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, 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 '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, 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 '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 '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. 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 Œdipus. 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 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 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.
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.
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--Vassili, the chasseur, murmured '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 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 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 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 '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 '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 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 '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 '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. |