?"

Mattina tried to tell her; but talking about Poros was like relating a dream which has seemed so long and which one still feels so full and varied, but which somehow can only be told in the fewest and barest of words.

"Is that all?" exclaimed Antigone, "just trees, and rocks, and sea, and fisher folk, and boatmen? It would say nothing to me! But each one to his taste. Why do you not go back to it and work there?"

"I cannot; each one works for himself on the island; there are no houses in which to serve, there is no money to earn."

Antigone shrugged her shoulders.

"Truly it is much money you are earning here! Eight drachmæ a month, and your shoes," with a contemptuous glance at Mattina's feet, "all worn out!"

"There are only three holes," said Mattina gravely, "and she," with a backward jerk of her thumb, "said I should have new ones next week."

Antigone laughed.

"You will get them on the week that has no Saturday."

"And at New Year," went on Mattina, "she will give me a present!"

"Give you a present! She! Your Kyria! You have many loaves to eat, my poor one, before that day dawns!"

"But she said so."

"She said and she will unsay!"

"But my aunt heard it, too, and she told my uncle it would be a fine one."

"Your aunt does not know her, and I have lived next door to her it is three years now, and I have known all her servants. Some people give presents, yes, they have good hearts; but your mistress would never give a thing belonging to her, no, not even her fever! Now there is the 'Madmazella' who lives in the ground floor room at our house. She gives lessons all day long, and she has not much money, yet she often gives me things. When she came back from her country last time, she brought me a silk blouse ready sewn with little flowers all over it, and lace at the neck. And the other day she put her two hats into one paper box, and gave me the other one to keep my hat in, because it gets crushed in my trunk. And always with a good word in her mouth! So I too when she is ill, I run for her till I fall. She is going away again to her country, in a few days now, and she says that when she comes back she will bring me a new hat."

But Mattina's mind was running on her present.

"I do not want a silk blouse, nor a box for a hat, because," she added as an afterthought, "I have no hat. But I should like very much if someone would give me a picture with a broad gold frame, which I saw in the window of a shop the other day when I took the children out. It was the picture of the sea, and there was a boat on it with a white sail, and you could see the sail in the water all long and wavy, as you do really, and if you touched the water you thought your finger would be wet. That is what I wish for."

"A picture! And where would you hang it?"

Mattina thought for a moment.

"I do not know," she said at last, "but it would be mine, and I could look at it every day."

"You! with your seas, and your rocks, and your island!" exclaimed the older girl as she stooped to pick up her crochet work which had fallen off her knees. "Even if it were Paris, you could not make more fuss about it."

"What is Paris?"

"Paris is the country from where Madmazella comes. She says it is a thousand times more beautiful than Athens."

Mattina looked about her, at the women who sat chatting before the narrow doorways behind which were occasional glimpses of crowded courtyards and linen spread out to dry, at the dirty little trickle of water along the sidewalk with its accustomed burden of rotting lettuce leaves, at the children scrambling and shouting in the thick dust of the road, and sighed. She could not have told why she sighed, nor have put into words what she found so ugly about her, so she only said:--

"Perhaps it is better there than here."

That Athens has beauties of its own, which people travel from distant lands to see, she knew not. Its charms were not for her. When she walked out with Taki and Bebeko, the pavements hurt her badly shod feet, and the glare of the tall white houses hurt her eyes. As for the beautiful Royal Gardens with their old trees and their shady paths, their pergolas, their palms, their orange trees and their sheets of violets, as for the Zappion[17] from whose raised terrace one can see the columns of the old Temple of Jupiter, the Acropolis,[18] the marble Stadium,[19] and Phalerum and the sea, all of which together make what is perhaps the most beautiful view in all Europe, ... she had never been there! Those were walks for the rich and well-born children whom she sometimes saw wheeled about in little carriages by foreign nurses who were dressed all in white with little black bonnets tied with white strings. How could she lug two heavy children so far? No, Athens for her was made up of hot narrow streets, of much noise and hard pavements.

The very next morning while she was sweeping out the passage, she saw Antigone in her best dress and her hat with the pink flowers, beckoning to her from outside the house.

"What is it?" exclaimed Mattina, "how is it you are dressed in your fine things in the morning? What is happening?"

"It is happening that I am going! That old screaming mistress of mine has sent me off!"

"But what did you do?"

"I only told her I was not a dog to be spoken to as she speaks to me, and she told me to go now at once! Well, it matters little to me; there is no lack of houses, and better than hers a thousand times! I am a poor girl without learning, but I should be ashamed to scream as she does when anger takes her. Why, you can hear her as far off as the square! Well, if she thinks I shall regret her and her screams, she deceives herself! See, I leave you the key of my trunk. I will send my brother for it this evening, if he can come so far; he lives at the Plaka[20] you know. And I will tell him to ask you for the key: I will have no pryings in my things. And Mattina...."

"Yes?"

"Do me a favor and may you enjoy your life!"

"What shall I do?"

"Who knows when the old woman in there will get another girl to serve, and there is that poor Madmazella who is ill, and in bed again to-day, and not a soul to get her a glass of water! Go in you, once or twice, will you not? Her room is over there; it opens on the courtyard by a separate door, so you need not go near the rest of the house at all."

"I will go," said Mattina.

"I shall owe it you as a favor. Well, Addio--good-by--perhaps I shall see you again."

"The good hour be with you!" said Mattina, and then ran back into the house, hearing her master calling her.

Later in the day, when her mistress had gone out for the afternoon, Mattina filled a glass with cold water and carried it carefully into the neighbouring courtyard. She found the ground floor room easily, and lifting the latch, stood hesitatingly in the doorway. Tapping at a door was unknown in Poros etiquette.

A young woman with a pale face and tumbled fair hair lay on the bed in a corner of the room.

She opened her eyes as the door creaked, and smiled at Mattina.

"What is it, little one? Whom do you want?"

"Antigone said ..." and Mattina shifted from one foot to another, "that there was not a soul to get you a glass of water."

The young woman raised herself on her elbow, and her fair hair fell about her shoulders.

"And so you came to bring me one! But what kindness! I accept with gratitude; but it is not water I want. Since the morning I have taken nothing, and I have a hollow there, which gives me still more pain in the head."

Mattina looked puzzled; she did not know what a "hollow" was.

"Listen, little one: on the shelf of that cupboard there, there is a small box of chocolate; it is in powder all ready and my spirit lamp wants but a match to it. Bring then your glass of water; you see we do require it after all, pour it in the little pan, and the chocolate, so ... stir it a little with the spoon, and we will wait till it bubbles. You can wait a little.... Yes? Is it not so?"

"I can wait; the Kyria is out."

"Then pull that little table close to my bed. Ah! How it hurts my head! Scarcely can I open my eyes."

"Close them," said Mattina; "I will tell you when it boils."

Deftly she pulled forward the little table, straightened the tumbled sheets, and closed the open shutters so that the hot afternoon sun should not pour on the bed. Then she stood by the spirit lamp, and watched the frothing mixture.

"It boils," she announced at last.

The young woman opened her eyes.

"Ah, the glare is gone!" she said, "how well that is for my poor eyes. But you are a good fairy, my little one! Now bring the cup from that shelf.... No; bring two! There is plenty of chocolate, and I am quite sure you like it also."

"I do not know," said Mattina. "It smells good but I have never tasted it."

"Never tasted chocolate! Oh, the poor little one! Quick! Bring a cup here, and bring also that box of biscuits from the lower shelf! I am sure you are hungry. Is it not so?"

"Yes," assented Mattina, "I am always hungry. My mistress," she added gravely, "says that I eat like a locust falling on young leaves."

"Like a locust! But what a horror! It is a sign of good health to be hungry. Come then, my child, drink, and tell me if it be not excellent, my Paris chocolate?"

So Mattina tasted her first cup of French chocolate, and found it surpassingly good.

And the next day, and for three days after that, in the afternoons, when she might have sat down to rest on the doorstep, Mattina would lift the latch of the room in the courtyard, while "Madmazella" was out giving lessons, and sweep, and dust, and tidy, and put fresh water into the pretty vase with the flowers, and clean the trim little house shoes, and fill the spirit lamp.

But on the fifth day, a carriage came to the door of the next house, and the coachman went into the ground floor room and brought out a trunk, which he lifted to the box, and "Madmazella" came out also in a dark blue dress, with a gray veil tied over her hat, and a little bag in her hand, ready to go away to her own country.

Mattina stood outside on the pavement looking on, and there was a lump in her throat.

"Madmazella" got into the open one-horse carriage and beckoned to her.

"Come here, my little one! You have been of a goodness,--but of a goodness to me that I do not know how to thank you; I shall bring you a whole big box of chocolates from Paris when I return; and now take this very little present, and buy something as a souvenir of me! Is it not so?"

She smiled and waved her hand as the carriage drove off, and only when it was quite out of sight did Mattina look at what had been pressed into her hand. It was a crumpled five drachmæ note and Mattina looked at it with awe. She wondered whether it would be enough to buy the picture with the boat, in case the New Year present should be something else. In the meanwhile where should she keep it?

Suddenly she thought of the pocket Kyra Sophoula had stitched into her brown dress. She ran up to the little dark room, half way up the stairs, reached down her bundle from the nail on which it hung, pulled out a much crumpled brown dress, shook it out, found the pocket, and placed the five drachmæ note in it, pinning up the opening carefully for fear the note might fall out.

V

It had been agreed that Mattina should be allowed to go to see her uncle and aunt every other Sunday, in the afternoon. But it had happened lately that Sunday after Sunday her mistress had said, "I have to go out myself, a friend expects me," or, "My head aches; I cannot be troubled with the children; you can go out another day." But the "other day" never came. An older serving maid, or one who knew town ways better, would have asked for the outing on a week day; but Mattina did not know. She cried a little over her lost holiday and stayed in week after week, in the narrow street and the close rooms that always smelt of stale smoke.

It was a blazing hot Sunday morning in September, and the fifth since Mattina had last been out, when as she was sitting in the small kitchen listlessly peeling and slicing a pile of purple aubergines[21] which seemed as though it would never lessen, someone shuffled along the street outside and stopped at the little window which was level with the pavement.

It was Kyra Polyxene, the old washerwoman who lived on the top floor of the next house, and who went out washing to nearly all the houses of the neighborhood. Mattina knew her quite well. She had been engaged two or three times to help for a day when the big monthly wash had been an extra heavy one. The brown old face and the gray hair made Mattina think a little of Kyra Sophoula when she looked at her, except that Kyra Polyxene was taller and stouter and wore no kerchief on her head.

She put her face close to the window bars and peered in.

"Good day, Mattina, what are you doing in there?"

Mattina let drop the slice she was holding, into the basin of cold water beside her, and came close to the window.

"Good day to you, Kyra Polyxene; I am cutting up aubergines to make a 'moussaka.'"[22]

"How is it you have so many aubergines?"

"We have people to-day for dinner. The Kyria's sisters are coming, and Taki's godfather also."

"And your mistress does not help you?"

"She is upstairs dressing the children to take them to hear music in the square. When I first came here she showed me, but now I can make 'moussaka' all alone and it tastes as good as hers." There was a certain pride in Mattina's voice.

"Shall you go with them to the music?"

"I? No! There is this to finish, and the dining room to sweep, and the table to lay, and if the dinner be not ready at twelve, the master is angered."

"And after they have eaten?"

"There will be all the plates to wash."

"And then?"

"Do I know? There is always something."

"Listen to me, my girl! Yesterday I washed at a house up at the Kolonaki, and they sent me for a loaf to your uncle's oven, and he was saying that they had not seen you for many days; and he told me to tell you that you must go there this afternoon and that if your mistress makes difficulties, you are to tell her that if she keeps you always closed up, he, your uncle will come and take you away, and find another house for you."

Mattina opened her eyes widely.

"Did he say so to you, Kyra Polyxene?"

"Just as I tell you, my daughter."

Mattina wiped her hands on her apron and ran upstairs to her mistress's bedroom. She found her struggling with Taki's stiffly starched sailor collar, while Bebeko sitting on the unmade bed, with unbuttoned boots, was howling for his hat which had been placed out of his reach.

"How many more hours are you going to be, cleaning those aubergines, lazy one? How do you want me to dress two children and myself? Have I four hands do you think? Fasten the child's boots and make him stop that crying."

Mattina lifted the heavy screaming boy off the bed, and sat down on the floor with him.

"Why does Bebeko want his hat?" she whispered. "Now in a minute after I have fastened his little boots for him, I shall tie it on his head and he will go with Mamma and Babba and Taki, and hear the pretty music; and when he comes back...." The child stopped crying and looked at her, "and when he comes back, if he be a good child, I shall have such a beautiful boat ready for him, cut out of an aubergine! It will have two seats and a helm."

"And a mast. Will it have a mast too, Mattina?"

"And a mast, of course."

"And a sail?"

"No," said Mattina seriously, looking out of the window, "it will not want a sail, there is no wind to-day."

"But I want it to have a sail," persisted the child.