Tales of a Cruel Country
Date: 2019-09-10T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short stories; Manners and customs -- Fiction

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Title: Tales of a Cruel Country

Author: Gerald Cumberland

Release date: September 10, 2019 [eBook #60272]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60272

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF A CRUEL COUNTRY ***

TALES OF A
CRUEL COUNTRY

TALES OF A
CRUEL COUNTRY

BY
GERALD CUMBERLAND
Author of “Set Down in Malice”

NEW YORK
BRENTANO’S
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1919, by
BRENTANO’S

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

TO
FREDERICK NOEL BYRON

Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, with heart-breaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!

De Quincey

CONTENTS

| PAGE
The Two Lovers | 1
Katya Kontorompa | 19
The Baths Murder | 33
The Dreamer | 47
When the Green Roses Came | 57
Paul of Tarsus | 73
The Moon Man | 83
How His Friends Destroyed Him | 97
The Victim | 117
Trench Madness | 133
Loot | 141
How It Grew | 159
Katya’s Wooing | 167
The Storm | 183
The Man Who Gave His Soul | 199
The Stranger | 215
A Little Correspondence | 235
The Deaf-Mute of Kilindir | 243
La Belle Dame Sans Merci | 259
Into Dust | 283
The Grandchild | 311
Nerves | 321

THE TWO LOVERS

To
Frederick Noël Byron

THE blossom of the lilac-tree gave a pulp-like sound as it thwacked against her window, and curiously named Stephanie Miniati smiled to herself as she turned in her bed and, placing a hand on her rounded breast, closed her eyes in order that she might see Orosdi. For not only did Orosdi dwell in her heart, but his big, black eyes burned in her brain and lit it, and his sinewy hands were ever about her throat in love-cruelty. She closed her eyes and, in imagination, summoned him to her chamber. He came: not hurriedly, as an anxious lover moves, but with long, lazy strides, his baby-face all smiles, his selfish, rounded chin thrust a little forward. He stood by her side and then, in imagination, she made him bend down suddenly and kiss her shoulder....

She sighed in a luxury of love, and “Orosdi! Or-os-di!” she murmured. And she thought for the thousandth time: “I am the most beautiful girl in Ajvatli, and Orosdi is the most handsome lad of all who walk on the plain of Langaza.”

But as yet she was only half awake, and in her semi-consciousness had forgotten her other lover who now lay in the church cemetery on the high land above Ajvatli.

The noise of the sheep and the goats herding down the uneven street brought her to full consciousness, and, sitting up in bed, the smile slowly faded from her face, a scowl, almost a snarl, taking its place. For she had remembered that to-day was the anniversary of the death of her other lover and that, though Orosdi had made the thought of her dead sweetheart sometimes hateful, yet fear of her neighbours would, she knew, compel her to weep and pray at his grave and fondle the bones that had once been covered with stubborn flesh. She sat and scowled; then, suddenly, having taken up a mirror that lay on a chair by her side, she smiled entrancingly at her reflection. She pulled back her lips and looked at her white teeth; she bared her breasts and, holding the mirror below them, looked at and admired the twin curves reflected therein; then, making slits of her eyes, she looked from the corners of her eyelids—looked roguishly, invitation in her glance.

“Oh, you dear creature!” she exclaimed; “how good of you to be so beautiful!”

All morning she was at work in the fields whilst her wifeless father sat drinking cognac in the village. She herself loved wine, but when with Orosdi drank only mavrodaphne, the “black holly” that makes lovers more ardent and leaves no sting behind. The plain, covered with vineyards and mustard and poppies, blazed hotly. Banked roadways, infrequently used, were covered with multitudinous flowers, flowers that were warm to the touch and almost sickly with the sun’s day-long kiss. Stephanie, stooping over her work, wiped away with the back of her hand the drops of perspiration that stood gleaming on her forehead. The heat did not trouble her: she loved it, for her strength was that of an animal. The sun, the flowers, and the call of cuckoos made Heaven for her, and she praised her Heaven to the utmost height of sublimity whenever she looked at Langaza, white among green poplars, where her lover lived.

“How white it is!” she said to herself; and then something in her brain whispered: “How white they will be. How white they will be to-night, in so few hours!”

She caught her breath and bit her under-lip. Her cheeks paled. “What do I mean? What do I mean?” she asked herself, hurriedly. But only too well did she know what she meant. Her brain was thinking of her dead lover’s bones, which to-night would lie in her hands—bones that, washed in wine a year ago, had been placed back in his shallow grave at Ajvatli, and which were as white as the cambric that comes from England. Her religion, her loyalty, her dead love—everything that demanded her acquiescence in the customs of her race—meant nothing to her: but the opinion of her neighbours meant everything. People in small villages can be very cruel. “Oh, yes,” said Stephanie, pitying herself, “they would be cruel. Father most of all.”

With a resolute gesture she turned from Langaza, and bent over her work. How wonderfully decisive and final is the thrust with which the diabolically selfish can rid themselves of uncomfortable thoughts! With an: “Oh! I’ll go through with it!” she put the little grave aside, forgetting the dead youth’s dear kisses that, how brief a time ago, used to run from her brow to her eyes, from her eyes to her mouth, and from her mouth to her breasts where they used to cling and turn her girlhood to maidenhood.

At midday she stopped her work and, seated on a high bank, ate bread and olives and drank a little of the wine of Samos. I think I can show her to you. The bank is covered with high grass and tall flowers—such flowers as you will see in England any real June. So, of course, she is half hidden in a little swimming mist of colour of blue and yellow and green. Her skirt is pulled above her knees and you can see the thick woollen stockings that do not mar the beauty of her long ankles. Her dark face is sallow and red, her hair black; her bosom—you can see it, for her blouse is opened two buttons at the neck—whiter than the paper on which this little history is printed. She wears no hat, and her blouse is a dusky red, the colour of her cheeks. Her eyes are pits of darkness in each of which a flame burns brightly, almost fervently. An animal, of course. But a beautiful animal, with a beauty that not one woman in a thousand Greek women possesses. But is she Greek? She says so. But is she? Some lusty Bulgar, perchance, raped her grandmother, or a Turk, insinuating and cruel, crept to the bed of some maternal ancestor. These things happen there in Macedonia, as elsewhere.

You will not like the way she eats, for her lips are not closed and her right cheek bulges. And her hands, face, neck, and breasts are wet with perspiration. A woman to be loved and feared, I think: more feared than loved....

But she has finished her little meal....

She lay on her back, the sun smiting her, the sun of Greece that two thousand years ago smote men to greatness, that burned men and melted them and recast them as poets, orators, sculptors, writers of dramas. She turned over on her side and murmured something, pressing her lips to the ground, and smiling....

* * *

Orosdi was drinking at Langaza. He was sleek and lazy, but his brain was bright, and he was now busy purchasing two mules from his father. For Orosdi had a farm of his own, and prospered as all physically lazy men may prosper if their brains are deep and cunning and if they retain the accumulated traditions of their ancestors.

“Ninety-five drachmæ,” said Orosdi, placing his plump hand on the thin, vein-corded hand of his father.

The older man smiled.

“You are the son of my father,” he said, enigmatically. Then he added, reminiscently: “He always began with half the price he was willing to pay. We will talk of this to-morrow.”

“No, no. It is pleasant here. Let us finish the business now.”

He turned aside and called to the keeper of the inn outside which they were sitting. A dirty creature limped from the dark interior to the doorway.

“You have my bottle of whisky there, is it not so? Well, open it. And bring two clean glasses.”

His father started a little.

“’Tis an old trick,” observed he. “You would make me drunk and then buy from me? I would rather give you the mules than that you should do that.”

“Father, I brought the whisky for you because ... because, well, you know why.” He looked affectionately at his parent.

The old man, gazing at his handsome son, felt his eyes becoming moist. An impulse overswept him.

“You were always a good son to me,” he said. “Let me give you the mules.”

“Father!”

“Well, after all, I’m at the end of my life, and you.... You know, Orosdi ... but do you know?”

“Father, father!”

But the dirty innkeeper interrupted the conversation by putting the whisky bottle and two glasses on the table.

“Come, let us drink,” said Orosdi, feeling a little uncomfortable and pouring out the liquor.

They drank the spirit neat, and almost immediately the old man’s worn face became flushed and active.

“Well, they are yours,” he said; “I will bring them to you to-morrow.”

His son rose and kissed him on the cheek.

“What can I give you in return?” he asked.

His father sat silent for a minute, twisting his fingers under the edge of the table and looking on the ground. He darted a shy glance at the young man.

“I would like only one thing,” said he.

“It is yours.”

“I would like you to come.... But perhaps you have already arranged.... If you were to come and sit with me to-night, I should be very happy.”

Orosdi’s jaw sank and his face clouded.

“To-morrow, father,” said he, “of course I will come. But to-night I go to Ajvatli.”

The old man poured out more whisky and drank it greedily. He sighed, and began again to twist his fingers under the edge of the table.

“Not to-night, then,” he murmured, with resignation.

“But why especially to-night?” urged Orosdi.

“Have you forgotten? It is my birthday.”

“Blast!... Yes, father, of course I will come. I will come three hours—two hours—after sunset. I thought of your birthday yesterday: you were a good deal in my thoughts.... But to-day! But you know me, father. I am like that. I have always been so. But you do know, father, don’t you, that no one comes before you in my love?”

“You see, my son, I am old. To-day I am seventy-three. And it seems to me that the nearer I get to the grave the more lonely I become. Sometimes I wish that we lived together ... that if we lived together....”

“Oh, but, father—it was you who urged me to strike out for myself ... to do what I could without hindrance—that is how you put it, father: you called yourself a hindrance.”

“Did I?” questioned the old man, dully. “I forget. You may be right.”

“Come and live with me, father,” said Orosdi, impulsively. “You can sell your bit of land....”

“No,” interrupted the old man, proudly, “no, Orosdi. This is just a minute’s weakness: every one has these moments. You must go your way; I, mine.”

He poured out more whisky and drank it.

“And now, Orosdi,” said he, looking at the half-empty bottle, “I think I will go home.”

“And I will accompany you to your door. You must take the whisky with you.”

Orosdi recorked the bottle and put it in his father’s hands.

They rose and walked together through the village until they reached its outskirts, where, coming upon a detached, terraced house where the old man lived, they parted. The old man closed the door behind him. The room into which he stepped straight from the street was large, but badly lit; it smelt stuffily of leeks. Lurching across the tiled floor, he reached a little stool on which he sat, his hands clasped in front of him, his head bent low. His lips moved, and he trembled with the ague of age.

Presently, feeling intolerably tired, he rose and shambled to a rug lying in a corner. Casting himself upon this, he was soon asleep; dreams came trooping to him, dreams of hatred of Stephanie Miniati who was taking his dear son from him. How he loved Orosdi of the lazy smile, Orosdi whose shoulders were so strong, Orosdi who could be as tender as a woman, and as faithless.

* * *

The sun had already set when Orosdi went forth from Langaza to see his love at Ajvatli, and he pulled his body together sensually as he trod the long, white road. Frogs splashed and croaked in the ditches, nightingales sang, a big moon stared. But he cared for none of these things. The world to him was one woman: a woman whose kisses were fierce, and whose clasp would not let him go.

His mood was a little bitter and cruel. Stephanie had played with him too long. She would not marry him and she would not let him.... What was the use of a love like that? It was not that she was virtuous: she was simply afraid? After all, why shouldn’t she marry him? Her old lover had been dead these years, and there was no reason for her ridiculous clinging to his memory. It was true, she had been the cause of his death, for he had given his life to Langaza Lake in attempting to save her from drowning. But that was an accident: a happy accident.... He smiled grimly.

But to-night he would bring the business of his passionate courting to a head. The thing was wearing him out. His robust body was failing him. To clasp and kiss ... to clasp and kiss and never really love! That was play for children.

He quickened his pace and passed through the outskirts of Ajvatli. The crooked village was full of black shadows, and even to him who was familiar with them, the twisting, inconsequent streets were like a maze; nevertheless, Orosdi could without difficulty have found his way blindfolded to Stephanie’s house. His nearest way there lay past the central inn, outside which many men were sitting, drinking. For a moment the young farmer hesitated; then, calling for a bottle of mavrodaphne, he flung himself down in a chair and peered around him to see if he could discern the face of Stephanie’s father by the light of the one lamp that hung outside the inn. Several acquaintances greeted him: he replied to them curtly, almost insolently. Miniati was away, they told him. He had set out for Seres in the afternoon, and would not return for nearly a week.

He grunted his satisfaction, uncorked his bottle, poured out a glass of wine, and slowly drank the sweet intoxicant. Almost at once he felt its stimulating effect; it fired him and his passion, and, with a gesture of impatience, he rose and made his way to Stephanie’s house. Having arrived there, he knocked, but there was no reply. He tapped with a stick on the high window, but no one came.

“Blast!” he whispered between his teeth.

“And don’t you know where she is?” asked a voice behind him.

He turned to see a wrinkled old woman who was bent almost at right angles over a stick that supported her.

“No,” he answered, impatiently, “where is she?”

“Where should she be to-night if not with my grandson?”

He remembered. The old woman was the grandmother of Stephanie’s dead Mercury, and the girl herself would be in the cemetery with the boy’s bones. He kicked at a stone angrily, and, turning on his heel, walked past the church to the graveyard above. At the open iron gate he paused and looked about him. Not a soul was to be seen. Going down on his hands and knees, he crept behind the diminutive gravestones until he came to within a few yards of the grave he sought, where he lay prone, scarcely breathing, his eyes hard and glittering, his upper jaw closed anxiously over his lower lip. He could see his girl. She knelt at a very shallow open grave; touching her knees was a heap of disordered bones; a white skull, small and boyish, reflected the moonlight.

But Stephanie was not looking at what remained of her Mercury; she was gazing into space with unseeing eyes, her arms by her side, her body held loosely, dejection in every line of her figure. Once or twice she stirred uneasily as though half aware of Orosdi’s presence.

He, cunning and alert, watched for his opportunity. A mood of disgust might presently come to her. Or she might melt in tenderness at thought of him....

There was a wind in the trees, and in the air the scent of lilac. Orosdi heard the wind and smelt the lilac. The earth gave forth the warmth of the day’s sun; it excited him, and his teeth bit more deeply into his lower lip. His Stephanie looked cool and apart in her white robe....

* * *

Less than a dozen yards away, peering over the wall was an old man whose lips moved angrily. But he was patient in his anger, for he was afraid of his son. He felt himself to be futile, and it was deep misery to stand here and watch Orosdi worshipping that handsome and destructive Greek girl: still, he must remain. He had a morbid craving for self-inflicted pain, and the whisky he had drunk earlier in the day twisted things out of focus. He would do nothing; he would only watch. He would learn the worst.

After a very long time, he saw Orosdi crouch like a cat and glide like a snake. He saw him glide behind Stephanie, rise to his feet and approach her till he stood above her, holding out his arms.

And then a violent thing happened. Orosdi, having stood irresolute a moment, suddenly stepped to his lover’s side, kicked away the bones that lay at her knees, threw his arms around the girl’s body, lifted her from the ground, and carried her away to the shadow of the little stone building in which, hidden in rows of sacks, lie the bones of Ajvatli’s dead. There was no sound save a small hysterical laugh of joy from the girl. The old man heard them sighing in the shadow, and, like a knife, the thought of his own honeymoon stabbed his soul. He muttered rapidly to himself, and frowned. Then, pulling himself laboriously over the wall, he walked rapidly to the graveside, gathered the scattered bones together, and replaced them in the shallow grave. He did this quickly but tidily, feeling his decency shocked, and feeling, as he had never felt before, that his son was a stranger to him. He filled up the grave with earth, and smoothed the surface with the palms of his hands. And then, with a frightened prayer, he rose to his feet, made his way to the wall and clambered over. On the far side he stopped to listen a moment. But no sound reached him; the lovers were quiet in their bliss.

It was nearly midnight when they rose, and all the guardian semi-wild dogs of Ajvatli seemed to be barking together. Orosdi was full of quiet happiness: Stephanie had given herself to him and had promised herself in marriage. He placed his arm around her and began to lead her towards the iron gate of the cemetery. But, very gently, she put him away, saying:

“Leave me alone. I will see you to-morrow.”

“No!” he insisted. “You are mine now. What does it matter who sees us?”

“But you forget,” she protested. And as he did not appear to know what he had forgotten, she added: “You forget what we are leaving behind. I must put him away again.”

She walked towards the grave, he by her side. Simultaneously, on emerging from behind a tree, they discovered that the bones had disappeared, that the grave had been refilled, and that the earth above it was smooth and tidy. They stopped, and her hand sought his. He put his arms about her protectingly, though his fear equalled her own.

“He has gone back!” she muttered, awe-struck. And she stood gazing on the grave as though hypnotized.

“Come away,” he said, trembling; “your Mercury may return.”

Without another word they turned and, panic-stricken, rushed from the cemetery. At her house-door they stopped.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

“It means he no longer loves me. You kicked him. You kicked my Mercury who was always so good to me.”

She looked at him wild-eyed, accusingly.

Without a farewell embrace she opened the door and entered the house, leaving him alone.

The old man was lying on his rug when his son entered. He had finished the bottle of whisky and he knew not what his mood was.

“Two hours ago it was my birthday,” he said, aggressively, “my birthday, and you did not come, though you promised.”

He protruded his under-lip and, seizing an empty glass that stood near him where he lay on the floor, he cast it on the tiles where it was smashed to fragments.

Orosdi, weary and a little afraid of what the night had brought him, sat down and sighed.

“Do not be angry with me, father,” he said, gravely.

“You have done three evil things this night,” said the old man.

“One is not always virtuous.... But I will see you in the morning. I must sleep. You also, father. You are overwrought.”

“No. I’m drunk. Men see truth when they are drunk. They see things they dare not look at in their sober times. Your mother, who was a scholar, used to say there is truth in wine. Damnable truth. Never mind, Orosdi, my son. We cannot help ourselves.”

But Orosdi had slipped from the house, and the old man was talking to an empty room. He continued maundering for a long time until, overcome by sleep, he fell heavily on the floor and closed his eyes.

KATYA KONTOROMPA

To
Jack Kahane

MRS. Kontorompa waddled into her large drawing-room at Hortiach one May morning calling “Katya! Katya!” in a voice more shrill than a parrot’s. She progressed rather magnificently in spite of her waddle, for she had both weight and solidity, and it was not without dignity that, having reached the window, she leaned out and surveyed her hot garden blazing with colour. “Katya! Katya!” she shrilled.

“What is it, mamma?” asked a languid voice from the depths of a luxurious chair near the piano a yard or two away.

Mrs. Kontorompa’s irritation vanished instantly.

“Oh, Katya, dear, I have just been speaking to your father on the telephone. He said....”

“I know what he said,” interrupted her daughter. “He said no. He always does say no. But I warn you, mamma, I’m just about at the end of my patience, and either to-day or to-morrow I shall ... well, I shall do something desperate.”

Mrs. Kontorompa’s most benevolent face assumed a look of anxiety.

“But what can I do?” she asked, despairingly.

“Nothing, dear mamma. We have always known—you and I—that you could do nothing. It’s not your fault. But papa is so stupid, is it not so? Why, in the name of God, he sent me....”

“Katya, you must not swear. Besides, you have promised me not to.”

“Very well, mamma, I won’t. Why, in the name of respectability then, he sent me to Brussels—Brussels, of all places—I can’t understand.”

Her luminous blue eyes, deep and tender, formed large patches of colour above her very pale cheeks, and her pouting red lips, half smiling, concealed her regularly irregular white teeth.

“Your father, Katya, dear—well, you know what your father is. He blunders, but he means well. He thought Brussels would be good for you.”

“Oh, it was, it was: most awfully good. The Avenue Louise, mamma, on a May morning with Captain Pierre Lacroix by my side—oh, that was heaven! Yes, Brussels was heaven, and I lived there among the male angels—I mean the deliciously wicked men—for one very short year. But if Brussels was heaven, Hortiach is hell, and I really do believe father is the devil himself.”

Her mother smiled reluctantly.

“Katya, dear, you musn’t talk like that. At all events, only when we’re alone.”

It was Katya’s turn to smile, and in the middle of her sweet smile she broke out, impulsively:

“Father is a dear, really, you know; but he is so awfully blind and dull and stupid. Fancy thinking Salonika is too wicked for me to live in! Why, if he only knew the things I did....”

She paused and her eyes grew naughty with reminiscences.

“Yes, Katya?” her mother whispered, invitingly.

“Oh nothing. I say ‘nothing,’ but I mean everything.”

“Everything?”

“Well, not quite everything. Yet I sometimes wish I had gone what my English friends used to call 'the whole hog.’ All the way, you know.”

“Oh, do, do be careful, Katya. You will be married some day, you know.”

“That’s just the point—shall I? Whom can I marry in Hortiach? Is there a single soul good enough? You know there isn’t. Yet in Salonika, only fifteen miles away, there must be scores of the most delightful creatures. Oh, mamma, I do love men, don’t you?”

“I used to, dear. But now I love only your father.”

“Poor mamma! But how awfully sweet for father!”

They sat in silence for a few minutes whilst the still garden hummed with insects; the sun smote the flowers, and a trickle of water made a tepid sound in the well close by.

Then, suddenly, Mrs. Kontorompa, having brushed away a fly that had settled on her nose, turned to her daughter.

“I will persuade your father to let us join him in Salonika for a fortnight. I will really, Katya. I know how to do it. We will go next month.”

“Oh, you are sweet, mamma dear, aren’t you? I do think you’re sweet.”

And Katya, rising from her deep chair and gliding to the pianoforte, began to play Chopin’s Polonaise in C-sharp minor, crashing out the fat discords with all the exuberance of youth. With her hands folded on that part of her body lying below her waist, Mrs. Kontorompa sat admiring her daughter: admiring this daring and bewildering creature who, only a month ago, had come from a Belgian school whither she had gone to add smartness to her education: admiring and loving her, and feeling that she would sell her soul to be like Katya—eighteen, beautiful, devil-may-care, clever, wilful, and so terribly worshipful. Then, Katya having begun the great Nocturne in C minor, with its quivering and mounting octaves, Mrs. Kontorompa rose and left the room to supervise the mysterious workings of her Grecian household.

It was quite early the same morning that Katya, white and wonderful, left her father’s house and walked higher up the mountain to the side of which Hortiach clings. She was in a mood of half-angry revolt, and as she walked along a sheep-track winding among the rocks, she told herself that if only Elise Deschamps were with her, they would surely find something amusing to do. Elise respected the opinions of no one. And as Katya Kontorompa’s mind was busy thinking of her friend, suddenly, from behind a rock stepped a tall, slim youth, hatless, bare-chested, carrying a flute in his hand, his black curly hair surmounting a face that was at once grave and beseeching.

“Oh!” said Katya, half-aloud, as she caught her breath and passed him.

He, giving her a rapid, shy glance, walked across her path and made his way to a shaded pool that even at midday is always cool and fresh.

She watched him as he, far off, sat down in the sunlight that, dripping from the fig-tree above him, flecked him with patches of green and white. She could just hear the low, watery tones of his flute as he improvised with the careless ease of an artist. She had seen him thus on several occasions, and, seeing him, had always felt a little thrill of desire. She wished to love him just for an hour, to have those slender arms about her body, to feel his curved, inexperienced lips against her own. But he was shy and a little afraid. Yes, she was sure he was afraid, for every time she had crossed his path he had hastened his pace to almost a run, and had never once looked back to meet her inquiring and inviting gaze. His fear of her spurred her on to an adventure with him, for she could not understand his sexless eyes, and to her it was ridiculous that a handsome youth should run away from a beautiful and willing girl.

Sitting down in the shade of a rock, she half closed her eyes and looked lazily at him as he sat by his deep pool of coolest water. His flute still gave its music, music that was as free from care and all self-consciousness as the song of a bird. What a dear, foolish and charming boy he was! He could be no more than a year younger than herself, and yet she could swear he had never loved a woman. Loved?—why, not even kissed.

Though she felt angry with him because of his passionless eyes, she could not help experiencing a certain yearning for him, a tenderness that was half laughter, half tears. When, at length, he wandered away, she sighed.

“Oh, damn!” she whispered. “The little fool is an abject idiot! Do I really love him? I wonder.... In any case, I will have some fun with him. If he will not love me, he shall at least hate me.”

Happy with her new interest in life, she planned her mischievous and immodest scheme. Like all Greek women, she was discretion itself, and the first question she put to herself was: “If I do it, will he tell?” But this so necessary question required only a moment’s consideration. Of course he wouldn’t tell, for, in any event, whatever the outcome of her escapade might be, the story of it would be against himself. Moreover, she would so cleverly contrive matters that it would appear that the entire occurrence was one of the many affairs of chance.

And, musing over her plan, she walked rather rapidly down to her garden-home.

Mrs. Kontorompa never dressed for breakfast. In the warm days she always breakfasted in a flimsy dressing-gown on the little veranda outside her bedroom, and it was here early one morning that Katya, looking very demure, joined her. She carried a French translation of one of Joseph Conrad’s books.

“Good morning, mamma,” she said, “how perfectly sweet you look in that pink thing!”

Mrs. Kontorompa, who knew very well that she did not look sweet in anything in the world, smiled.

“You do say such nice things, Katya dear.”

“Oh, the coffee’s here already. Do pour me out a glass, mamma. I’m terribly thirsty—and hungry, too.”

She ate bread, butter and honey, and smiled at two kissing butterflies.

“How nice to be a butterfly!” she said, munching.

“Yes, but why?”

“Well, a butterfly does just what it wants. It does not wait to be introduced. It is so wonderfully unmoral.”

Her mother surveyed her for a moment.

“Do you know, Katya, you sometimes talk just like some of the women in those French novels you brought home with you from Brussels.”

“Do I? Well, I feel like them. I’m going for a bathe this morning, mamma.”

“A bathe! Where? Why?”

“In the little pool by the fig-tree. Because I want to.”

“Very well, I’ll come with you.”

“That would be lovely,” said Katya, “if I were selfish enough to allow you. But you’d make yourself ill, climbing up there in the sun.”

“But, Katya....”

“You know you would, mamma. No, I’m going alone. No one ever goes near the place: I shall be quite all right.”

And when she had finished her breakfast, she went to her room, put on a big sun-hat, took a towel from her bedroom cupboard, and stepped very silently downstairs. But her mother issued from the drawing-room just as her daughter reached the bottom of the stairs.

“But you have nothing to cover yourself with—no bathing costume!” Mrs. Kontorompa objected.

“Ah, that’s just it!” said Katya mischievously.

“What is?”

“Oh, nothing, mamma, my precious. Good-bye.”

And she ran into the garden, swinging the towel over her head.

There was still a little coolness of dawn in the air, especially under the trees, and the freshness of the air and the hard exercise of climbing up the mountain-side brought an unaccustomed tinge of rose to Katya’s cheeks. The clear pool was waiting for her, and, stepping to its rocky edge, she bent over a little and gazed at her reflection in the cool water.

“Really, I grow more beautiful every day,” she murmured, pleased and excited.

She knelt down behind a rock and began to undress, now and again turning her eyes in the direction from which she expected her flute-player to come. But when her garments were ready for taking off, she did not remove them; instead, she sat down and surveyed the romantic and picturesque village below.

Yes, it was romantic enough, she thought, but it was so stupidly familiar. She knew every house, every tree, every rock, and if she did not know every man, woman, and child, it was because she did not care to. Yet, after all, people mattered enormously. The most seductive scenery in the world was not romantic except in its relationship to human beings. And even this boy, this flute-player, had a certain air, an atmosphere, something of distinction and attraction.

With sudden impatience and self-disgust, she shook herself, and then leaned over the edge of the water.

“Fool!” she ejaculated to her reflection; “sentimentalist! He is a little nincompoop and you know it. You are going to teach him a lesson: you are going to terrify him out of his wits.”

Raising her head, she saw the object of her thoughts issuing from the outskirts of the village and making his way up the mountain to the pool. He walked with an easy stride.

Hastily she took off her clothes, hid them in a cleft of the rocks, and stepped into the water which took her beautiful body with a laugh and a sigh. She swam about for a minute or two and then, calculating that by now he would be near at hand—the intervening rocks hid him from sight—she swam to a little narrow bay where the water was deep, and where she was hidden from view, and clung with her finger-tips to a ledge in the rocks.

The wrinkled surface of the pool had only just had time to become smooth again, when the flute-player, very silently, walked to the fig-tree and sat down in its shade. Almost immediately he began to play, and the melodies he invented were very melancholy. Katya smiled with malice, though she approved of and liked his skill.

“What a clever little fool it is!” she said to herself, as, giving herself to the water and pressing her feet against the side of the rock, she pushed herself out toward the middle of the pool and began slowly to swim in the flute-player’s direction. So quickly did she go, and so absorbed was he in his music, that he did not see her even when she was within a dozen yards of him and was standing, the water reaching to her waist, regarding him with wide, malicious eyes. She raised her hands and brought them down on the water with a heavy splash.

A run he was playing broke in the middle like a thread that is snapped, and, startled, he let his instrument fall to the ground. His eyes had the look of one whose dreams have come true; it was as though he had been evoking a nymph and she had at last arrived. Motionless and absorbed, he stared at her, his eyes very round, his lips parted; but he spoke no word, and something in the earnestness of his gaze—a look a little unearthly, indeed, holy—made her, who had wished to frighten him, herself afraid. There was no abashed look in his eyes, as she had expected, no look of dismay, no hint of fear: merely an expression of incredulity—the look of a boy to whom a long-awaited miracle has at last happened.

Their long gaze into each others’ eyes lasted many moments, and as his eyes did not droop under hers, but indeed, stared and stared unflinchingly, Katya began to experience the shame of a child who has been discovered in some wickedness. She had expected him, on her appearing, to run away in terror and shocked modesty. If he had blushed even, or had looked confused, or had turned his back upon her, or exhibited any of the signs of awkwardness and shame, she would have known how to continue the comedy. But he accepted her. Moreover, she knew that some wonder had been expected from that water. To him she was not human, but the spirit of the pool come at the bidding of his music.

Her courage and her impertinence deserted her, and, with a sudden movement, she disappeared under the water, and swam back to the deep bay where she had left her clothing. She heard him cry out excitedly, and, with equal excitement, she swam towards the edge of the water, touched the ground with her feet and began to walk to the shore. He was there waiting for her, for he had run rapidly round the pool, and now stood with his flute in his hand, his face full of ecstasy, with white teeth shining in the sun.

For a few moments he stood thus on a high rock looking down upon her. But when she had reached the cleft where her clothes were hidden, and when he saw her take them in her hands, his face instantly changed from ecstasy to bewilderment, and then from bewilderment to loathing.

“It’s you—you—you! You dreadful black woman!” he called out.

She raised her head to look at him, and saw that he was trembling with anger. His brown face was yellow and distorted. He tried to speak some more words, but his throat choked him, and his inability to speak increased his anger so greatly that all his body shook like one convulsed.

Raising his flute on high, he threw it into the water with terrific force, and, turning, ran up the mountain side with a frantic speed that had not decreased when she could no longer see him....

Pressing her white dress to her face, Katya wept and wept. She wept with shame, with mortification.... She wept with love.

THE BATHS MURDER

To
Edwin Morrow

BEFORE you had crossed the threshold you felt the humid air as it stealthily assaulted your flesh, and the dank stone couches, some bare and perspiring, others half covered with painted rags, gave the impression of tawdry self-indulgence.

I have tried many times to determine precisely what it was about those cavernous baths that gave me the impression of wickedness, and because my attempts have always been unsuccessful I have been driven to entertain the possibility that the wickedness lay in myself, and was evoked by the semi-darkness, the drip of water, the lamps that flickered but did not die, the humid air, the long treacherous corridors, the dirty domes, and the soft secrecy of scandals stealing up the stair. But why should these things, either separately or collectively, suggest evil? I do not know. But they did. They do. And the little poisoned glasses of cognac which, one by one, used to be placed at one’s side so that one might sip before and after sleep, seemed to me lewd and violently unnecessary....

In that place worked Aristides Kronothos, lean Kronothos, who, with his lack-lustre eyes, his long, dangling arms, and air of patient resignation hid, and hid well, the venom in his breast. A year ago he lived in Soho with his wife and worshipped child. To their little restaurant came a man of mixed blood—some Armenian, some Montenegrin—who, with money and promises, stole Aristides’ wife and left England for Greece. Kronothos, having knowledge of his lair in Salonika, sold his business and followed. He loved desperately and hated desperately. But the man of mixed blood was well protected, and seemed out of reach of all revenge, for though it is true that Kronothos, almost any day, might have slit his throat in full view of the street and its people, he had no desire to be caught and punished. He felt greatly, profoundly; but he did not feel tragically. His skin was of immeasurable value to himself.

So he used to go about his work in those cave-like baths feeling thwarted, and I am told that, on slack days, he would sit, chin in hand, brooding, his unfocused eyes looking into spaceless space, his long, lean neck jutting ostrich-like from his towel-robe, his nervy fingers twitching.

He was a good worker. Rompapas told me that. Rompapas always insisted to me that Aristides Kronothos had an almost extravagant sense of duty. For example, he would stay after hours hosing and even scrubbing the filthy corridors, trying to vanquish their musty smell; and so constant and devoted was he that in time he was entrusted with the keys of the great watery and wandering place, and would lock up two or three hours before midnight, and dismally seek his dismal room.

Half drunk and full of vanity, the man of mixed blood—George Georges was his fantastic name—plunged out of the Olympos Hotel and bawled for a gharry. At his command three came. His great, hulking body sank into the first and bent its crazy framework into a capital U.

The city had just lit its myriad lights, and the sky was like purple velvet. Georges gave it a contemptuous glance, and as the driver turned round for orders, his temporary master waved a fat hand in the air and grunted:

“Anywhere! Take me out of this damned hole!”

But which damned hole he meant the driver did not know, for Georges’ gesture embraced the universe. The gharry jolted and swayed along the quay and, turning to the left, entered a semi-suburban region of large houses, evil smells, and gutter children. It was dark here, and Georges hated darkness.

“Take me out of this damned hole as well,” he shouted.

And in a minute they emerged into Rue Egnatia and passed the Baths. Georges had a thought.

“I’ll get washed,” said he. “And after that,” he added, for he was a man of some education and humour, “I will stay me with flagons and comfort myself with apples.”

So he stopped the gharry, alighted, and, paying his driver rather regally, turned to the Baths.

He arrived at the precise moment when Aristides Kronothos, having decided that further custom that night was most improbable, was about to discard his towel-robe and don his ordinary garments. In those dim Baths he saw his enemy and recognized him, and, shrinking behind a pillar, said in a high-pitched assumed voice:

“Perhaps His Highness will take a room on the right.”

Georges rolled up the half-dozen steps and entered the room.

Aristides was a man of great resource and some courage, and when his mind, trumpet-like, had shouted to him: “My moment has arrived!” he ran quickly to the outer door, bolting and locking it. Then he sped to a little chamber, turned on a light and seized a razor....

There is no disguise like disfigurement, and within two minutes Aristides had shaved off his eyebrows, taken out his prominent false teeth, and cut a deep gash in his right cheek. The sight of his own blood, as it fell into the bowl of water he had prepared, excited him excessively, and as he swathed the lower part of his face in bandages he breathed stertorously, and his eyes began to glitter with internal light. But he worked quickly and without clumsiness, and he smiled with satisfaction as he saw his thin blood creeping and spreading on the bandage like red ink on blotting-paper.

“It must just show,” he said to himself, “not enough to alarm or sicken him, but sufficient to assure him that my bandage is necessary.”

By now Georges was clapping his hands and calling for cognac, and it was a very large glassful that Aristides, obsequiously bowing, handed to him a moment later.

“God!” exclaimed Georges, “you are bleeding.”

“Yes,” said Aristides, “but it is nothing.”

“But I wanted a massage, and you look ill.”

“I assure you, it is nothing. It does not even hurt.”

Georges drank the cognac with a gulp, and sighed with vexation.

“I hate to see wounds,” he said, “are you sure your bandage is securely fixed?”

“Your Highness need not be afraid. I shall not take off my bandage while Your Highness is here. And it will not slip,” he added with a humour that he felt to be daring.

“Very well, then: I’m ready. Sandals—a small pair.”

His wooden sandals clicked down the steps as he followed Aristides. In single file they crossed the large court-like entrance hall, entered a passage that twisted and turned inconsequently, passed through a room whose ceiling dripped incessantly, found another passage, and, turning suddenly to the right, entered a circular room whose ceiling was a blind dome. Here also the water dripped.

“Like a cave,” observed Georges, with an utter lack of originality. “One can imagine stalactites and stalagmites forming here and, in the course of time, meeting and crusting together.”

Aristides stood listening deferentially. He knew his man. He knew that Georges, with his insatiable vanity, was seeking to impress him.

Georges slipped off his towels, sat down on the raised marble slab and submitted himself to his massage.

Nothing, of course, can reach the mind except through the channel of the senses. Yet something reached Georges’ mind that his eyes did not see, nor his ears hear, nor his flesh feel. Fear began to bud and blossom in his mind like a monstrous fungus. Yet, curiously, he did not fear Aristides: he feared himself.

“You are a clever masseur,” he observed, thinking banal conversation might rid him of his terror.

“I am glad Your Highness thinks so.”

Aristides stopped in his work. He was kneeling by the side of his enemy, and he fixed his glittering eyes on him with hate-hunger.

“I think I’ve been massaged enough,” said Georges, feeling suddenly sick. “I am not very well. Perhaps it was the cognac.... How silent this place is! No sound but water dripping.”

“We are here alone,” said Aristides. Though he spoke with no meaning in his tone, Georges started violently and looked at the closed door.

“Yes, it is locked,” said Aristides.

And, without a word, the masseur rose languidly to his feet, crossed the little chamber, and sat on the only chair it contained. Georges raised himself to a sitting posture. His flabby face was pale, and involuntarily he looked up at the windowless domes.

“There is no way out here,” said Aristides, smiling grimly.

“No. Why should there be? Will you fetch me some water? I feel faint and damnably sick.”

“Certainly.”

Aristides brought a glass from a cupboard, filled it with water, and handed it to his enemy.

Georges, having drained its last drop, rose, swayed for a moment, and sat down, wiping his perspiring forehead with the back of his hand.

“You look ill,” said Aristides.

“I have drunk too much, I think. I drank on an empty stomach. Help me out into the cooler air. All the air here has been used up: it has been through a hundred lungs.”

But Aristides did not move to help him. For a full minute there was silence: a great silence emphasized by the drip-drip-drip of water within the circular room. Georges was dimly aware of the water vapour rising from the wet marble floor, and some strange inquiring part of his brain wondered why the vapour made no noise as it floated upwards through the dome. At length his wandering eyes were caught and held by the eyes of Aristides, whose glance was sharp and poisoned. Georges recoiled a little.

“Surely I have seen you before?” he asked.

“It is possible. It is likely. But I do not remember our meeting.... Does Your Highness feel better now?”

“A little. But I want air.”

And then Georges suddenly began to tremble, for as he stopped speaking he became blindingly aware of the identity of his masseur. His physical cowardice was astonishing, but he had a bold, sinewy mind, and he summoned all its subtlety to his aid.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, with a welcoming smile, “you’re Kronothos! How extraordinary! But I thought all along, somehow, that I knew you.”

He held out his hand with a great gesture of pleasure. Aristides took it, and with his own communicated to Georges an indefinable feeling of impending woe. He did not speak.

“But you must have recognized me!” urged Georges. “Why did you not say so? We were friends once, you know.”

Aristides saw his fear and loved it.

“Once it did certainly seem as though we were friends,” he admitted, “but now, you see, I am the husband of the woman you live with.”

Terror shook Georges in his very vitals, and he leaned over as though to vomit.

“Ah! Yes, yes!” he muttered. And his consciousness seemed to dart about in his brain like a ferret in its cage.

Aristides stood savouring the quaking fear of his victim, but it was with difficulty he prevented himself from rushing upon his enemy and crushing out his life.

“Your Highness will wait here a little time whilst I tidy up,” he said.

And he began folding the towels and swabbing the floor. Georges, sitting with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand, watched him with apprehensive eyes. Finding this period of waiting no longer bearable, he said, humbly:

“Will you let me go? I am too ill to.... You know, I am not entirely to blame. She was tired of you.... Living with you made her....”

He stopped, fearing to speak more. Then:

“Please let me go,” he added.

With a bound Aristides was upon him, his wiry hands about Georges’ fat throat, his finger-tips disappearing as far as the first joint into the flesh of his wife’s seducer. He held on viciously, his fingers as firm and frenzied as a bulldog’s teeth. Georges rolled over on his back, his muscleless arms waving in the air like branches swayed by a breeze, and a sound, half groan, half hiss, came from him as Aristides pressed his right knee on his enemy’s chest. It lasted little more than a minute, and at length the fat man of mixed blood lay soft and limp upon the couch of marble whilst Aristides, exhausted, sat examining him eagerly....

If you wish, you can be with him for a moment. In those spacious, thick-walled Baths there is always deep silence save when customers and workers are there; but the silence is constantly broken by big drops of water that fall from roof and walls to the paved floor. As you listen, there appears to be some purpose in this sound: some elaborate scheming, maybe: some nefarious business afoot. It is the persistence of it that counts, and it is the deliberateness of it that makes you suspect conspiracies.

After violence there is always reaction, and a reaction came to Aristides very quickly as he sat dumbly looking on the dead body of his victim. He had a feeling of approaching catastrophe—a feeling that implied that what had happened was as nothing compared with what was about to happen. Disaster had been released, like a lion, from its den, and ravage must necessarily follow. He, so careful of his own life, felt himself drawn, dragged, into disaster. And the agent of disaster was himself.

He rose, gave a final frightened glance at the body, unlocked the door, and stumbled his way to the entrance of the building. He wanted to run quickly and unthwarted to his doom. So he cast off his towel-robe and began to don his outdoor clothing. And as he dressed he kept repeating to himself:

“Kalamaria! Kalamaria! I will go to Kalamaria to die.”

For beyond Kalamaria, where the little cliffs are, the sea is deep, and the water would take his body and smother it. He did not want to die, and a deep fear shook his heart as he thought of death. But he could not help himself. Something within him—the lion he had let loose—was driving and goading him on towards death: his terror of death was as nothing compared with his terror of discovery, for discovery would mean prolonged torture as well as death, and he had already been tortured to his soul’s full capacity.

What could bring him solace? Drink. Of course. The very word already soothed him, as the promise to lend money immediately soothes the eager borrower. He took a bottle of cognac from the shelf and drank deeply and agitatedly. The liquid burnt his throat and stoutened his heart. He stopped and gasped for breath, and then drank again, and again gasped. Yes: yes: the stuff was already averting disaster: the lion would, in the latter end, pass him by. For, after all, what had he done? Simply an act of justice. Nothing more. An act of bare justice, for was it not right that a seducer of women should die? He had, it is true, taken the law into his own hands. But what man wouldn’t? What man doesn’t?...

Oh, yes: he felt much happier, much stronger, now. Nearly, very nearly, he was content. The cognac fumes dizzied his brain, and as he rose to leave the Baths, he lurched and laughed insanely at himself for doing so. Turning out the lights, he opened the door and looked into Rue Egnatia twenty yards or so away. The shops were lit: there was plenty of traffic: an electric tram clattered by. The entire city, except these loathsome Baths, seemed very friendly. And he was about to issue forth into the night when the thought of the unconsumed cognac came to him. If the half-bottle he had already drunk had killed his fear, would not the remainder remove the very cause of that fear? The drink-fumes in his brain assured him it would, and he re-entered the baths, felt his way to the shelf, and carefully groped for the bottle his soul desired. He found it and drank deeply.

And then he sat down and began dully to think—a stupefied brain in an exhausted body. The bottle fell from his nerveless fingers, and the liquor, pouring out, filled the air with the thick, sickly smell of scented alcohol. Through the open door came a stray dog; it gazed round in the darkness and wandered away.

Throughout that night Aristides Kronothos slept heavily and dreamlessly—slept for an hour or two in a sitting posture until, swaying a little, he overbalanced himself and fell stupidly and without protest to the floor. It was there, Rompapas told me, that he was found next morning, still crazy with liquor, still confident that he had averted disaster.

When last I heard of him he was in the Citadel—a mild, gentle figure, pathetically happy, and with a keen and soul-comforting remembrance of his last encounter with George Georges.

THE DREAMER

To
Edith Heald

EVERY few years, gathering his small savings together, he left intolerable Salonika and went to Athens where he dreamed away a month of spring on the Acropolis, in the great weed-overgrown cemetery where remnants of ancient beauty lie broken and marred, and in the Temple of Jupiter in which he imagined he could hear faint music, and where, of a surety, he witnessed dim processional rites unseen by others. And always a few days were spent in Eleusis—fever-stricken Eleusis, so foul to-day, so fair yesterday: Eleusis that still holds its Mysteries known only to the gods: Eleusis where, each morning at dawn, he issued from the muddy, sordid inn and, slipping off his white tunic, bathed in the Ægean, singing to himself and gazing long and long into the clear waters.

Athens to him was a White Paradise, and he would have left Salonika years since to make his home there had not his bedridden mother clung with increasing fretfulness to the gaudy city where her forefathers had lived ever since the great exodus of Jews from Spain, centuries ago. To her son, Salonika was hateful, for it was ever in conflict with his dreams, and dreams were his life. They kept his soul winging. Whereas Athens threw him into a quiet ecstasy. The present slipped into nothingness, and the past lived....

There was a certain marble figure in the museum which seemed to him to hold all Ancient Greece in its limbs and face.... A green lizard clinging, sun-smitten, to a white wall seemed to belong to a remote age; and a valley full of white butterflies—butterflies so thickly clustered that they looked like dancing snow—was even now haunted by Pan. And at night the moon on the marble of the Parthenon made him giddy with the piercing realness of life....

But this evening he was at home, standing at his shop-door at the corner of the Place de la Liberté. He gazed with shy eagerness up Venizelos Street, that ill-paved gutter of a street where Birmingham and Hamburg jewelry compete with one another for Jewish gold. Here, every evening, he was to be seen, and, when no customer was in his shop bargaining for a cast of Venus or for some piece of ivory carved by the Dreamer’s sensitive hands, he would stand there in the daytime also, his rather tired eyes full of hunger. For—but it was not likely—she might come by day, though a years-old intuition insisted that the time of her arrival would be some evening between sunset and dark.

Many people knew him and saluted him as they passed by: to these salutes he responded gravely, and a little dignified gesture of his hands spoke in duet with his voice: “God be with you! I pray you, do not speak to me.” Hands so beautiful might well have made him vain, but he never thought of himself. And though he lived so intensely, he was very rarely conscious of his happiness except each night when, having closed the street-door, he sought his bed with strange relief.

Venizelos Street was never beautiful, or even picturesque, till the great fire of August 1917 came like a giant and, in a few hours, twisted it to fantastic shapes. And the Dreamer loathed it, though he made himself spend many hours of each day in gazing upon its squalidness, his eyes ranging from the Place de la Liberté up to the point where the street narrows and the Arcade and the Bazaars begin. But he had one of the secrets of happiness: he could look at things and not see them: better, far better, he could see things that were not there. Stein’s steel-walled shop did not exist: Orosdi Back had never been there with his wine and pickles: Tiring was only the faint echo of a name. Salonika’s life-blood moved sluggishly in that main artery; but the slowness was a predatory slowness—the cautious movement of men and women for ever on the prowl. Sometimes his eyes would rest for a moment on the discontented rich as they sat on their little chairs outside Floca’s, drinking syrups and haggling over prices. They were nearly as unreal to him as Jesus Christ is to the Christian.

He rarely glanced towards the sea, for he was sure she would not come that way. The mountains were her home. She would come drifting like a wraith, and, leaving the mountains, place her tiny feet on the plain, flutter past Lembet and Karaissi, enter the town, and, turning to the left down Rue Egnatia, reach this ugly street that sloped to and ended in the tideless sea. Surely, crocuses and anemones would bloom on the pavement when she came, and with her would come the stirring of a breeze. It must be so: he had pictured it so often. She had radiant eyes, he knew. She had always been young, ever since the beginning of the world. Youth was hers for ever. And her hair ... his heart leapt, for it seemed to him that her hand was about his heart: his heart cupped in her hand: a hand cool and, in some curious way, conscious of itself. Her hair was in his eyes, blinding them. A great light shone about her.

When she came, she would not speak to him: but, all the same, she would know. That was what he was waiting for, living for: that she should know.

A complaining voice came from the room just above his head. Turning swiftly, he passed through the shop where a few pieces of statuary gleamed white against the walls and shelves painted black, and quickly mounted the staircase.

“God be with you, mamma!” he breathed, as he bent over a little curled-up figure that lay on a bed near the window. The paralysed woman murmured a little something he could not hear.

“I am here,” he said. “Feel me.”

And he placed a lean cheek against one of her hands.

A devastating weakness overcame her and she cried a little, but her weeping, suffocated by exhaustion, soon ceased. She lay still and seemingly asleep, and the Dreamer, kneeling by her side, felt pity rising like a fountain in his heart. Her sallow face was like his own, aristocratic, broad-brewed, patient. The eyes were still full of Jewish ardour. He worshipped her always as a devotee worships the Madonna. It was she who had quickened his love for the Beauty that lies behind beautiful things, who had taught him that all life was a Seeming, who had added glamour and twilight and witchery to his entire environment.

“Great little mamma!” he whispered.

She smiled wanly and opened her eyes for a brief instant.

“Were you watching?” she asked.

At this he started guiltily, for he had told no one, not even his mother, why he stood nightly at the street-door.

“Yes,” he said simply.

“My poor son!” she murmured, her face tense with anxiety. “What you wait for will never come.”

“No?... But if she did, and I were not there? You see how it is, mamma. I must be there.”

“Yes, yes. One must always be there, waiting.”

Her face composed itself, and, after waiting a few minutes, and thinking she slept, he tiptoed away, his heart rushing before him to welcome the lady of his dreams.

(Yet how was it that, having reached the doorway and having darted a glance up the street, an expression of immeasurable relief lit his face when he had satisfied himself that she was not coming down that way?)

Darkness was beginning, and demireps issued from side streets to the Place. Greek women, flat-footed and unbeautiful, waddled by, virtuous and miserable in their virtue. They carried virtue with them like a shroud. The demireps, haughty and impudent, were like flowers in the dusk. Lights appeared in the shop windows and the street traffic ebbed. Plashing of waves against the quay almost level with the water less than a hundred yards away, could faintly be heard. The Dreamer, looking towards the sea for a robbed minute, saw divine Olympus, purple and august, glowing and dying in the glowing and dying sky. So all beauty faded and died, to be reborn richer for its ancestry, more wonderful for its age.

He sighed, and his hungry eyes sought his lady. His brain was washed clean of life: nothing dwelt in his mind but his dream. And unconsciously he clenched his hands to convince himself for a moment of his ecstasy, and to make that ecstasy more intense....

Those gracious, tender figures on the Acropolis! How chastely their garments hung! They had only life that was life, and perchance even now—oh, yes, now, for a faint slip of moon was gliding down the sky—they were walking, hand in hand, silently, in the Parthenon. They mysteriously were she, his lady, his lady who must never speak to him, but who one day, or one evening like this, would appear among this depravity, and, looking on him, know and for ever remember....

The thought of Olympus dying away in the South came to him, and he stole another glance at the mountain’s almost dead glory. Its summit was white. A small boat heaped up with fruit was at the quay’s edge. Golden oranges were massed together.... Yes: she would wear golden sandals, and on her wrists would be gold, and gold would be on her hair.... His impressions mingled confusedly; thought lay dead.

I do not think that in all Salonika, and perhaps in all the world, there was so happy a man that night as the Dreamer in his hours of watching and longing.

He lingered in his doorway until the streets became silent. She was not coming. Not to-night. She was not coming with her everlasting youth, bringing with her also his own renewed youth. For many years he had waited, but every night she had disappointed him.

The night was now full-starred, for the moon had gone. A dog, shapeless in the dark, nosed in the gutter. Two whispering old men passed close by.

At length, exhausted by his vigil, the Dreamer turned and re-entered his shop. His happiness, his sense of relief, was too great for expression. As he closed the door quickly behind him, it was as though he were shutting out the Dreadful One. He stood dazed in the darkness. The oblong room in which he stood was perfumed and sweet. The white pieces of statuary standing against the walls made themselves just visible; they seemed made of mist, intangible; their outlines were blurred. Rubbing his eyes, he stared at the statuary and smiled. Then he stretched his arms to their utmost above his head and, bending his head back, turned his face to the ceiling. In utmost weariness he stretched himself and yawned.

And then, uttering a cry of delight, he rushed upstairs to his mother. He fumbled with a lamp and lit it. Then he went to his mother’s bedside.

“Oh, mamma, mamma,” he said, “she has not come. It has not happened. My dream has not come true. Oh, I am so happy, so very happy!”

He kissed her cheek. Her eyes, opened wide, searched him through and through, as they had done on so many occasions.

“Oh, my son, my son!” she exclaimed, pityingly.

But he smiled with serene happiness, and taking a wisp of her meagre hair between his finger and thumb gently rubbed it.

“The gods be with you,” he said, “as they are with me.”

WHEN THE GREEN ROSES CAME

To
Trevor Johns

THERE are only two people in this story: Zuleika, a large, indeed massive, Jewess from Bucharest, and a rather elderly English diamond merchant with a slight body and a white moustache.

For some odd reason—largely, I think, because he was both infinitely courteous and gaily reckless—he attracted me, and, because I had been some considerable time in Salonika and he had only just arrived, he requested me to “show him round.” Before proceeding to do so, I asked him what were the three things in the world he loved most of all. He replied at once: “Animation, colour, and women.”

“Then,” said I, “my task is easy. Come with me.”

So we stepped into a gharry (we were staying at a farm a little off the road to Hortiach), and bumped down the Lembet Road, past the funny old cemetery on our right, and stopped importantly in the middle of that disastrously sordid square in which the Rue Egnatia and the road from Lembet meet.

“And that’s that,” remarked Twelves as, having stepped from the gharry, we watched it waggle away.

It was May 1913. The afternoon was late, and a cool breeze swept along the sun-strewn street. My friend had (which I have not) the carriage of a soldier, and, though I could give him at least three inches, I am confident that, in the eyes of the women we met, he appeared to tower above me. I think he was conscious of this, though he seemed to try to hide it. To him, fresh from a tedious voyage from Bahia, Venizelos Street was Paradise, and when we came to the Place de la Liberté, he stood and looked at the gay crowd outside Floca’s with a slow, beguiling smile about his mouth.

“I am beginning to sit up and take notice,” he remarked; “this, if I am not mistaken, is indubitably IT.”

If “IT” meant laughter, light, and delicate linen discreetly displayed, he was right. People from all the countries of Europe were there. The ladies, being large and languid, and the early afternoon having been insufferably hot, wore as little as possible. This, Twelves pointed out with unnecessary particularity, was precisely as it should be.

But I am not going to tell you about Floca’s, for the tragedy did not begin there; indeed, nothing really began until well on in the evening when, as we were starting dinner at the White Tower, the sound of music came to us from the adjoining room.

“It is Debussy’s ‘Les Poissons d’or,’” said Twelves, swallowing whitebait, “and this is just the right atmosphere for it.”

Then, placing his napkin upon the table, he rose from his seat.

“In a minute I shall return,” he said, excusing himself and hastening from the room. But ten minutes passed before he rejoined me, and a single glance at him revealed that something of importance had happened to him in the meantime.

“I’ve just seen Jezebel, or Cleopatra, or Zola’s Nana in that room,” he said, excitedly, jerking his head in the direction from which the music was proceeding. “She’s stunning. The restaurant people tell me they have dancing in there after dinner—dancing and music. Shall we go?”

A curious, half-insane gleam of desire was in his eyes; he looked as though he were on the point of attaining something for which he had been striving all his life. His hands shook a little and he moistened his dry lips with the tip of his tongue.

Now Salonika is the City of Evil Women, and not a few rapacious demireps prowl like sleek tigers, subtle and wise, through the garish rooms and prim gardens of the White Tower. They are wonderful to look upon; their voices are like soft music; their hands are fluttering white moths; their mouths are innocently crooked. Gorgeous works of art they are, and, as works of art, entirely commendable; but to speak to them is to be poisoned, and to embrace them is to place one’s arms around Death. I said as much to Twelves, but he did not appear to listen, and as he was at least fifteen years older than myself and a man of more worlds than one, I did not venture to make my words more insistent or pointed.

As we were eating ices and hot cherries, the music, which had hitherto been played by a master, became vulgar and tawdry. It was a vapid valse given with a lunging and immoderate accent on the first beat of every bar.

“That’s the sort of thing that makes cities loathsome,” remarked Twelves, referring to the music; “let’s go and stop it.”

We arose, and I looked regretfully at six fat red cherries which, against the yellow of my ice, appeared almost purple.

A minute later we had entered the great room with its stage, its smooth floor, its half-moon of boxes. As yet only a few people were there; they sat round small tables imbibing vicious drinks and gazing with half-contemptuous amusement at the pianiste. I saw at once that she was the woman who had so rapidly inflamed Twelves’ passion, for even her back was voluptuous, and her neck reminded me of certain passages in the Song of Solomon. She was sensuality incarnate—sensuality brainless, horrific, devastating.

Twelves walked up to her and, placing his hand firmly on one of her white shoulders, said:

“Stop playing! You are making yourself ridiculous. Listening to you is worse—infinitely worse—than being in Clapham. Come over here with my friend and me and tell us of some of the wicked things you have done.”

Her eyes swooped into his. They were large and lustrous, but, as they sank into his, they decreased until the pupils became mere points of light. Then her lips parted and she showed her little teeth in a broad smile. I noticed that her skin appeared as firm and healthy as that of a plum not wholly ripe. She ceased playing and, with a sharp gesture, banged her fist upon the treble notes of the piano, placed one hand upon Twelves’ arm and the other on mine, and walked between us to an unoccupied table in the far corner of the room. As she did so she turned and smiled triumphantly at the other ladies of her profession, and her smile said: “See how easily I secure my prey! You, poor things, will have to scheme and ogle till midnight.”

Even before she was seated she clapped her hands to summon a waiter, and presently ordered a bottle of champagne.

“I always drink champagne with Englishmen,” she observed, “Beaume with the French, and with the Germans—beer!”

She looked at Twelves for his approval, and the smile he had ready for her was ample assurance that she had said a very witty thing.

“I come from Bucharest and my name is Zuleika,” she announced, inconsequently. Her self-satisfaction was that of a deliciously vain child. Then, with strange disconnectedness: “Would you like to see my coins?” she asked.

We expressed the greatest interest.

“From Cairo,” she said, as she patted her satchel of beads the colour of pigeons’ blood. She took therefrom a number of bright foreign coins and held them in the cup made by her hollowed hands.

But Twelves did not even glance at them.

His strong, lithe fingers were embedded in the white flesh of her arm, like manacles, and his eyes held hers.

“Well, well, well,” she laughed, “but you must be good and patient.”

She released her arm and touched him lightly on the cheek with the tips of her fingers, smiling at him all the time.

And then the waiter placed a silver bucket of ice on the table; in the middle of the ice wobbled a bottle of Moet and Chandon. Zuleika showed her teeth in a broad smile, and turned swiftly round to examine the faces of those who, in the meantime, had sat down at neighbouring tables. Her eyes gave a rapid signal to a silly-looking creature immediately behind her; he had a face of lard, a drooping moustache, and googly eyes.

“Ah, Maestro!” she exclaimed, clasping his hands with gipsy ardour.

She turned round to us just as Twelves was taking a 25-drachma note from his pocket-book. Her face immediately assumed a cunning expression, and she stretched out a plump arm, gripped the bottle by the neck, and poured out the wine.

“Another five drachmas,” she said softly, “that is the price in this room.” Then, without a second’s pause, and holding her glass within an inch of her ear in order to listen to the icy hiss: “I have been in Salonika three weeks,” she announced, “and I think it is very nice. And you?”

“We both leave to-morrow,” he said.

We clicked glasses and drank. The room was rapidly filling, and an orchestra of scarlet-coated musicians played the latest Austrian waltz. We talked about nothing, yet we were not bored by Zuleika’s brainlessness, for Twelves was aflame with desire, and to me she was a new type of huntress. Full-bosomed ladies, absurdly conscious of the number and whiteness of their teeth, have always seemed to me much too grotesque to love.

It was not long before I began to perceive that Zuleika had no intention of succumbing either to Twelves’ masterfulness or his money. She knew I knew this, and was particularly charming to me in consequence. She desired neither him nor me: her mind was in Twelves’ pocket-book, counting his money: but she sought to make me her accomplice by securing my silence. Her design was the design of all hunters—to fasten her teeth on her prey and not lose hold while there was blood left to suck.

A watery-eyed waiter hovered near, like a bat. She plucked his sleeve.

“Another bottle!” she commanded imperiously, and, magically, it was on the table in twenty seconds, but this time the neck of the bottle emerged from a silver bucket filled with white roses. Evidently we were now customers worthy of special attention.

“C’est a vous,” she said, nodding and smiling in my direction, and evidently it was, for the bat, with folded wings, stood by my side.

It was while I was paying him in ten-drachma notes that an acquaintance squeezed his way past our table, stooped and murmured in my ear:

“Do you know how much she gets for each bottle you pay for?”

“Haven’t the remotest,” said I, “about how much?”

“Just a matter of ten drachmas. I hope she’ll prove worth it. But that, I suppose, remains to be seen.”

He went, and, turning round to the table, I saw much to my astonishment that there were now four clean glasses on the tray the waiter had brought. Zuleika was filling them all to the brim.

“Maestro! Maestro!” she called, without turning her head. From the table behind came the man with the googly eyes. He smiled familiarly yet guardedly at us as he took the glass of champagne which Zuleika handed him. He would have spoken to us if he had not seen the hostility in Twelves’ and my eyes; but, without the slightest indication of embarrassment, our uninvited guest tossed the contents of the glass into his mouth, let them dwell there a moment, and then swallowed them with an audible gulp.

“He is my brother,” explained Zuleika, enthusiastically.

“That may be so,” said Twelves, “nevertheless, he is an extremely disagreeable person.”

And his long hand darted out like a hawk and again plunged into the flesh of her arm. He looked at her meaningly; indeed, his gaze was like a shout saying, “I want you! I want you! I want you!” She turned away from him impatiently.

“Very well, then,” she said, “but you must wait a little. When the green roses come. These are white, but round the fifth bottle there will be green.” And she spread her hands over the white roses surrounding the champagne bottle.

“Oh, damn the green roses!” growled Twelves. “Here, waiter, another bottle, quick!”

She glanced at him from the tail of her eye, and then immediately became absorbed in the performance of a tall angular girl who, with exquisite art, was singing a rapid French song full of diablerie. She had no looks, no voice, and no figure; but she had personality, genius. Silence had fallen upon the drinkers, and every one listened and watched; only the waiters, more than ever like bats, moved swiftly about, bearing absinthe and vermouth on purple trays. The singer exhaled a charm that diffused itself about the room; suddenly, she ceased singing, made a faint gesture, threw a kiss to the audience, and vanished. Immediately there was a great shouting and a stamping of feet.

“It is always like that,” complained Zuleika, pouting. “The men love her. Why? She is ugly and she is all bones and skin: Ugh! It makes me sick to see so ugly a woman driving the men mad.”

But the third bottle of champagne caught her eye, and she burst into a laugh.

“See,” she said, pointing to the roses, now pink, that surrounded the bottle, “see my passion is—what do you call it?—rising—yes, rising!”

In proof thereof, she threw her arm lightly round Twelves’ neck and kissed him behind the ear. He paled with desire. As for me, I turned a little to one side and made a pretence of studying the audience. The next thing I was aware of, they were both leaning over the table, their heads together, whispering. She was smiling, cunning and triumphant, whilst his face wore an expression of irritation and baffled desire.

“Come on, waiter, damn you!” he called, “another bottle and another. Yes—two! Blood-roses round the first, and round the second green. And that,” he added, “makes five.”

“Yes, five. One, two, three, four, five,” she counted on her fingers. “It is enough.”

And in due course the two fresh bottles appeared. The bucket containing the blood-red roses was placed in front of Zuleika: that containing the green before Twelves. When the waiter had opened both bottles, Zuleika ordered him to take one to the neighbouring table for “the Maestro.”

“You seem to be very fond of your brother,” observed Twelves, “but it is strange he should be willing to drink a whole bottle of wine paid for by a complete stranger.”

She looked at him darkly.

“You wish to quarrel with me,” she said, “very well then, I am quite content.”

“So that’s your game, is it?” exclaimed Twelves, with unexpected ferocity. “You drink champagne with me for a couple of hours and then think you can do what you like. The green roses have come and you must pay for them.”

He pulled out his pocket-book in order to pay for the wine, but before he had handed the waiter the money, she held out her hand, palm upwards, and placed it on the table.

“One hundred and twenty-five drachmæ for me,” she whispered; and, without a moment’s hesitation, he handed her five 25-drachmæ notes.

Then an amazing thing happened. Quite openly, she swung round in her chair and handed the five notes to the man she called “the Maestro.” He took them and placed them carefully in his pocket; but, as he did so, he kept his eyes fixed on Twelves. Twelves returned his gaze steadily. In the eyes of the stranger I saw a look of amusement and half-veiled contempt. And certainly Twelves was appearing in a contemptible light. Even physically he was contemptible, for he looked very diminutive by Zuleika’s side, and it was only his firm jaws and clear eyes that redeemed him from futility.

“Before we go we will drink this last bottle,” she said.

They sat side by side without a word, drinking their champagne. As I was, so to speak, out of it, I turned my head and gazed at the scene of mad revelry that met my eyes, wondering and trying to discover precisely what it was that made the frantic abandonment of the night different from similar evenings I had spent in Paris, Marseilles, Cairo, and Athens. I came to the conclusion that the difference was chiefly in the women. They had no tenderness, no passion, no sense of adventure, no enjoyment. They were simply rapacious. They did not walk: they prowled. They did not sit: they couched....

During the last half-hour the chairs and tables in the middle of the room had been removed and a few couples had started a bizarre form of tango. A woman with bared breasts and arms, a broad crimson sash wound three times round her body her only clothing, focused the onlookers’ attention. She was tall and graceful, and her body imitated the movements of a snake. It was horrible, but it was fascinating, and the beast that is in most of us leapt to the faces of the men who looked on and made them seem inhuman. Here was another huntress, but I felt that her potential victims were as rapacious as she, and that soon she would be their prey.

From the tail of my eye I saw Twelves and Zuleika rise and move from our table. It was as I had guessed. She would not repulse him here, but in the spacious hall outside, for even in the White Tower “scenes” are not tolerated.

I followed at a discreet distance, feeling a sudden nausea at the vice around me and longing for the northern mountains of Greece where I had spent the winter. There was a sickly smell of heliotrope, and the air was misty with tobacco smoke.

When they had reached the hall, Twelves and Zuleika stopped in earnest conversation, but I moved on to the cloakroom to get our hats and sticks. This occupied me for only a minute, but when I had returned I found my companions in the midst of a furious, though subdued, quarrel.

Twelves hardly spoke, but when he did so, he jerked out a sentence in a whisper so passionate that it sounded more urgent than a scream. Fragments of the conversation reached me.

“But it’s impossible,” exclaimed Zuleika, “to-morrow. Not now.... My husband is here. Yes, yes, yes! I have told you already. The Maestro is my husband. He would kill me.... How dare you! But you Englishmen are all pigs. I go back to the room. And you ... you clear out!”

She stretched out her arm with a superb gesture and pointed to the door. But Twelves stood resolute.

“You red fiend!” he whispered, “but I will have you yet.”

Two waiters had stopped to watch. One of them, a lascivious Greek, broke into a giggle.

“You are coming with me and you are coming now,” said Twelves, “if you don’t, I shall have no mercy on you.”

Then she laughed and threw her beaded satchel over Twelves’ head to one of the waiter’s behind her. He caught it, and she folded her arms.

“I could laugh at you,” she said, “but if I once began I should never stop. What is it you say in England—‘No fool like an old fool,’ isn’t it? And a fool always threatens what he can’t do. You will have no mercy on me! Boo!”

And, swift as lightning, she thrust out her arms and caught him by the shoulders. For a few seconds her massive frame towered above him and she shook him violently. The waiter renewed his high falsetto giggling. Then, placing one foot behind her, she lunged her body forward, and her muscular arms shot out like two piston-rods. Twelves fell backwards, his head striking a heavy chair four paces behind him. As he did not move, I rushed forward to his help, but, as I rushed, the waiters ran also, and we arrived at Twelves’ prone body at the same moment.

Twelves, though badly injured, was perfectly conscious.

“Take me out,” he said, “I feel bloody sick.”

And that is all that happened.

At the beginning of this story I called it a tragedy, but perhaps you think that “comedy” describes it better. Well, on the whole, so do I.

I only hope Twelves does too.

PAUL OF TARSUS

To
Julius Harrison

PAUL had finished his day’s work at the quay-side of Thessalonica unloading a cargo of timber, and now sat watching two young men, followers of Christ and dear friends of his own, who, naked to the waist, were washing the day’s sweat and dirt from their arms and faces. They were Greeks—handsome, athletic, and full of gaiety.

“Art thou tired, Master?” asked the younger of the two, walking up to the great traveller and preacher and offering him a wet cloth for his face.

“What—with this kind of work?” said Paul, smiling. “Thou thinkest I am old and weak, I know,” he added, taking the cloth from his young friend and pressing it gratefully against his bared throat.

“No, dear Father, I don’t.... I will sit by thy side until Aristarchus has finished cleansing himself.... Father, I want to ask thee something.”

“Well, my son: ask.”

But the young man stared across the sea to Olympus and would not speak. Paul, divining the mood that was upon him, touched his arm gently.

“Ask me any time, my son.” Then he added eagerly and with some passion: “Hast thou told Aristarchus thou wishest to marry?”

“Marry?”

The young man laughed nervously and self-consciously.

“Father, I might have known thou wouldst guess,” he said. “No, I have not told Aristarchus. I have told no one: not even her.”

“And it is about her thou wishest to speak with me?”

“Yes, Father, it is,” answered Lycastus.

But again he sat silent, not being able to speak one single word; and presently Aristarchus came over to them, his bronzed face wet, his neck and arms bare.

“Jason will be expecting thee,” he said to Paul.

“Yes,” assented Paul. “And thou, Aristarchus? Whither art thou going?”

“I am going home to my wife and little son to talk of Jesus Christ. But I will walk some way with thee, Master,” he said. “Come, Jason will have his food spread for thee, and, I doubt not, some wine for thy tired body.”

“Aristarchus, thou knowest I am not tired,” said Paul, reproachfully, “it is only here that I am weary,” he added, placing his hand against his heart. “Come, Lycastus and Aristarchus, we will walk together.”

But though Paul had protested that he was not weary, he walked half a pace behind the young men and placed a heavy hand on the shoulder of Aristarchus. They walked in a westerly direction, towards the marshy mouth of the great river, and when they were clear of the city walls, they slackened their pace. Already the air was cooler, for the evening was coming and the sun was now sliced across by the horizon. Olympus, in a delicate mist, burned milkily like an opal.

“Aristarchus,” said Paul a little absently, “Lycastus has something to tell thee.”

But Lycastus, hanging his head, did not speak.

“Lycastus, what is it?” asked Aristarchus. “But I see how it is with thee. Thou art shy. Thou art in love and thou wishest to marry.”

He laughed a little.

Lycastus placed his arm for a moment on the arm of his friend.

“Thou knowest also? Who told thee?”

“Thyself. Has he not told us, Master? Thou hast been very happy these last weeks, Lycastus, and sometimes thou hast been sunk deeply in moods of the sweetest misery. And sometimes the blood has come quickly to thy cheeks for no reason that I could see, and has gone as quickly as it came. It is only a maid who does that to a man. What is her name?”

“Her name is Drusilla.”

“And she loves thee?” asked Aristarchus, encouragingly.

“I think she does. I have prayed that she may.”

They walked on in silence for a little while, Paul’s eyes bent on the ground.

“What dost thou say of it, dear Father?” asked Lycastus, timidly.

“If thou hast been praying to Jesus Christ and He has helped thee, what can I say? Those who must marry must marry. But I shall lose thee as I have lost Aristarchus.”

“Oh, Master: thou knowest well thou hast not lost me!” exclaimed Aristarchus, reproachfully. “We love and serve the same God. It was you, Master, who gave Jesus to me and I still have Jesus.”

“Nevertheless, thou hast gone from me. I feel thou hast. Thy wife has—stolen thee.”

Aristarchus, angry and resentful, moved a little away from Paul so that Paul’s hand slipped from his shoulder and his arm fell dead and limp.

“It is not true, Master,” he said.

“No, dear Father, it is not true,” urged Lycastus.

“Only I,” said Paul, “can know who are those who dwell in my heart, and thou, Aristarchus, are not one of them.... But here I leave thee. This road on our left is mine and, as thou hast reminded me, Jason will be waiting for me.”

The three men stopped at the cross-roads in the dusk. It was the short time of half-light. The sky in the east was the green of apples, and in the west it was like the red of the pomegranate’s fruit. All three men were disturbed and sad. Aristarchus, so loyal and patient, felt his anger melt suddenly: the something hard in his bosom softened and went.

“Come, Master,” he said, “come to my home. Come and speak with my wife. Thou dost not know her because thou wilt not.”

“But, Jason will be....” began Paul, the words dying on his lips.

“Go with him, dear Father,” urged Lycastus, “I will come with thee.”

So Paul turned without a word and went with his young friends, but the dark look on his face matched the dark shadow that, from the northern mountains, was swallowing up this land.

It was but a short way to the house of Aristarchus, and as they entered the little stone dwelling they found a woman awaiting them. Aristarchus saluted his wife with a kiss, placing his hands one on each shoulder.

“Master, this is my wife, and here, Philyra, is Paul of Tarsus of whom thou hast heard me tell so many times.”

“Welcome, Master,” she said, and she pressed herself against the doorway to let him pass.

Inside there was but little light. The son of Aristarchus and Philyra was asleep in a wooden cradle on the floor near the centre of the room. On a table near by were wine and food.

“Thou wilt sit and drink, Master?” asked Philyra.

But Paul waved her aside and remained standing.

The child woke and, seeing his father, said some little words. He was fair, like his tender, beautiful mother. As Aristarchus moved forward to greet his son, Lycastus pulled his garment, but Aristarchus, paying no heed, walked to the crude cradle he had made, and bent over his babe. He gave the child his finger to play with, and lingered by him a moment or two.

“Didst thou finish thy work?” inquired Philyra, abashed yet very eager.

“Yes. It was very hot. Our Master has come to talk with us, Philyra. Thou wilt sit, Master?”

“No,” answered Paul, “I came for but a minute. Jason awaits me. And I would be alone. Farewell!”

“Stay, Master, stay!” cried Philyra. “I have heard thee talk of Christ—many times I have heard thee in the market.”

She shrank a little after she had spoken, afraid that she had said what should have been left to others.

Paul looked at her kindly, but with no trust in his eyes.

“Thy son has been baptized?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Indeed, yes,” she answered.

“And thou and Aristarchus are already followers of Christ! Why, then, should I linger? So many are unsaved.”

“I think,” said Lycastus, “some men and some women want support in their faith. When the light is withdrawn, there is darkness.”

“Put not thy faith in man, Lycastus,” said Paul, sternly. “Light proceeds from God, and God never withdraws Himself.”

“Then if thou art not the light,” said Philyra in a whisper, “thou art the lamp that shields the light, that keeps it burning—for us.”

But Paul’s dark face remained dark, and when the child in the cradle began again to speak little words, the great teacher turned to go. He withdrew very silently, saying only, “Farewell!” as he reached the door. As he disappeared, Lycastus asked Aristarchus a question with his eyebrows, and, in reply, Aristarchus gravely lowered his head.

So Lycastus followed Paul into the night which by now had come. He could see his Master outlined against the thick stars. Paul was walking slowly; his heavy frame was bent, and his robe trailed in the dust. Lycastus, fearing to incur his anger, walked some paces behind his Master, and his sandalled feet stepped warily.

He loved Paul dearly, and to-night his heart ached for him and his conscience smote him. But so full of tenderness is the heart of man, and so sweetly selfish is man’s love for woman, that in a very short time he had forgotten his Master and, in imagination, Drusilla walked by his side, her slender fingers in his, her head on his heart. For Lycastus was never alone. As soon as he was withdrawn from others, Drusilla was with him. To-night the stars were in her hair, and the little breeze was her breath. And he fell to thinking of the house they would share and of the babe that would be born to them, and in his heart of hearts he knew that what Paul had said was true. Paul had lost Aristarchus, and Lycastus soon would be lost to him also.

“It must be so! It is right it should be so!” said Lycastus to himself.

Yet he felt sad when he thought of Paul, and he sought in his mind for something he could say or do to comfort him.

Presently they were at the cross-roads. Paul stopped, turned, and saw his young friend approaching. But he would not return Lycastus’ greeting; instead, he stood firm and rigid, his thick neck and noble head immovable. The wild eyes had in them light that was not borrowed from the stars.

“Pass on!” he said. “Trouble me not!”

So Lycastus passed on to his home and, ere he had unloosened his robe, had forgotten Paul and was already dreaming of Drusilla and the glad days to come.

THE MOON MAN

To
Samuel Langford

SOUR and always a little miserable, Vuk Karadjitch worked all day in the fields, feeling that life had brought him nothing. Life was as tasteless as water, as unmusical as the chink of money on a counter. He could not conceive why he had been born; existence was a casually organized series of accidents. Every thing that happened was accidental. Death was the only event that the gods had deliberately and elaborately planned: one saw death coming almost from the very moment that one was born.

Karadjitch had the lithe body of an aristocrat: the features also, and the poise of head. His neck had proud muscles, and his throat was shapely. But though he had the appearance and carriage of one highly born, his birth was lowly, and the education he had snatched, almost stolen, from life was not of the kind to increase his money-earning capacity.

His mind, a little marred at birth, had been almost ruined by knowledge. His brain fastened itself on the past—on mythology—the sweet legend of Hylas, and on the golden story of Helen of Troy. It is so easy to make the past more real than the present: it is so pleasant to do this, so fruitful of happiness. So Vuk Karadjitch lived in the days that were long before his birth.

And as he worked in the orchards that lie above Kirekoj—working at night to keep robbers away—he stared continually at the moon, the moon that was to him the oldest and most tired thing in all God’s universe. Ever since he had been a boy this wayward planet had excited him, and the coming of manhood had not lessened the strange sympathy, even longing, that he felt for the great globe of light wandering with such self-conscious pride among the stars....

His mother, a harassed, reserved woman, used years ago to put little Vuk to bed with fear whenever the moon shone through the high, shutterless window. She would cover his head so that he should not see the blue light on the wall.

“Go to sleep, child,” she would whisper as she bent over him; “do not walk to-night.”

But almost of a certainty he would rise in his sleep and walk to the room in which his mother sat, his eyes open and luminous, his little hands stretched palm upwards in front of him. Then she would tremblingly put down her work, go to him, and just touching him with the tips of her fingers, guide him back to bed.

If, as often happened, the boy’s father was in the house when Vuk walked, the gnarled old man would roughly seize him and shake him into terrified wakefulness.

“It’s a beating the lad wants,” the father would say; and, indeed, one night he raised his hand and his son staggered and shrieked under the blow he received.

Vuk’s father had reason, though he knew it not, to dislike the boy. Karadjitch was a cuckold, but so little suspicion had he of this, that he smiled with secret pleasure when neighbours remarked how like to him was his wife’s handsome boy.

One evening the mother arranged a curtain over the bedroom window so that the moon could not get at her son. But even on that night Vuk walked. And, a few evenings later, softly entering his room, his mother saw him standing on the back of a high chair at the window, his body precariously balanced, his dilated eyes fixed most questioningly on the molten moon....

She spoke nothing to her neighbours of all these things which, I must tell you, happened fifteen years ago in that most lovely of towns—Doiran so white and perfect standing by the blue, deep lake whose name is also Doiran.

Kirekoj has no lake like Doiran, yet Vuk, now a young man of twenty-three, loved this place cupped so gently in the mountains. He had only to walk up through the vineyards and orchards and drag himself to the top of the ridge to see Langaza which, though not so beautiful as Doiran, is perhaps more mysterious.

Just as, when a boy, he had been employed to scare away birds from the crops, so was he now paid to guard the fruit-burdened orchards from robbers....

One night in August his depression was so great that, as he sat with his back against a young pomegranate tree, he allowed his mind to become numb with wretchedness. There was no moon this night, and he had come to depend so much upon this far-off friend of his that a great loneliness oppressed him. A dog, snuffing in the undergrowth, came to him and put his nose in Vuk’s open hand. The young man made no response, but the dog licked and liked him and stayed with him. And every night the affectionate wild creature would come and sit by him. Never once did Vuk give him a caress or vouch him a word. Yet he never wished the dog to go away.

The man and woman in Kirekoj with whom Vuk lived were kind to him, though they thought him strange and often wondered what his thoughts were. When Vuk set out in the evening to his work, the woman would give him a little parcel of food—bread, a handful of olives, and a bottle of red wine, and Vuk would smile at her shyly and say some words of thanks. The young men of the village—mostly Bulgars—had long ago accepted him; at first, they had teased him a little, but as he always replied with a smile of good-nature, they had soon come to see that his oddness was not a thing to give them amusement.

Sometimes Vuk would try to throw himself into their company, forcing himself to be one of them. He was afraid of his own strangeness. But his abnormal shyness barred his way, and the sensitive distaste he had for life was too strong to be overcome. He envied his fellows. He envied their capacity for comradeship, their day-long happiness, the ease with which they laughed and talked. But he could never become like them. His self-distrust increased with the years, and he turned more passionately than ever to his dreams of the past and to his silent companion in the sky.

One afternoon, the man with whom he lived came in from his work in the fields and found Vuk reading a book.

“Will you drink wine with me?” the man asked.

“Thank you: I will,” answered Vuk, shrinking a little.

The man poured out two glasses, and, as the day was very hot, Vuk drained his at a single draught. The man silently refilled it, and in five minutes the glass was again empty.

His host, looking at him, smiled.

“Why don’t you go to the inn and drink with Stepan and the other lads?” he asked. “To get drunk sometimes is good for a man.”

Vuk, returning his gaze, smiled also.

“I will drink with you, if you like,” he returned, for the wine had excited him, and he did not feel as much afraid as usual.

So his host brought another bottle and yet another and, after some time, Vuk began to talk.

“Am I in your way living here?” he asked, his eyes looking wounded and beseeching.

“No. I like you to be here. My wife likes you to be here. We are all happy together—eh?”

“I am happy with you,” said Vuk. “I often want to say things to you, but I can’t. I am not stupid. I understand things, but—somehow—— ” His voice trailed off to a murmur. Then, clenching his fists and tightening all his body, he said with an effort: “I understand things, but I cannot speak about them. It seems as though you are all so far off that you wouldn’t grasp what I said. And I am always afraid that I might say something that would be strange to you.”

His host laughed tolerantly.

“We are all strange, eh? And what would it matter if we didn’t understand you? You must talk: it is good for every man to talk. Perhaps you are wise, and no one understands wise men.”

This comforted Vuk a little.

“Perhaps I am,” he said; “I do not know.” He paused for a moment. “Have you—have you ever noticed at night how, though it may be very silent, it is still more silent when the moon appears?”

His companion considered a moment.

“No, I don’t think I have,” he answered, shifting uneasily in his chair.

Vuk took another mouthful of wine.

“Well, you listen one night and you’ll hear. Especially when the moon is just rising—red and swollen on the horizon. Of course, she is angry then, and at those times I always think she is like some raging, drunken queen rising from her couch in the middle of the night.”

His companion stared at Vuk for a moment and then laughed. But by now Vuk was too exalted and excited to notice that his host was uncomfortable and perhaps a little contemptuous, and, putting his arms on the table and leaning forward, he began to talk volubly.

“I wish I had money to buy jewels,” he said, “especially certain jewels like opals. I would like to hold many opals in the hollow of my hand: I would like to crush them together between my hands. You know that all fire is the sun. Did you know that? Yes. I’m telling you. Take coal. Coal is buried wood. And what is wood? Wood is trees. And it is the sun that makes trees grow. It pulls at the ground and draws them out; it warms them and feeds them. When you burn wood and coal, it is the sun that leaps out at you—a little bit of the sun that has been silently hiding for many years. A good deal of the sun is stored under the ground and a good deal of it is alive and burning there. Well, it is the same with the moon. Some precious stones absorb the moon. Opals do. That is why I want to hold many opals in my hand and crush them together. And I am sure that the moon gives herself to water, especially to large sheets of water like Lake Langaza.” He paused a few moments, his thoughts far away. “You can feel the moon, soft and sliding, on your limbs, if you bathe at night when the moon is high in the sky: but when the dawn comes, the light of the sun destroys all the moon that is in the water.”

He noticed, for the first time, that his companion’s eyes were shut and that his heavy breathing was developing into a snore.

“I am explaining this to you!” exclaimed Vuk, peremptorily.

But his host sank deeper into slumber, and for a little while Vuk talked quietly to himself until he, too, slept.

That evening at dusk Vuk, dazed with wine, made his way to the orchards above Kirekoj. For a long time he sat brooding among the trees, until the moon, full and splendid, went redly up the sky. He watched her so closely that he could see her moving. To-night she did not seem to glide: she moved with just perceptible jerks—“Like the hands of a very large clock,” said Vuk to himself, for he had wandered far and had lived in many big cities.

He watched the trees appearing out of the blackness: they seemed to be marching upon him, closing in upon him. So he arose and began to walk, and presently came to the edge of the orchard and looked up at the mountain at whose feet he stood. He began to climb, and soon, after leaving the vineyards behind him, he came upon large, bare rocks in the clefts of which grass and flowers grew. It was while he was climbing both with hands and feet that his dog-friend, excited but silent, joined him.

“Tchut! tchut!” said Vuk, beneath his breath.

The dog, honoured by human speech, became still more excited, and Vuk could see him dimly as, having rushed to the top of a high rock, he stood open-mouthed, wagging his tail.

Now, there was no one either in Langaza or Kirekoj who was more bound by conscience to his work than Vuk Karadjitch, and it was very strange that on this night he should, without effort, have left his master’s orchards to wander up the mountains. He did not know where he was going or, indeed, why he was “going” at all. But I have no doubt that something in his brain—one of the many selves that were Vuk—was urging him forward to some secret purpose of its own.

Stillness and the moon’s rays held the night, and though the moon falsified distance and misled even Vuk who was used to the moon’s deceit, he reached the top of the mountains sooner than he had expected. There, unseen, Langaza lay beneath him. Looking in Langaza’s direction, he suddenly became aware of his motive in coming thither. Turning to the dog, he muttered threateningly:

“Go away! Go away!”

But though he threw stones at the animal, it refused to leave him. So, muttering to himself, Vuk proceeded down the other side of the mountain, making his way to Langaza with impatient strides.

Langaza is a lake without banks, and even a careful investigator will find it difficult to determine where dry land ends and water begins. Rushes and grasses, tropically luxuriant, grow from dry earth, mud, and the lake’s bed. In hot weather the air is miasmatic, and millions of mosquitoes make with their wings high shrieks as they fly their way through the air.

When Vuk found himself on the edge of this poisoned richness, he was covered with sweat, and the fumes of the afternoon’s wine had left his brain. For a little time he stood looking at the moon—not at the moon in the sky, for that was too far away, and its very distance mocked him; but at the moon in the lake that was so near. Man cannot without wings soar into the sky, but his own weight will carry him to the bottom of the deepest abyss.

He walked into the rushes and grasses and, in a moment, was surrounded by them; they towered above his head, and soon his feet began to sink in the slime and mud of the lake’s true edge. The dog, with velvet paws, followed a pace behind him. Vuk had forgotten him, for Vuk’s mind was now full of the moon and inflamed by it.

In a very short time walking became laborious and slow, for Vuk’s feet sank into the mud until it covered his ankles, and it was with a great effort that he drew them out again. The sucking, explosive sound they made, and the Moon Man’s heavy breathing startled many large water-birds that, with flopping wings and raucous throats, announced their fear as they rushed away.

Guided by the moon, Vuk at length reached the inner edge of the rushes. In his journey he had fallen many times, and his clothes, his hands, and his face were thick with ooze; the spiky rushes had pierced his flesh, and his face and neck were bleeding. The water now reached his thighs. He stood still while he undressed. His impatient hands feverishly unwound the long cloth that circled his stomach many times. When naked, he waded still further into the lake, and then, lifting his feet and pressing his chest against the water, he swam towards the moon lying in the lake. The dog, devoted and dumb, and seemingly driven by the same fate, followed him.

Vuk could swim well, but he was already exhausted before he had emerged from the forest of rushes and grasses. It was a long, long way to the moon in the lake, and in a little time his strokes became feeble and there was only just enough movement in his arms to keep him afloat. Turning himself on his back, he rested. All deep desire had gone from his mind. Weary, he wished for oblivion. The moon was at the bottom of the lake, waiting. He had only just to sink now where he was, and slowly, very slowly, but oh! how safely and inevitably, he would go to her.

He began to sink and to be smothered.... After a time he reappeared, feebly struggling. The dog snatched at and missed him. Vuk sank again. And after that Vuk’s body, remaining, for how long I know not, midway between the water’s surface and the lake’s bottom, was never again seen.

The dog swam in ever-widening circles round the spot where the Moon Man had disappeared until he, also, sank, perhaps joining the only friend he had ever known.

HOW HIS FRIENDS DESTROYED HIM

To
Olive Warnock

TO Harry Bruton it seemed an eternity before the little steamer, Caucase, was berthed, the gangways placed in position, and the passengers allowed to disembark on the quay at Le Pirée. For nearly half an hour he had been standing on the quay-side shouting inanities to his friend Dick Cassels who, clad in flannels, a straw hat, and a lemon-coloured tie, stood grinning on the deck and failing to catch a word that was called to him.

“Had a good time?” shouted Bruton.

Cassels, examining his watch and craning his neck forward, yelled back:

“Just 8.40.”

“Oh—damn! Can’t you hear?”

“What do you say?”

“Damn!—that’s all.”

This sort of thing could not go on indefinitely, and Bruton, shrugging his shoulders, began to laugh. Nevertheless, he was terribly anxious for Cassels to come on shore. Every minute mattered. God alone knew what might be happening at this very second in that big house on the outskirts of Athens—that house whose garden even now, in April, was one huge, thick cluster of flowers, crimson, blue and yellow.

Bruton had been in Greece a couple of years. Leaving Oxford at the age of twenty-three, he had gone to Athens to study and write. Cassels was coming to him for a few days on his way to Constantinople. Friends of many years standing, both had for some weeks been looking forward eagerly to this meeting, and now, though they were within a stone’s throw of each other, they could not clasp hands. At last the gangways were pushed from the boat to the quay, and Cassels was one of the first to step on shore.

“Let’s hurry through the Customs as quickly as possible,” said Bruton, “I’ve got a car waiting on the road.”

Five minutes later they were in the car rushing at top speed in the direction of Athens, four miles away.

“And now that those rotten Levantine Jews have ceased pawing my baggage and me,” said Cassels, “how are you?”

“Top-hole. And you?”

“Never fitter in my life. Good lord, it’s fine to see you again, Harry. Had a ripping time on board. There was a French girl who sang....”

Bruton interrupted him by placing a sudden hand on his friend’s arm.

“An awf’ly rotten thing’s happened, Dick. I must tell you all about it before we arrive. I’ve got a friend here in Athens—a man called Gascoyne. Yesterday his girl jilted him and ran off God knows where with another fellow. She played up to him—to Gascoyne, I mean—to the very last moment: spent the evening with him the day before she skedaddled. Well, Gascoyne’s done—absolutely broken. All yesterday and last night I was with him, literally keeping him from suicide. I am going to him now: I daren’t leave him alone.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Cassels. “Rather a weak sort of devil, isn’t he? And why the dickens should you bother about him, anyway? This is going to knock the bottom out of our holiday.”

“I’m afraid it is. But, you see, he’s all alone and I’m his closest friend. His mother’s dead, his father’s away, and there he is with just one man-servant, a Greek, living alone in an enormous, rambling house. I scarcely liked to leave him even while I came to meet you.”

Cassels cursed under his breath and lit a cigarette.

“I’m beastly sorry,” said Bruton, “but what can I do? If anything should happen to him I should blame myself for ever.”

“Oh, you’re doing quite the right thing, old son,” Cassels assured him, “but what a damned ass the man is! It makes me sick the way young fools carry on about women.”

“But he’s not a fool. As self-contained and manly a chap as you could wish to meet. Now, listen. What I propose to do is this. We’ll go and seek him now, have breakfast together, and persuade him to come back with us to my place. I can easily put him up. Wherever we go we’ll take him with us. He wants pulling out of himself, and in a day or two he’ll probably be all right. But just at present he’s dangerous—dangerous to himself, I mean, though I may tell you I’ve got his revolver all right. But here we are.”

The car slowed down and stopped in front of a big white house with green shutters, standing well back from the road. A great wooden gate barred their way. In response to their ring, an oldish man came hurrying from the house.

“Everything all right?” asked Bruton.

“Yes, sir. Mister Cyril’s digging in the garden.”

And at the back of the house they found Gascoyne, a fair handsome fellow with blue eyes and freckles; he wore no coat, and his open white shirt revealed a magnificent chest.

Shaking hands with Dick Cassels, he invited them indoors.

“Coffee and things are waiting for you,” he said.

“Good!” exclaimed Cassels; “for I’m dreadfully hungry. On the boat we’ve been breakfasting at 10.30. Such a rummy breakfast! Wine and rolls and hors d'œuvres and cheese.”

They stepped into the house and entered a large cool room with whitewashed walls; the pine-wood floor was bare except for an occasional Persian rug whose smooth colours held and gratified the eye.

“Do help yourselves,” said Gascoyne. “No, don’t. Sit in these easy chairs and I’ll wait on you.”

His fresh face was a little haggard and his eyes glittered. He busied himself with cups, plates, and food, and when his friends had begun eating, he eagerly and tremblingly seized a decanter of whisky, filled a champagne-glass to the brim, and drank it off neat in two gulps.

“Oh, I say,” exclaimed Cassels, “I didn’t know you had any whisky there. Do give me some.”

“Certainly. I’ll get you some soda.”

When Gascoyne had left the room, Bruton turned to his friend.

“What on earth are you drinking whisky for at this time of the morning?”

“Well, the great thing is not to let your friend think he is doing anything unusual. He knows we are watching him carefully, and a watched man always poses. He is suffering, and perhaps he is a little unhinged—all the more reason why we should not only make no comment on what he does, but should behave ourselves as nearly as possible in the same way that he does.”

“I wonder,” said Bruton.

Gascoyne entered with three or four bottles of soda-water.

“Oh, really, you shouldn’t have troubled,” protested Cassels, “for I’d much rather have it neat. I’m sick of red wine, and they hadn’t even a drop of whisky on board.”

And he helped himself to a glassful.

“How shall we spend the morning, Cyril?” asked Bruton. “Shall we drive to the Acropolis and sleep for an hour in the shade of the Parthenon?”

Gascoyne looked at him curiously for a moment, and then laughed.

“What a funny old thing you are!” he said. “No. Been to Athens before?” he asked Cassels.

“No—this is my first visit.”

“Very well, then. We’ll go to the Acropolis to-night. There’s a full moon, and one’s first sight of the Acropolis should always be by moonlight. This morning we’ll take the car to Eleusis. There are Mysteries there,” he added, darkly, “undiscoverable Mysteries. The Temple of Demeter is now a confusion of broken stones. We can bathe there. The sea is blue.”

He drank more whisky and still more, and while his friends ate their breakfast he had continual recourse to the decanter. But he exhibited none of the more obvious signs of intoxication: his voice and gait were steady; only his eyes were wild, and his face strained.

After pacing the room for a short while, he sat down in a deck-chair facing his friends.

“Finished?” he asked. “Do have some more. Those oranges were plucked only this morning. No? Well, then, come upstairs with me: I’ve got something rather magnificent I want to show you.”

He rose and led the way from the room. The house was full of greenish light reflected from the half-open shutters. The staircase leading to the upper story was made of white marble flushed gently with pink. Gascoyne, opening a door, said:

“This is my bedroom.”

They entered and he pointed to a plaster cast of a woman’s head nailed upon the wall opposite the window. Walking to the window, they half-seated themselves upon the dressing-table there and looked at the cast. Instinctively, Cassels knew it was Gascoyne’s love.

“It is very beautiful,” said he softly.

The face had the inscrutable smile of La Gioconda; there was mystery in the mouth, imagination in the eyes, and holiness dwelt on her brows.

“Who did it?” asked Bruton.

“Some artist chap,” answered Gascoyne; “as a matter of fact,” he continued, carelessly, “the man she’s run away with. He’s very clever, don’t you think?”

He walked up to it, as though scrutinizing it for the first time; then, returning, he put his face close to the face of Bruton and said:

“Damned little devil, isn’t she?”

But it was Cassels who answered him.

“She has the most wonderful face I have ever seen,” he said; “the kindest face. But, then, nearly all faces are masks. That, I suppose, is what they’re for—to deceive, I mean.”

“Outside,” said Gascoyne, “I have the most gorgeous view.”

They turned and looked. The windows were wide open. Beneath them was a thick, undulating carpet of pear-blossom as thick as a heavy fall of snow, and as brilliant as snow in the sun. The orchard was several acres in extent. In the distance were blue mountains; the sky above them had a faint tinge of purple.

“Good Lord! How wonderful!” exclaimed Cassels. “And is this Greece or Paradise?”

“It was both—till yesterday,” said Gascoyne. “Now it’s hell. By the way, Cassels, are you a good shot with a revolver?”

“Pretty fair. At least, I used to be, but I’ve had no practice for years.”

“I wonder if you can shoot as well as this.”

And on the instant he turned round and, at arm’s length, held out a Webley, pointing it straight at the cast on the opposite wall. In rapid succession he fired six rounds, smashing the cast into a hundred pieces. His friends, standing one on either side of him, looked on without a word or movement.

“Rather good shooting,” said Cassels, at length, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world to pour lead into bedroom walls after breakfast.

Bruton, pale and trembling, exclaimed:

“But I thought I’d taken your revolver!”

“Have you taken my other revolver?” asked Gascoyne, his face working with anger. “What the devil for? Where is it? Give it me now. Get it, I tell you! Who in God’s name are you to come here stealing the things I may want at any minute?”

Bruton put his hand on Gascoyne’s arm.

“Don’t be angry with me, Cyril,” he said, penitently. “I was a fool to do it, I know. But I was so upset last night—I scarcely knew what I was doing.”

“But why did you take it?”

But again it was Cassels who answered him.

“He told me on the way here why he had taken it. He was afraid you would find the—the other man and kill him.”

Gascoyne’s face cleared a little.

“In any case, it was a damned silly thing to do,” he said.

“I know it was,” said Bruton, “but you’ve forgiven me, haven’t you? It’s up at my place—I’ll get it you this afternoon or some time to-morrow. Look here, Cyril. Why not come and stay with me? I’ve plenty of room. It’ll be a change for you.”

“Thanks. But I don’t want a change. As a matter of fact, I’m damned tired. I think I’ll go to sleep.”

He was still holding his revolver, but now he put it down on the dressing-table with a gesture of disgust.

“I’ll not go with you to Eleusis,” he added. “Use my car, won’t you? You’ll find it round at the hotel garage, and Eurinikos will drive you if you want him. I’ll call for you to-night after dinner, and we’ll all go together to the Acropolis.”

“Right,” said Cassels.

“But are you sure you’ll be able to sleep?” asked Bruton, involuntarily glancing at the revolver.

“Of course I shall be able to sleep,” answered Gascoyne, irritably; “why the hell shouldn’t I?” He hesitated a moment. “Well, good-bye for the present,” he added, in a matter-of-fact voice.

“See you to-night, then,” said Cassels, smiling frankly.

The two friends left Gascoyne, Bruton closing the door in careful silence. Out in the street, he asked:

“What do you think of him?”

“Look here, Harry,” said Cassels, “let’s not talk about it at all. If you think you ought to stay with him we’ll wait downstairs until he wakes up. But if you think he can be safely left, let’s go out for the day together and forget all about him. With a chap like that you don’t know how much is sincere and how much is acting. Probably the poor devil doesn’t know himself.”

“But he’s got his revolver with him!”

“Yes, he has. What then?”

“He may use it.”

“Precisely. For Heaven’s sake, Harry, do make up your mind what you are going to do. But let me tell you this—your presence irritates him, and it is much better for him to be left alone.”

“Well, then, we’ll leave him. We go this way for the garage.”

Dinner that night at the Minerva Hotel was rather a dull affair, for Bruton even at the third course began to fidget about Gascoyne and to wonder if his friend were lying dead in his bedroom.

“Let’s have some wine, Harry,” said Cassels. “What’s that golden booze the people at the next table are drinking?”

“Some native stuff—Olympus they call it, I think.”

“Well, we’ll have a bottle—two bottles.”

But the more Bruton drank the more despondent he became, and over coffee and liqueurs he said:

“It’s quite time he was here. Half-past nine.”

“For heaven’s sake, do keep calm. We can do nothing but wait.”

“Yes, I know. But I feel we ought not to have left him alone all day. How rotten he would feel when he woke up! And, in his present condition, he may be annoyed that we’ve come here to dine. I do hope my servant has given him my note telling him where to find us.”

He moved restlessly, and then rose to his feet. An idea had struck him. It was possible Gascoyne had left a note or a message for him at his flat across the way.

“Excuse me a minute, won’t you? I’ve left something at my flat that I want.”

He hurried away. In five minutes he was back again, holding a note in his hand.

“He left this at my flat this afternoon,” said Bruton, agitatedly; “what does it mean?”

Cassels read the following.

I’m not coming to-night. I’m staying at home. All the loveliness of the world has become cruel. Sympathy is an intrusion and kindness bruises. Yet if you and your friend would like to come and get drunk with me to-night, you will be welcome.

“I understand his mood well enough,” said Cassels. “We’d better be getting along, hadn’t we? The best thing we can do is to let him drink himself to sleep. To-morrow we’ll put the screw on.”

They hurried down the road and in a quarter of an hour had reached the big white house with the green shutters. In the moonlight it looked insubstantial, ethereal, like some enormous ghostly bird preparing for flight. The door of the main entrance showed there was a light in the hall, and through the half-closed shutters of one of the rooms on the ground-floor more light revealed itself.

They rang, but there was no response. Nor did their knocking evoke any movement they could hear. Ringing and knocking alternately, they stood for five minutes or so, speaking little, but into the hearts of both of them fear had begun to creep.

“Damned funny!” said Bruton, at length. “Look here, Dick, will you stay where you are while I go and investigate? He may be in the garden somewhere, or he might have dropped off to sleep in one of the outhouses.”

Cassels, sitting down on the top step, lit his pipe. Summing up the situation and attempting to calculate the chances of Gascoyne’s having committed suicide, he muttered: “More than likely—more than likely. A chap like that might do it just for the sake of making an effect—just to give the whole affair its proper dramatic close.”

Bruton was a long time away. At last he returned, running.

“Are you there, Dick? No: I’ve found nothing. He’s not there. I’ve tried all the windows I can get at, but they’re all locked. His servant sleeps out, and I don’t know where to get hold of him. We must break one of the windows.”

“Yes, I suppose we must, if it’s only to ease our own minds. This damned business is getting on my nerves.”

They selected the smallest window, broke it open, and entered the house.

“You’d better let me go first,” said Cassels, “my nerves are a bit steadier than yours.”

They entered the lit-up room—the room in which they had breakfasted. It was untenanted. The decanter which, earlier in the day, had been half full was now empty; by its side was a bottle of brandy holding a third of its original contents. Without a word, acting on the same impulse, they left the room, ascended the stairs and entered Gascoyne’s bedroom. This also was untenanted. Near the door the floor was covered with the debris of the shattered cast. Bruton walked to and almost pounced upon the dressing-table, opening one drawer after another.

“His revolver’s gone,” he said, as if the final word had been spoken.

“Is there a piano in the house?”

“Yes—why?”

“Let’s go and play it. It’ll pull us together a bit. After all, what is there more likely than that he’s gone for a long tramp? Or he might have changed his mind and gone to your place after all. In any case we can do nothing now but wait.”

A little comforted, Bruton led the way to the music-room.

“Play something, Dick: I’m too shaky,” he said.

So Cassels played some of the humane if rather turgid music of Schumann in which one may always find balm for the poisoned mind. The brooding sound brought them both consolation for a time, but at length Bruton’s mind wandered away from the music, and he began to tease and lacerate his spirit with horrible thoughts.

“Supposing he is lying dead in a cupboard somewhere,” something whispered to him, “or in a bath. He might have cut a vein and even at this moment be bleeding to death. Or he might have gone on to the roof.” Then, rising from his chair, he said, hurriedly:

“Dick—we must go and look for him—we must go and find him!”

At the first word Cassels’ fingers dropped lifeless on the keys.

“I was thinking the same thing myself,” he said. “We’ll do the ground-floor first.”

Slowly and in silence they went from one room to another, switching on the electric lights and looking in every place—likely and unlikely—which a man might have chosen to hide his own dead body in. The rooms, for the most part, were large and sparsely furnished, and a mere glance was in many cases sufficient to assure them that there, at least, no tragedy had been enacted. But in a narrow, long passage leading to the back premises, and in the back premises themselves, were many cupboards. These they opened one by one and, striking matches, peered inside.

“Damn the whole business!” exclaimed Bruton; “my legs feel like jelly. Each time I look I expect to see—something.”

And Cassels found that the hand with which he held the matches on high trembled. His body was cold and he felt sick.

Nothing on the ground-floor. In the room upstairs there was much more furniture, and they feverishly opened the lids of boxes and ottomans, looked under beds, pulled open the doors of wardrobes, and searched behind curtains. Coming out of the third bedroom they had searched, they both suddenly stood still with a sensation of terrible and grotesque fear: Gascoyne was standing at the doorway, leaning drunkenly against the jamb and watching them.

“Looking for me?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Cassels, who was the first to collect himself; “we thought you had fallen asleep in one of the bedrooms. We’ve come to drink with you.”

“Drunk enough,” said Gascoyne. “Been drinking all day. However, you fellows help yourselves: plenty of drink downstairs. Staying the night? Good. I’m going to bed. Choose your own rooms. S’long.”

He groped his way to his bedroom. Bruton followed him. Cassels, standing in the passage, heard the following conversation.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Cyril?”

“Course I’m all right. Why the hell shouldn’t I be all right? What’s the matter with me, eh? That’s what I want to know—what’s the matter with me?”

“Oh—nothing. Of course there’s nothing. Good night, then.”

Bruton emerged from the room pale and excited. When they had reached the foot of the stairs, he whispered:

“I’ve got it. I’ve got his revolver. I took it out of his coat-pocket. Look! All six chambers are loaded.”

After a drink the two friends, choosing separate rooms, went to bed.

It must have been about three o’clock next morning that Cyril Gascoyne awoke with an intolerable thirst. For a little while he lay wondering where he was and trying to remember the events of the previous day. Like a nightmare they came to him, and with them came a feeling of self-disgust.

Sitting up in bed he groped about for his coat and, taking a box of matches from one of his pockets, struck a light. Some blind instinct made him feel in the right-hand side-pocket to discover if his revolver was still there. The pocket was empty.

In a flash he jumped out of bed and turned on the light.

“Damn him!” he muttered; “he’s got them both now!”

And then his brain, overwrought and dizzied with the fumes of alcohol, began to breed the thoughts and desires of madness.

“So Bruton thought I was going to commit suicide, did he? And he’s tried to outwit me! The damned fool! Why, blast it, if I’d wanted to shoot myself I would have shot myself. Why not? But I’ll show him. He can’t get the better of me—I’m damned if he can.”

He chuckled with insane laughter, and his eyes became deep with cunning. Having turned out the electric light, he lit a candle, noiselessly opened the door, and listened. Not a sound. Yes: breathing—the sound of someone breathing deeply in his sleep. He crept along the passage, stopped and listened again. The sound came from the room on his right, the door of which was open. For a brief second he looked inside: it was Bruton, fast asleep.

Gascoyne had no doubt at all that his revolver lay under the pillow beneath Bruton’s head. He was as confident it was there as if he had seen it. He extinguished the candle, put it on the floor, and crept into the bedroom on his hands and knees, making no sound, and breathing through both mouth and nostrils. His fingers slid along the mattress until they reached the pillows. Then for a minute he paused. Gently, gently his open hand felt its way inch by inch, pressing itself hard upon the mattress. Again he paused. The sleeper did not move. Then, once more, his hand began its stealthy work, exploring, sensitive, apprehensive....

In ten minutes he was sitting on the floor holding the revolver, sweat on his forehead, a dreadful dryness in his throat. And now he rose to his feet and walked quickly and agitatedly but very silently to his own room, locking the door behind him.

“I’ll show him!” he muttered. “I’ll teach him to meddle.”

Taking a thick eiderdown quilt from a cupboard, he spread it carefully on the bed. Then, with the revolver still in his hand, he crept head-first beneath the clothes, dragging them closely around him....

No one heard the shot that was fired....

Not until the marvellous April dawn of Greece came that morning did Bruton wake up and, jumping out of bed, try oh! so quietly to open Gascoyne’s door. For, if Gascoyne slept, he did not wish to wake him.

THE VICTIM

To
Marcel Xystobam

I SUPPOSE there are few civilian prisons in the Near East more humanely conducted and governed than the cosmopolitan Citadel of Salonika. Yet the Citadel is most inhuman. Men rot there: their brains rot, and their bodies become flabby, sickly and inert.

If, as a casual and inquiring visitor, you enter through the archway, you will be told to go to the right and then make a sudden turn to the left into a kind of cage which leads you to a staircase; mounting the stairs, you reach a platform placed high in the true centre of a circle. The circle below you is divided into four roofless segments: in one segment are Greeks; in another, Bulgars; in the third, Turks; in the fourth, Armenians, Montenegrins, Spanish Jews, and men of many other nationalities. The prisoners are separated by high walls; for if they mingled with each other they would fight, and perhaps kill; but well-behaved victims of law, if they choose, may leave for a short time one segment for another.

The Citadel is inhuman because the men living there are not compelled to work. Any work is better than none. Even a treadmill is a boon compared with everlasting indolence. I have been there many times and, fascinated, have watched young men sitting with their backs to the walls, staring with unfocussed eyes at—nothing. Always staring at nothing and, no doubt, thinking of nothing, and hoping nothing and regretting nothing.

For this reason they decay.

Euripitos Cavalcini—half Greek, half Italian—had not yet recovered from the shock of his arrest, trial and sentence. Three months ago he was one of the proudest men in Salonika—nay, one of the most overbearing, one of the most insolent. He owned much land, two breweries, and four streets of houses in the slums; he kept a flaunting large-bosomed courtesan; he was a patron of the arts, and the walls of two of his large rooms sported many of Rops’ indecencies. He commanded respect, admiration. As soon as he entered a bank, lo! the manager was by his side. And before he had time to sit down at a restaurant table, the head waiter was reporting to him the latest additions to his wine-cellar.

But successful and magnificent though Euripitos Cavalcini was, he had his limitations. Life intoxicated him, and his grandiose vanity was an incessant drug. In Salonika there were cleverer men than he, and when he floated the India Bazaar Company with a capital of half-a-million, he felt strong enough to own half the world as enemies. But he was found out. The colossal swindle ruined many families, and even before he was pronounced guilty great crowds of men and women would gather round the court to cast insult upon him as he was taken in and escorted out.

The sentence of two years’ imprisonment broke him. His magnificence fell from him in a single hour, and the insolent, hot spirit of him became abased and cringing.

That is why, when in the Citadel, he was so humble. The lord of life had become life’s slave. He was afraid of the meanest and most wretched of his fellow-prisoners. Life had turned upon him once and brought him to the dust, and some dark fear warned him that even yet life had not had its full revenge.

So he humbled himself and served others. The courtesan whom he had loved used, twice a week, to bring him food—cooked meats, fruit and sometimes a bottle of wine. These he would press into the hands of others—especially those who eyed him with contempt or who were harsh to him. Particularly did he cultivate the friendship of the big and strong, partly because he feared them, and partly because he hoped that in time of need—physical need—they would come to his defence.

Soon he became the victim of a great bearded man with small eyes of cunning, a man who, towering contemptuously above others, strode up and down the prison half his waking hours, his thick bare arms folded on his chest, his head set defiantly upon a bullock-like neck. This man was named Aristides, and it was said he was there because he had half-killed a demirep who had not kept faith with him.

“Take this, Aristides,” said Cavalcini, one afternoon, pulling a bottle of wine from beneath his cloak and furtively handing it to the bearded giant who was striding hither and thither.

Aristides, taking the bottle by the neck, held it up above his head against the sky’s brilliant blue.

“It is full?” he asked.

“Yes, it is full. And I have some grapes also.”

A big bunch of grapes changed hands. Aristides, having torn off a mouthful with his teeth, chewed them meditatively, spat out the skins on Cavalcini’s feet, and then stared down on his victim.

“Anything else?” he asked, loudly.

“No,” faltered Cavalcini.

With a snarling smile of amused contempt, Aristides resumed his walk.

There were terrible hours when Cavalcini gave way to morbid introspection. There was nothing in him that he kept sacred from himself; there was nothing so vile that he did not wish to understand it. Yet this habit of introspection dragged him deeper and deeper into dejection.

One morning he threw himself on the ground near the wall and covered his face with his cloak.

“Why am I so afraid?” he asked himself. “What harm can come to me here? Aristides will not hurt me. Aristides is my friend.”

Presently, he slept. It was a burning July day, and here, in this roofless prison, the air burned one’s skin. There was a faint, foul odour. The hard, enamelled sky and the sun beating on the walls mocked the prisoners. The sentry on the little raised platform in their midst looked pale and ill. A boy-prisoner—he had stabbed his mother—moaned occasionally in his sleep. There was little sound in any of the prison’s four compartments, for everyone was lying down exhausted—some asleep, some merely stupefied. Everyone except Aristides. The giant, saturnine and insolent, promenaded like an emperor who has covered himself with degradation. His eyes, examining the sweating men around him, picked out Cavalcini. Walking up to him, he kicked his victim on the buttocks. Cavalcini lifted his head and, seeing Aristides, staggered to his feet.

“Walk with me!” commanded Aristides.

For a full hour they strode up and down, no word passing between them, Cavalcini apprehensive and trembling, Aristides bearing himself as though ten thousand eyes were upon him.

A slow month crawled from the future into the past. There were hours—especially at night time when all the prisoners lay herded together in the big room upstairs—in which Cavalcini took the edge off his suffering by thoughts and half-formulated plans of escape. In his heart he knew he would never escape, that he would never attempt it, but it gave him pleasure to devise schemes for eluding the sentry, for scaling the walls, for leaving Salonika for the freer world of Marseilles or Port Said.

One day he thought he would curry favour with Aristides by talking to him of his plans. So, very humbly and with his eyes on the ground, he walked over to where the big bearded man was standing.

“I’ve had something on my mind for a long time past,” he began; “something in which you might be willing to help me.”

“Well,” said Aristides, “what is it?”

“Escape—escape from this den—this den of animals.”

His companion laughed.

“Isn’t that what most of us have been thinking of ever since we came here? Try again: think of something new.”

“But it could be done. I’m sure of it.”

“Can you scale the wall?” asked Aristides, nodding towards the outer wall that seemed to tower in the sky.

“No. But I might walk through gates that are locked and barred.”

“How? Speak out. Don’t play with me.”

“I mean bribery. I have money—plenty of money. That is to say, I can get plenty.”

“How much?”

“A thousand drachmæ. Ten thousand drachmæ.”

“Ho-ho?”

Aristides spat.

“You want my help?” he asked.

“I thought we might get away together,” said Cavalcini, afraid of what he had already spoken, and horrified at the things he yet might utter. “Two can sometimes contrive a thing that is impossible for one,” he added.

“Well,” said Aristides, “ten thousand drachmæ would not be enough. Can you get twenty thousand?”

“I might. I will try. My friend is coming this afternoon with my food. I will ask her what she can do.”

And as Aristides stood silently contemptuous, Cavalcini turned miserably away, feeling that he had committed himself to some frightful scheme he could not possibly carry out, and that he had done so to no purpose, for it was obvious Aristides was no better disposed towards him now than he had been before.

“I must not talk to anyone again,” he said to himself; “my nerve is gone, and I say things I do not mean.”

It was true he could get the sum of money he had named, but it was not true that he wished to attempt to escape. Only heroes and very desperate men escaped from that prison, and he was too deeply involved in misery to be desperate. But when his mistress came and he spoke to her for a few moments, as the prison rules permitted, he told her how to get the money.

“Bring it next time you come—bring it in hundred-drachmæ notes. Wrap them into a little parcel and when you are talking to me, slip it into this pocket of my tunic. I will stand as I am standing now. But be very careful you are not observed.”

“But where shall you go when you escape?”

“I don’t know,” he said, miserably.

She looked at him with eyes of compassion, took him in her arms and kissed him.

A few days later she called again, and passed the money into his pocket, unobserved.

“Don’t get yourself into worse trouble than you are in now, mon p’tit,” she said, her eyes full of tears.

He took the notes to Aristides, retaining five hundred drachmæ for himself, of which he told Aristides nothing.

“I have brought you the money,” he said.

Aristides’ small eyes almost disappeared into his head with greed and cunning.

“Do not give me it now,” he said; “many eyes are upon us. That swine of a sentry is looking. Wait until we go to bed.”

And he turned on his heel and began walking disdainfully to and fro.

Now, at the time of which I am writing, the sentry on duty over the prisoners in the Citadel was relieved every two hours. By day there was only one sentry; by night there were two—one in the “compound,” one on the gallery above. Against one of these men Aristides nursed a fanatical hatred. They had known each other for a long time; indeed, they were both from the same mountain village; but they had not met for many years. Critias had married the girl Aristides loved, and though she was now dead and Critias had come down in the world, nevertheless Aristides’ hatred had flamed anew at sight of his old enemy. Nor had Critias wished for a reconciliation; on the contrary, he had sought every opportunity to revile and taunt Aristides in his state of bondage. Aristides had sworn to have revenge on the sentry before he left the prison, and so near was his hatred and so dear was the thought of vengeance, that he could not persuade himself to attempt to escape until he had done his worst against his old enemy.

As he walked hither and thither, his thick hairy arms folded on his chest, his chin on his bosom, he matured the half-formed plans that had come to his mind on the first occasion on which Cavalcini had spoken to him of escape. His term of imprisonment had only three more months to run: he would gladly serve those months if he could compass the death of his enemy, throw the guilt upon another, and secure at least a substantial portion of the money Cavalcini possessed.

The whole thing was so simple that he smiled contemptuously at Cavalcini as he passed him.

That night as they were preparing for bed, Cavalcini once more offered the money to Aristides.

“Give me half,” said the giant, “and keep the other half for yourself. I will tell you my plans to-morrow.”

“But where shall I hide it?” asked Cavalcini.

“Where I hide mine—in the pocket of your robe. Nobody would think of looking there for valuables.”

And he ostentatiously put the notes Cavalcini had given him in the inside pocket of his robe.

But before an hour had gone Aristides had secretly removed them to the middle of the straw in his mattress.

Cavalcini could not sleep. His head was hot and light with anxiety. He would, he knew, have to attempt to escape with Aristides, yet the prospect of this attempt terrified him. But Aristides, it was evident, was depending upon him, and he did not dare to disappoint him.

Because of his apprehensiveness, Cavalcini’s senses became abnormally keen, and it was with a feeling of nausea that he felt the sour odour of his fellow-prisoners as they turned in their beds. He could hear a low voice in distress at the far end of the room, and he told himself that it must be the wretched boy-prisoner talking in his sleep.

And then he became aware of someone moving: there was no sound, and the sense of movement was not conveyed to his brain by his eyes. It was as though stealthy and impending disaster were in the air, impinging on his brain through some unknown sense-channel.

He raised his head an inch and saw the bulky form of Aristides approaching. Cavalcini shook with fear. The giant was undressed, and his form, without his long, flowing robe, seemed much larger and stronger than when fully clad. Nearer and nearer he crept until he reached Cavalcini’s bed, where he stopped. The little man simulated sleep, but under his lids his eyes watched what might befall. Aristides took Cavalcini’s robe from the end of his bed and donned it; it fitted grotesquely. Then, in silence, he passed the foot of the bed and made his way to the treacherous, winding stone stairway leading to the four compartments below.

Terrified, hypnotized, Cavalcini sat up in bed, crawled to its foot, and watched this wanderer in the night. He saw Aristides—for there was a moon—descend the steps and crawl by the side of the wall as cruelly and as sinuously as a tiger. The sentry, twenty yards from Aristides, appeared to be facing him, but it seemed certain he saw nothing, for he made no movement and called out no challenge. Aristides stopped, advanced a little, and stopped again, crouching. His body was so tightly squeezed against the wall that to Cavalcini it seemed to have become part of it. For a long time he did not move. But when the sentry turned his back on the would-be murderer and with slow regular paces began to walk away from him, Aristides rushed forward with a bound. Cavalcini could not see what happened next, but he caught the glint of a knife raised on high, and a few seconds later he saw the sentry lying motionless on the ground and the giant running back to the stone stairway. It had all taken in place in absolute silence. For a few moments Cavalcini did not realize what had happened. When, at last, he understood, his brain seemed to freeze with horror. Trembling, he sank back on his pillow and shut his eyes. He dared not move: it was dangerous even to breathe. He felt, rather than saw Aristides return and pass his bed, and he knew that his robe had been replaced.

Silence, save for the rapid, distressed muttering of a boy-prisoner at the far end of the room. After what had happened, it seemed an outrage that the night should continue. Cavalcini, feeling himself to be the victim of evil powers it was useless to resist, lay shivering with cold in the warm night, saying to himself over and over again.

“He has killed the wrong man! Why didn’t he kill me? He has killed the wrong man! Why didn’t he kill me?”

Suddenly, down in the “compound” below, a voice, sharp and clear, rang out. The guard was being summoned. The body had been found. Armed soldiers entered. Torches and candles were brought. Orders were given and countermanded. Swords were drawn and bayonets fixed. In two or three minutes the soldiers began to climb the stairway and take up positions along the gallery, fifteen paces apart, by the prisoners’ beds. A shrill whistle was blown many times until all the prisoners were awake.

“Every man will sit up in bed!” called out the officer in charge of the guard, speaking alternately in several languages. “If anyone attempts to get out of bed, he will be shot.”

And then began a systematic search. Cavalcini only dimly realized what was happening, but when the officer and a sergeant reached his bed he became a ghastly victim of terror. His very looks condemned him. The officer eyed him with searching suspicion.

“Get out of bed and stand up!” he ordered.

Cavalcini put his feet on the floor and attempted to stand, but he collapsed on the bed, a miserable heap of quaking fear.

“Blood!” exclaimed the sergeant. “Look! There’s blood on his gown!”

“Stand up!” commanded the officer.

Cavalcini slipped to the floor and crawled forward on his hands and knees, gibbering.

Then the officer, searching the pockets of Cavalcini’s gown, pulled out a handful of hundred-drachma notes.

“Arrest him!” he said, calmly.

Cavalcini was pulled on to his feet and half-dragged, half-carried to the dark little hole, less than four feet high, that is to be found in the stone wall at the top of the stairway.

There he lay in a muddled heap, bereft of sense, every nerve quivering.

Three months later, Aristides, with his woman, was dining at one of the flashy restaurants on the quay-side.

“Tell me!” she said, pressing her foot upon his and rubbing his calf against her knee; “tell me! Where did you get all your money?”

“Well,” said he, smiling at her cunningly, “it was given me by a great friend of mine in prison. He used to give me half of everything he had. Poor devil! He’s dead. They shot him. He didn’t behave himself very well. He murdered one of the sentries.”

TRENCH MADNESS

To
Ellary Warden

LE Grand Couronné was the last of the mountain peaks to disappear in the darkness that so quickly follows twilight in Greece. To Valentine Latimer, excited by malaria, it seemed to curtesy as it went. He raised himself on to the fire-step, took off the gauze mask that protected his face from mosquitoes, and handed it to his orderly.

“Won’t you keep it on, sir?” asked his orderly; “the mosquitoes are out in their millions to-night.”

“It’ll make no difference,” said Latimer, “and I can’t breathe with that damned thing smothering me.... How heavy the air is!”

His servant stood behind him leaning with his back against the rock trench-wall, his head—so tall was he—almost touching the parados.

“We’d better visit the sentry-groups, Morgan,” said Latimer.

The man had slung his rifle, but Latimer did not move. He was listening to the fitful rustle of the trees immediately overhead. The sound reminded him of his father’s garden at home—the garden in which he had spent the happiest hours of his life. The little breeze went its way, and almost immediately a sour smell stole up from the trench. Into his fevered brain came the word “decay ... decay,” and stayed there like a drop of poison.

“Everything is strangely quiet,” he observed.

“Yes, sir,” said Morgan.

And, indeed, the silence was as heavy as the heavy air. Latimer had the curious feeling that he and his orderly were the only people in that country-side, and when a cough broke upon the stillness, he started.

“That’s number two group,” said he, mechanically; “Corporal Davies is in charge there, eh, Morgan?”

Some sickly lines of Edgar Allen Poe started up in his brain and began to race along it, repeating themselves again and again. Though he was a little worried by their repetition, they gave him a sense of romance, of power.

“We’ll start from the ravine and work upwards,” he said, stepping onto the duck-boards.

Though both officer and servant were well acquainted with those steep and winding trenches, they had to feel their way along, so black was the night, so ineffective the light of the glinting and eager stars. They came upon a group of men in a fire-bay; two of them, stretched on the fire-step, were asleep. The sentry on duty stood looking over the top of the trench; by his side was the N.C.O. in charge of the group.

“Everything all right, Corporal?” asked Latimer, in a low voice.

“Everything, sir,” whispered the corporal.

A few yards further on, Latimer stopped. He wanted to cry out. He longed to scream wildly and break this conspiracy of silence. Suddenly, it seemed to him as though the entire country-side were for a brief second illuminated by a magnificent burst of light: Le Grand Couronné was revealed from top to toe; in the slits crinkling the breasts and flanks of the mountain he saw dark, bearded Bulgars, bullet-headed and yellow-toothed. They were all gazing at him with cruel, malignant eyes.... The hallucination passed.

“I feel ill, Morgan,” he said.

Morgan, a man twice Latimer’s age—for Latimer was still in his teens—took from his pocket a bottle of tabloids.

“You ought to have gone sick this morning, sir,” said Morgan; “or, better still, let me take you to the telephone dug-out.... Have a drink from my water-bottle, sir.... Ask Captain Mitchell to send another officer out to relieve you.”

“Oh, no; I’ll stick it out. But let me have a drink.”

But the water had none of the virtue of water: it was tepid and sickly, and it tasted slightly of grease....

The sound of a single rifle-shot from the enemy’s lines ripped the silence. It meant nothing: it was nothing. Yet Latimer cursed beneath his breath.

“Let’s get on,” he said, and proceeded to feel his way towards the ravine.

In a few minutes they reached it. Here was another sentry-group. Assuring himself that all was in order, he began to retrace his steps. He was conscious of nothing except the procession of fantasies and memories within his brain: verses he had written last year beneath the young flowering laburnum in his father’s garden; a girl’s hand in which his heart seemed to be inevitably cupped; a flannelled figure, with a rapid, crushing serve, on the other side of the tennis-net; barbaric music from “Boris Godounov,” which he had heard in that wonderful summer of 1914; a great day on the river with his friend. At first these memories came singly; then they clustered together horribly and seemed to menace him.

“Fever: just fever,” he assured himself.

“Yes—just fever,” echoed his orderly.

Latimer turned upon him with his arms outstretched.

“Did I talk aloud?” he asked, in dread.

“Why, yes, sir. Weren’t you speaking to me?”

Soon their way became very steep, for the system of trenches took the side of a hill: here and there they were compelled to climb with hands as well as feet. When near the top of the hill, Latimer took off his heavy metal helmet and wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand.

“Only one more sentry post, thank God!” he said.

Then, suddenly, an enemy battery opened fire on that sector of which Latimer had temporary charge. Most of the shells dropped in the Little Wood down below. A machine-gun from La Tortue, on their right flank, chattered incessantly, and two trench-mortars from the same place shook the air and shattered it.

Latimer hurried down the hill with his orderly behind him. In five minutes they were in the Little Wood. All the shells were dropping short. This sort of thing was likely to continue at intervals all night: it was the enemy’s usual procedure.

In the Little Wood, which smelt so stalely, Latimer sat down and suddenly began to vomit. His orderly stood by regarding him compassionately; he took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to his master. In a few minutes Latimer, trembling and cold, rose and started to creep down the trench to the ravine....

A few hours later dawn began to paint the sky yellow, and the mountains moved out of the dark and assumed their daily places. In half-an-hour Latimer would be relieved.

“Report yourself to Sergeant Black, Morgan: I shan’t want you any more.”

He turned for a second to give his orderly a ghost of a smile, and then, placing his arms on the parapet, watched what was happening to the mountains and the sky. His large eyes glistened.

“Oh, how beautiful! How very beautiful!” he exclaimed aloud, as he gazed at the violet mist at the feet of the Belashitza Mountains. “I do wish father was here.... I do wish father....”

“Hello, Latimer! How goes it?”

The boy turned round: his company commander was standing behind him, looking at him curiously.

“You see how it is, sir,” said Latimer, gravely, “When night goes....”

His eyes quickly became dilated, and he swayed a little.

“You’re ill, laddie. Come back to Headquarters with me.”

“Fever—just fever. People have been playing tennis in my head all night. And Morgan’s killed. I wish I was dead myself.”

His lips trembled and a dry sob shook his shoulders.

“I do wish father was here,” he said.

LOOT

To
Frank Harris

IN their little flat between Rue Egnatia and the northern end of Rue Venizelos, Marie and Alys Cruchot deemed themselves safe from the great fire which, no one quite knew how, broke out in Salonika that oppressive Sunday in August, 1917. Their habit of holding themselves aloof from their neighbours, of disdaining even to recognize their neighbours’ existence, had isolated them from all local news, and in the hours of excitement that filled Sunday evening they held themselves more proudly than ever. The fire was a very long way off, and even if it should spread in their direction, it must be days before it could reach them.

Marie, the elder sister, was golden-haired and slim and tall: her skin was golden, and gold-brown were her eyes. She was twenty-three. Alys had her sister’s straightness and slimness; but her hair was dark, her skin was very white, and her eyes were almost lilac-blue. Alys was nineteen.

Their father had been chaplain to the French colony in Salonika, and immediately after his death in 1914 the two girls had been compelled to rely upon their own efforts for the means of support. Refusing all offers of help from their friends, they quickly acquired a working knowledge of shorthand, and were now employed as typists in the great store in Rue Venizelos from ten till six.

None guarded their virtue so carefully as they guarded theirs: no lives were more secluded or better ordered. To those whom circumstances compelled them to know, they were very gentle; but to strangers they presented a reserved and haughty front that protected them from all whom their beauty attracted and fascinated.

“Shall we go to bed?” asked Marie, late in the evening.

“Well,” said Alys, rather gravely, “to tell you the truth, I feel too excited to sleep.”

She was standing at the window looking at a livid sky.

Marie rose from her work at the table and joined her sister.

“Look!” said Alys; “isn’t it wonderful? I think it’s going to be one of the big fires of history. Some day children will learn about this in school-books.”

Marie put her arm round her sister’s neck and patted her cheek.

“Yes, little princess, it is wonderful. Look at that smoke, how it rolls and writhes!—just as though it felt angry.”

Alys nodded and nestled closer to her sister.

“Are you afraid?” asked Marie.

“Oh, no: not afraid: it is too beautiful to make me afraid. Perhaps I am what is called awe-struck.”

In the street below men and women were rushing to and fro distractedly, carrying armfuls of their household goods—blankets, mattresses, pots and pans, bird-cages, babies, carpets, cradles, chairs, etc. They dumped them in the street, the womenfolk sitting on them whilst their men went far afield seeking means of transport. Across the street, on the second storey, a wine-merchant, at his wits’ end, was hurling casks of wine onto the pavement below; each burst open with a crash, the wine rushing out and making a thick stream in the gutter. No one stopped to laugh at him.

“What cowards these natives are!” exclaimed Marie, with disgust; “they always begin to squeal before they’re hurt.”

“I should like to go out and wander about and see what everybody is doing,” said Alys.

“Better not,” counselled Marie. “There’ll be a lot of looting, I expect, and half the natives will be drunk. Look how frightfully excited they all are! But we must not get too excited or we shall never sleep. We have to work to-morrow, you know.”

Still, they stood for a long time at the window, fascinated yet contemptuous. The scene below grew wilder minute by minute. The vast white furnace half a mile away lit up the street. Confusion was everywhere. Occasionally, a woman’s shriek came up to them like a stupid bit of theatricality. Now and again a band of young men brandishing sticks marched down the street, singing and laughing.

At last, Marie drew her sister within the room.

“Thank God we are not as other people,” she said, smiling. “Let us go to bed.”

They shared the same room. Alys was afraid, but she did not dare confess her fear to her sister. Marie had always taught her that they were better than other people. No doubt they were better. Nevertheless, she trembled a little as she knelt down to pray. Her fear increased when she discovered that she was mumbling words without any thought or hope behind them.

Suddenly, she started and rose to her feet.

“What is that?” she asked, panting.

They heard the noise of heavy furniture being moved in the flat above.

“I was wondering how long they would dare to stay,” said Marie, contemptuously. “This is a city of cowards.”

Alys slipped into bed, and Marie, who slept at the other side of the room, came over and kissed her.

“Are you quite sure?” asked Alys.

“What do you mean, little dear?”

“Oh, nothing. But we really are safe, aren’t we?”

“Of course we are. Even if they don’t put the fire out, it can’t reach us for days and days. Good-night, princess. Sleep well!”

She put her arm round her sister’s neck and, for a little minute, lingered in love, blessing her. Then she rose, walked over to her own bed and, having drawn the thick curtains over the windows, blew out the solitary candle.

But Alys could not sleep. She only half-slept. Her tired little body seemed to sleep, but her mind buried itself in fancies—the sort of fancies that come to us in fever. This is what her imagination said to her:

“If the fire should come up the stair, walking, running. Then Marie and I would have to jump from the window.... You can buy fire. They put fire on the end of little match-stalks and sell him. They imprison him in tiny bits of phosphorus.... Oh, yes: just rub a match between your moist palms in the dark and your hands seem to be on fire. But it isn’t fire, really—just a strange kind of light.... Imprison! But no one likes being caged up. Fire doesn’t. Sometimes he leaps out of his cage—like to-night—and just shows you.... If we were in the street, we should be trampled on. Marie has not thought of these things.... Tiny bits of phosphorus. Just matches....”

Most wildly did these fancies crowd upon her. Real sleep came at last.

Marie and Alys were the only two who slept that night in that quarter of the town.

Adolph’s face was thin and intellectual. He had beautiful hands, and his wrists and ankles were as thin as an athlete’s. He sat in his gaudy brothel, drinking.

“A real God-send,” he said to his partner, and as he spoke he tapped his fingers on the little table holding their drinks. “A real slap-up present from the Almighty. Delivered free of charge.”

“Oh yes, oh yes: God is good. But what are we to do?” asked his partner, the man whom they called Tansy.

“Well, it’s simply a matter of choice. We’ve plenty to select from. All our customers are sick of these Barcelona girls: they haven’t a bite left in them. They start in Paris. Their bloom off, they go to London. When London’s sucked them dry, they go to Marseilles and from Marseilles to Port Said and from Port Said they come here and from here they go to ... well, I suppose they go to Hell. Not a single one comes from Barcelona. Now, we could do with half-a-dozen virgins.”

“Virgins?” asked Tansy, leering filthily. “And what strange fowl may they be?”

“Well, the Cruchot girls are virgins. Marie and Alys. I’ve had them at the top of my list for three years. They’re worth six thousand drachmæ apiece. From Pedro’s report here, the fire should reach their house at a quarter to one.”

“They’ll have skedaddled by now,” said Tansy, “it’s just on midnight.”

“They were at home an hour ago!” exclaimed Adolph.

“Well, what do you say to getting these two to-night and leaving the second-rate stuff till to-morrow?”

Adolph nodded.

“We’d better take Mrs. Knumf along with us.”

He rang a bell. Presently a male servant entered.

“Tell Mrs. Knumf I want her. She must put on her outdoor things,” said Adolph.

He dismissed the man with a motion of his flawless hand.

“Another drink,” suggested Tansy.

“I’ve had enough.”

“Share a bottle of champagne with me; this is a night of nights. Besides, we want priming. Those Cruchot girls will require a hell of a lot of managing. You see! If the elder one suspects anything, she’ll fight like a demon.”

He opened a bottle of champagne and filled two glasses. They drank. Tansy sat leering and perspiring. Soon the door opened and in walked a woman of incredible and revolting respectability. She was dressed in black.

“Ah! Mrs. Knumf,” said Adolph. “Sit down. Have some wine. Now, you know the Cruchot girls, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. At least, by sight,” said Mrs. Knumf, sipping her wine genteelly, and simpering.

“Well, Tansy and I are after them. They’re still in their flat. In half-an-hour or so the fire will be upon them. We must let them nearly get caught, and then we’ll rescue them. It should be simple enough. We will take the carriage. They will come back here with you. This is your private house: it is the headquarters of the Sisters of Mercy of the Orient: it is a branch of the Sacred Heart League: it is anything you like to call it. You understand? Well, then, come along.”

Mrs. Knumf eagerly swallowed the remainder of her champagne and rose. She composed her face and began to fiddle with a pair of black gloves. She coughed behind a delicate hand.

They passed into the street and entered a carriage. Even here, near the quay, they could hear the explosive noises that the hundred-acre furnace made. A vast belt of smoke blotted out half the stars. Millions of sparks were jerked into, and quenched by, the smoke, like water frantically forced through a hose-pipe.

They had but seven or eight hundred yards to go; the streets were crowded and they could proceed only at a snail’s pace. So intense was the light and so black the shadows that the streets and buildings looked grotesquely unreal. Almost everybody was shouting wildly. Many carried open bottles: their eyes were wide and glittering. An old man sat in the gutter laughing horribly and shouting indecencies to people as they passed. Some of the smaller shops had been broken open, and looting proceeded apace.

The fire strode about the city like a giant. It littered young pythons of fire that glided subterraneously hither and thither and set a red doom on old wooden warehouses and shops. It stretched quivering tongues of flame across the streets and knit up one quarter of the town with another. It triumphed scarletly in the night and, pushing violently against lofty walls of brick and stone, sent them rattling to the ground.

“It is a good night for everyone except the insurance companies,” said Mrs. Knumf, complacently.

But when they stepped from the carriage on to the road, a gust of hot air carried to them the brain-sickening smell of burnt flesh.

“A good many people will be missing to-morrow,” remarked Tansy.

“I suppose Hell’s a bit like this,” was all that Adolph found to say.

Half-an-hour later the two girls were escorted by Mrs. Knumf to the discreet, private entrance to the brothel. They had been rescued with the utmost difficulty, and both of them were now shaken and a little distraught.

“You would like to rest, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Knumf, leading the way to a double-bedded room.

“You are very kind,” said Marie, looking at her a little distrustfully. Then she turned to her sister who was seated on the edge of one of the beds, trembling a little.

“Undress yourself, dear,” she said, “we will stay here until the morning.”

“You will have some refreshment first?” asked Mrs. Knumf.

But Marie refused, and the woman, walking quickly to the door, vanished. Almost immediately, through a second door on the opposite side of the room, Adolph and Tansy entered.

“Well, ladies,” said Adolph, looking keenly at Marie, “it was a narrow escape, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” answered Marie, impulsively; “we owe you our lives. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

She moved over towards Alys as though to protect her.

Adolph suddenly lurched forward.

“Well, you’re pretty well beat, I should think,” he said; “what about a bottle of wine?”

“Oh, no! Indeed, no!” protested Marie, standing by Alys’ side, and placing a hand upon her shoulder. “We only want to be left in peace.”

“Oh! but you must!” said Adolph. “Mustn’t they, Tansy?”

“Of course they musht,” said Tansy, eagerly. “Ring for wine. Champagne’s the stuff: we’ve plenty of it.”

Marie suddenly made up her mind.

“My sister is ill—can’t you see she is? I beg you to leave us. You have been very good to us: we are both grateful to you: do not spoil everything by thrusting upon us further kindness that ... that is not to be endured.”

“She’s right,” said Tansy, with drunken conviction, “absholutely right. What did I say? ‘Leave ’em a bit': thash what I said. Leave ’em to simmer down. Now isn’t that just what I said?”

“Very well,” said Adolph. “If you want anything, just ring. Mrs. Knumf will attend to you.”

They left the room by the door through which they had entered, and Marie heard the key turn in the lock.

She turned to Alys bravely.

“Get into bed, little one,” she said, “I will sleep with you.”

Two gilt candelabra, each holding half a dozen lighted candles, illuminated the room. Marie examined the room with apprehensive eyes. There were no windows: only bare walls faced her on every side. Near the ceiling, on one side of the room, were three ventilators. She crept to the door through which Mrs. Knumf had left the room and softly turned the handle: it was locked.

Without a word and with a faint smile she approached Alys.

“Do not take your clothes off,” she said; “let us sleep as we are.”

Leaving the candles still burning, she lay down by her sister. Folded in each other’s arms, they lay for a long time without sleeping. Vague noises, whether in the house or not they could not tell, disturbed them from time to time.

“The fire’s coming nearer,” whispered Alys at length. “I know it is: I feel it is. Marie, let us go away from here: we shall be caught.”

She sat up in bed and looked wildly round the room.

“Lie down, little one,” said her sister, soothingly, as, rising on to her knees, she placed her arm round Alys’ waist. “We can do nothing till the morning. Lie down in my arms. You are quite safe.”

But Alys’ instinct was right. The fire was spreading with incredible rapidity, and even now was within a few yards of the brothel. The vague noises grew louder and more sinister.

Both the girls were in that condition which is neither sleep nor wakefulness when one of the doors quietly opened and Adolph and Tansy entered. The former, after rapidly glancing at both the beds, locked the door, pocketed the key, went to the nearest candelabrum and extinguished all the candles it contained.

Marie, holding her sister’s hand, slipped out of bed.

“Leave those other candles alone,” she commanded.

“We have come for our reward,” said Adolph, thickly.

Tansy seated himself on the table and made himself steady by placing his hands on the table on either side of him; even with this support he swayed a little. Alys had also risen from the bed; she now stood by her sister’s side.

“What do you want?” asked Marie.

“Well, aren’t you going to rest?” asked Adolph. “Let me help you to undress.”

But instead of approaching Marie, he lurched towards the younger sister and placed a cruel, beautiful hand upon her arm. Alys winced as though her head had been struck with a whip. For a moment, Marie hesitated: then her fist shot out and caught Adolph between the eyes. He staggered and fell, but on the instant rose to his feet.

“Come on, Tansy,” he called, mad with drink and lust; “it’s going to be a fight—it’s got to be one.”

Tansy, abandoning the support of the table, rushed blindly on to the two girls, his bestial face alive with cruelty. Alys, sick and faint with horror, fell to the floor.

“She’s mine!” shouted Adolph, dropping on his knees by her side and bending over her.

“Let her alone! Let her alone!” shouted Marie, ceasing to struggle with Tansy in whose ape-like arms she was imprisoned. “Take me—both of you. Do what you like with me—only leave her untouched.”

But Adolph answered her with an insane, triumphant laugh.

“You belong to Tansy,” he said, and raising Alys from the floor, he carried her to one of the beds.

A great accession of strength seemed to flow through Marie’s body and limbs from her brain; her excitement and terror were inexhaustible sources of energy. With a superhuman effort, she released herself from Tansy’s grasp, and rushed like a flame across the room to the bed on which Alys, only half-conscious, was now stretched. Throwing herself upon Adolph from behind, she put her long fingers about his throat, and it appeared to her as though her will to destroy pumped wave after wave of power along her shoulders, down her arms, and into her fingers, and made them stronger than steel. The man, half turning, struck her several blows upon her face; but she felt nothing. Tansy, in attempting to pursue her, had stumbled over a chair, crushing his head against a corner of the table. He now lay on the floor, moaning.

It was while Marie’s fingers were still about Adolph’s throat that she became conscious of dull explosive sounds immediately outside one of the doors. At the same moment some one began to attempt to force an entrance through the other door. A voice shouted excitedly, warningly. But Marie still clung to her victim until all the strength left his limbs and he fell to the floor. A key rolled out of one of his pockets. She tried to pick it up, but a sudden faintness overcame her, and she sat on the edge of the bed unable to move, her head light and empty, her legs trembling with the utmost violence.

As one who dreams, she heard a great blow upon the door from beyond which the strange explosive noises had been coming, and with unbelieving eyes she saw the door fall inwards, torn from its hinges by a great beam that had fallen against it. An inexhaustible cloud of black smoke rushed into the room, almost suffocating her; with the smoke came a wave of heat and the noisy crackle of burning wood. The excited warning voice at the second door had ceased to shout.

All Marie’s senses were incredulous of her approaching doom. She gazed on her surroundings with the detachment of an onlooker who was not directly affected by those surroundings. She said to herself: “If Alys and I don’t escape soon—now—we shall be burned alive.” But still she did not move. She could not. She tried to lift her arm, but it remained inert on the bed. She attempted to speak to her sister, but no sound came from her lips....

The fire came roaring down the passage and entered the room. It was so hot that Marie felt her skin was being scorched. The horror of dying in flames seemed to her much less dreadful than the horror from which she had just escaped. Yet it would now be a comparatively easy matter to get away if only she could move. Her heart was beating violently, and her breath came and went most stormily. With a supreme effort she gathered all the forces of her mind together and concentrated them, willing herself to move; in response to this effort, her body rose from the bed and began to obey her wishes. Her hand picked up the key from the floor, her arms folded themselves about her sister and half-dragged, half-carried her to the second door. She fitted the key into the lock and turned it. In a second the door was open, and she and her sister were in the passage.

The door banged to after them, imprisoning the two half-conscious evil men.

With many intervals for rest, Marie carried her sister to the end of the passage and out into the open air. The brothel was almost surrounded by fire: another five minutes, and she would have been too late. As she emerged into the street and looked around her, she saw it was deserted. No one in Salonika was interested in the burning of a brothel when great hotels, huge warehouses, and fine palaces were being destroyed. And degraded women are but poor loot when compared with jewels and drink.

As for Adolph and Tansy....

HOW IT GREW

To
T. Michael Pope

I SUPPOSE that, after all, I am at heart a good deal of a snob, for I remember taking enormous pleasure in being seen in Captain Porritt’s company as we sauntered by British Headquarters, and passed along by the side of the quay until we reached the Café Roma. For Porritt was most decidedly a notability in Salonika. He would have attracted attention anywhere. He was dark and sudden, like a Spaniard. He had an air of distinction, even of disdain, and though his face was peculiarly animated, it never revealed anything. He looked what he was; an eager young aristocrat, absorbed in and hugely entertained by his surroundings. Every part of him had intuition: his hands knew.

Now, I must explain that Porritt had been in some little trouble. A lady, I think; certainly not drink. She was somebody else’s wife, and Somebody Else happened to be a millionaire merchant. So for three weeks Salonika had been closed to Porritt, and to-day was the first day of the ban’s lifting.

“I’d better go slow the first day, Old Thing,” he said; “we’ll go to the Roma instead of the White Tower, and after lunch, if that little room’s empty, you shall play Brahms to me—especially the Little Valse.”

We mounted the stone stairway that takes you so unexpectedly to the restaurant. As soon as the manager saw Porritt he came fussing towards us.

“Ah, monsieur!” he exclaimed, delightedly; “you once more! Are you well? Yes?”

“Excessively. But how crowded you are!”

The manager gazed around at his cosmopolitan clients, and smiled reassuringly.

“There, in the corner—a table for two. True, it is engaged for somebody else, but you shall have it.”

He tangled fatly through the room, and, when at the table, turned about and smiled.

We sat down, and our guide handed a wine list to Porritt.

“It is some weeks since you were in Salonika?” he suggested, rather than asked.

“Yes; three. Very busy up-country. Very busy ... ve ... ry ... bu ... sy ...” Porritt’s eyes were among the champagnes.

“Ah: Indeed! Something important then?” (He had not heard of Somebody Else’s wife.)

Porritt looked up and winked knowingly. “Rather! You wait and see.” He lowered his voice, adding, confidentially: “There’s a move on.”

“Ah! The Big Push!”

His eyebrows shaped themselves into a question.

Porritt nodded gravely and impressively.

“The Big Push! The Big Push!” breathed the manager once more.

He murmured the words reverently and softly, and at once increased in stature a couple of inches, thus falsifying the spirit, if not the letter, of the Scriptural axiom. He was one of the Few who Knew. He was a personality.

He tangoed away for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. Porritt grinned.

“You watch!” he said. “It’ll spread as quickly as a scandal in a cathedral city.”

And, really, the effect of this purely imaginary piece of news, deposited in the bosom of the manager, was electrical. He passed from table to table, and dropped a bomb on each. In five minutes the restaurant was seething with excitement.

“The Great Push at last!... In France as well, no doubt.... Every front.... Yes, the Great Push. I always said it would begin in May.”

At one table the manager lingered for some little time. He was talking with some animation to three journalists, correspondents of French newspapers. Two of them were busy writing in note-books. It appeared that the manager had no lack of news to impart: he spread out his plump hands, lifted his shoulders, and wrinkled his brows. And then he looked furtively towards us, and whispered something behind his hand. The journalists also looked, half rose, thought a second time, and sat down again.

“Damned funny, isn’t it?” said Porritt.

“I’m afraid you’re rather in for it,” I remarked.

“Oh, I’ll soon dispose of them.”

Only one table went on smoothly and systematically with its eating. Seated at it were two Fleet Street men, who had just come to Salonika to conduct The Balkan News. They had listened to the manager, but had remained unmoved. But, presently, one of them took a slip of paper from his pocket, wrote a few words, and sent it across to us by a waiter.

Porritt unrolled the slip. On it was written: “Is there anything in it?” He hesitated a moment, then wrote underneath: “Damfino.” “Which,” said he to me, “being interpreted, means: ‘I’m damned if I know.’” And that is all the English journalists got; as a matter of fact, it was all they wanted, and they sat back in their chairs, and watched the rumour grow.

Extraordinary our human love of the sensational! Extraordinary our inability to pass on a piece of news without adding to it! Extraordinary the credulity we give to impossible stories we desire to be true!

“Let’s have our coffee and liqueurs down at Floca’s,” suggested Porritt. “It’ll be rather jolly to see to what fantastic shapes my Yarn has grown down there.”

Floca’s, of course, is just underneath the Roma, but though only a floor and a ceiling divide them, they are as different in mental atmosphere as the gilt-mirrored lounge of the Café Royal, and the dining-room at Morley’s Hotel.

The word “seethes” is banal; nevertheless, Floca’s seethed. For the Yarn had grown. It now had many twisted forms, each fashioned according to the desires and fears of the individual gossiper. Porritt, the only begetter of this disturbance, leaned back with a gratified smile on his lips.

“One must amuse oneself,” said he.

“Ah! Porritt! Porritt! Little do you know the mischief you have done! At this moment the news is on its way to Athens, thence to London, Berlin, Vienna—everywhere. At about seven o’clock this evening, just when the night editors are beginning to think of dinner, it will reach Fleet Street, perhaps by way of Zurich or Amsterdam. Even now, as I speak, the world is beginning to wake up to this great new event. Thousands of pounds will be spent on cables. Reputations will be lost. Perhaps Roumania will be induced to come in at last. Greece will stir uneasily, the Kaiser will wire to Hindenburg, the Stock Exchange....”

“Would it were all true!” interrupted Porritt. “Do you know, Cumberland, I have never felt so important in all my life? Look over there!”

He pointed to a neighbouring table. At it were seated two men, both of whom I knew well by sight. One a fat, hairy Greek Jew with a pendulous jaw, and great bags under his eyes, was a fabulously wealthy financier; the other his confidential clerk. They had been taken unawares by the news, and forgot that a dozen eyes were upon them. The financier was white and trembling, and time after time he tried to rise from his chair, only to sink back repeatedly in a condition of distressing exhaustion. Fear, a devastating fear, dwelt in his eyes.

“What is he afraid of?” I whispered to Porritt.

“Only his clerk knows. But evidently he thinks he is ruined.”

“Tell him!” I urged; “tell him it’s not true—that it’s only your invention.”

“Why should I? If people will speculate in human lives, let them take the consequences.... And now,” added he, “I must go to the canteen to get those six cases of whiskey. I’ve a limber waiting for me just off Piccadilly Circus.”

It reached Fleet Street precisely at nine.

“I think we might have a leader on it—in any case, a short one,” said Hartley, Editor of the Trumpet, that powerful organ of democracy, to the night editor. “Tell Bisham to come along.”

Like a lizard, Bisham darted in, an unlit stump of a cigar between his thin, intelligent lips.

“Well, Bish, the Big Push is on at last. All fronts. Just through on the wire. Waiting for censor’s permish. No details. Let’s have a couple of sticks, in case. The news about Salonika; the wire itself—it comes from Zurich—will go in under any circs. And, you, Beale,” he added, turning to the night news editor, “wire Amsterdam, and do the necessary with Paris. Now, trot along both of you. I’m busy.”

KATYA’S WOOING

To
Jack Kahane

IT was in May, 1912, that Katya Kontorompa met cosmopolitan Guy Fallon, and decided to make him fall in love with her. She was staying at the Olympos Hotel, in Salonika, with her mother, and Fallon had a suite of rooms on the ground floor. He was tall, dark, and vivid; moreover, he was young; best of all, he was fabulously wealthy.

“A week next Thursday,” said Katya one afternoon to her mother, as they sat on the shaded balcony on the first floor, “Guy Fallon will propose to me. It will take place in the evening in one of those boats.”

She nodded towards a flotilla of little rowing-boats that stirred lazily to the rhythm of the lazy waves.

“Yes?” inquired her mother, who sat in a low chair looking benevolently at the world that God had made specially for her.

“And though I shall be a little timid at first,” continued Katya, “I shall say yes as soon as he has kissed me passionately on the mouth. But not until. I think he would kiss rather well, don’t you?”

“I think he would be thorough, dear.... But we musn’t talk like this. I never used even to think like it till you came home from Brussels.”

“Would you like Guy for a son-in-law, mamma?”

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Kontorompa was fascinated by Fallon almost as much as her daughter was, and it was with a wholly sensuous feeling that she closed her lids and said:

“Yes, dear, I should—very much.”

“But the kind of kisses he would bestow upon you, mamma, would be very different from those I should get,” said Katya, mischievously.

But though Fallon saw a good deal of the two ladies during the next few days, there was something in his manner that made Mrs. Kontorompa suspect he had no intention of marrying her daughter. He was in love with her—yes; but it was not quite the kind of love that leads to marriage. Rather was it the kind of hot, uneasy passion that persecutes a man until he has gained his desire, when it shrinks and dies like an orchid in a night of frost. But Katya, of course, was extraordinarily clever: ignobly so. She was directing the affair with elaborate carefulness, confident that in the end she would trap this bright tiger of a man in her net of conspiracies.

Though living in the same hotel, Fallon wrote to her twice every day. Sitting up in bed in his yellow pyjamas each night, he wrote just before he slept, and the note was delivered by his valet to Katya’s maid at eight o’clock every morning. And just before dinner in the evening he also wrote, and this letter he himself handed to Katya as they said good night. Fallon knew how to write. He had a habit of intoxicating himself with words, and though each letter said: “I love you! I want you!” he rescued himself from monotony and her from boredom, by saying the same thing in a hundred different ways. But he was never tender, and Mrs. Kontorompa, who eagerly read the letters Katya passed on to her, was driven on one occasion to remark:

“It is not marriage-love. Your father has never loved me like that!”

“Poor mamma!” murmured Katya; “poor mamma! But don’t you wish he had?”

Fallon was with the Kontorompas almost every hour of every day. In the afternoons, when Mrs. Kontorompa slept, the two lovers played pianoforte duets in the big, deserted lounge. Fallon was a masterful pianist, and he played in a manner that suggested intense hunger of the soul. In these hours he had no courtesy, and when she bungled a passage he would scowl at her and call her a little fool. And at this she would laugh and play carelessly in order to taste his anger once again....

“To-day is Thursday,” announced Katya, one morning, as she and her mother breakfasted alone in their room.

“So it is,” agreed her mother, without conviction.

“But I mean it’s the Thursday. This evening Guy will ask me to marry him. After dinner he and I will walk to the White Tower. There we shall get a boat. Guy will row. There will be a moon.”

She spoke as though she had arranged for the moon to be there.

“Do take care of yourself, dear. Mr. Fallon is so dark and so ... so impulsive. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know what you mean, mamma; but those little rowing-boats are quite safe in more senses than one.”

And because she was so anxious for the evening to come, Katya found the bright hours of the day tepid and slow. She was very quiet and subdued in the afternoon, when Fallon found her in the empty lounge.

“Come and play!” he commanded.

“I feel languid and lazy, like a cat in the sun,” she said; “besides, I’m reading.”

“Very well—we’ll play the Petite Suite of Debussy’s and some other tame stuff. Let’s sentimentalize together.”

“Oh, but you’d find out too much about me. We should get too close to each other in that soft, melting music.”

“Is it possible for us to get too close to each other?” he asked, with a laugh that seemed to be half a sneer.

She rose, and together they walked to the piano.

Only those who have played in concerted music know how easy it is for two souls to mingle in sound. They enjoy an intimacy which no passionate avowals, no tender pleadings, and, indeed, no physical contact can provide. Debussy is never entirely innocent: even his gold-fishes swim wantonly in their pool: and the very tender miniatures of the Petite Suite are decadent with faint exhalations of patchouli.

Fallon detested the casual promiscuities of secret lovers—the pressure of hands, the stolen kisses, the entire vocabulary of illicitness. He had the fastidiousness of the gourmet, and as yet his body had tasted nothing of Katya’s delights, save the sharp thrill that eyes can communicate, and the peculiar, ghostly, but sensuous intimacy supplied by music.

Katya’s moon was in its appointed place as the two lovers silently descended the quay at the White Tower and embarked in their little boat. Guy rowed out into the bay. There was no breathing in the air, no ripple on the sea. The stars made magic in the sky, and conspired with the moon to create a feeling of far-off voluptuousness.

Fallon rowed lazily until they were a mile or so from the town, which was visible as a vast congeries of lights—chains of lights, terraces of lights, huge constellations poised in the air, lonely points of flame burning in solitary places.

“Like a huge window full of jewels,” said Katya.

The tens of thousands of lights were reflected in the sea as clearly as a face is reflected in a mirror.

“Which is the more real?” asked Fallon; “the city’s illumination or the sea’s version of it?”

“The water is quite warm,” said Katya, laying a white hand on the surface of the indigo sea.

“Yes,” said Fallon. “You could, if you wished, more easily plunge your hand into my heart than into that water.”

“I know,” she said; “perhaps some day I will.”

“Perhaps some day it will be too late. I cannot go on loving you like this—desperately—for ever. Love can be broken by its own strength.”

“You must not threaten me,” she said. “Your attraction for me is your strength: strong people do not threaten. They do not even warn.”

“Then you do love me?”

“Of course. That is, if you call it love.”

“If I lean forward I can kiss your ankle.”

She laughed.

“Humour must be preserved even if propriety isn’t,” she said; “nevertheless, you may kiss it.”

She felt the long warmth of his lips through her puce-coloured silk stockings. A hot wind suddenly came from the south, stirring the sea to life.

“And now,” she said, “you’d better row back.”

“We were fools to come here,” he said.

“Yes?... Why? Tell me.”

But he sat moodily for a minute without speaking. Then he lit a cigarette, and by the light of his match Katya saw the passion in his eyes.

“You’re a bit of a tiger,” she said.

“And you’re much of an iceberg,” he retorted.

“Passionless, cold, serene,” she quoted. “I wonder if I am. I’ve never yet had the chance of finding out.”

But he made no reply. His silence, his lack of directness, the lazy contemptuous manner in which he smoked his cigarette, whipped her to anger.

“Let’s go back,” she said, abruptly.

“No,” he replied, with grimness. “I’ve got you here.”

“Very well,” she said; “then give me a cigarette.”

He threw her a case and a box of matches.

Then, suddenly, words came from him in a torrent.

“You confess you love me. Well, if you do—passion’s what I want. Affection’s nothing to me. You’ve ‘never yet had a chance of finding out.’ Do you expect me to believe that? You were made to tempt men ... and to satisfy them. Listen, Katya: I love every bit of you. You’re not cold. You could kiss, I know. Let me row you back.”

His cigarette gave a little hiss as it hit the water. He threw his arms forward, desperately.

“Yes, let me row you back,” he repeated.

“I love you,” she answered, “but I can never be your mistress. I’m not angry with you....”

“Do you think I should care if you were?” he interrupted, violently. “Do you think I care a damn for your anger?—or your love? You would like to be cruel to me: I know: I know your sort. But I can wash you from my mind as easily as the sea has put out my cigarette.”

“Oh, no!” she said; “you can’t do that. You know you can’t. Something of me will be with you always.”

He took the oars and began to row. The little indigo waves passed by them; the feathered oars slid along their crests. At each pull the boat leapt; something of his strength was imparted to her body; she quivered in response.

At the quay of the White Tower he was rough and insolent.

“Get out, quick!” he commanded; “let’s finish this ridiculous business as speedily as possible.”

She turned upon him with an amused smile.

“You have the most dreadful manners of any man I have ever met,” she said, with a little laugh. “When you are in a temper, you are about twelve years old.”

He called a gharry, waited until she had stepped into it, and then strode away.

Mrs. Kontorompa was sitting up in bed, reading, when Katya opened her mother’s bedroom door. She looked at her daughter with a contented smile.

“Nothing happened,” announced Katya. “He does not want to marry me.”

“My poor child! Never mind: there were weeks and weeks when I used to think the same about your father. Men never know their own minds.”

“But Fallon shall know his,” said Katya; “I’m as clever as any man I’ve come across yet.”

“Do be careful, dear. You were careful to-night?”

“Very. He only kissed my ankle.”

“Your ankle!” exclaimed her mother, in amazement; “whatever for? Why should he want to kiss your ankle?”

“Well,” said Katya, laughing, “I’ve got rather a nice ankle, you know.”

Mrs. Kontorompa, who had no ankles at all, but merely calves terminating in feet, sighed anxiously.

“Your father never kissed my ankles,” she said, disapprovingly.

“Ask him to!” urged Katya, mischievously; “it’s a delightful feeling.”

A week later Fallon, dressed in white duck, knocked early one morning at Mrs. Kontorompa’s drawing-room door. Katya and Katya’s mother were to go with him to Langaza to picnic. But at the very last moment Mrs. Kontorompa, as had been arranged between her daughter and herself, felt indisposed.

“You will come by yourself,” said Fallon.

“Of course,” answered Katya.

The chauffeur was discreet and unobservant: he was paid a very large salary for not seeing things.

Their car was fitted with a lace awning, but the air was so hot and dry, that before they were well over the deserted Lembet plain they were inordinately thirsty. So Fallon stopped the car and opened a half-bottle of champagne.

“I didn’t bring champagne just because it’s expensive,” he explained, “but because I know you like it. Look!—the ice is half melted already.”

“It will be cooler by the lake,” said Katya; “there may even be a little breeze. I never drink champagne on a hot day,” she added, “without longing to have a bath in it. It would tingle so deliciously, like electricity.”

“Sensualist! I’ve often noticed you love the sensations you’ve never experienced.”

“The worst of it is, there are so few of them left.”

But Fallon was not interested, and he threw the empty bottle on the roadside with a gesture of boredom.

“Drive on!” he ordered the chauffeur.

When a mile from Langaza Lake, the car was drawn up by the side of the deserted road, and their chauffeur spread out their lunch under the shade of a little grove of poplars.

In silence they ate and drank. The sun-baked plain sent waves of visible heat into the sky. No birds sang. The bronze sound of a sheep-bell came from afar.

“Life passes,” said Katya, at length, “and we grow older.”

“True,” answered he, mockingly. “It is only the grass that never withers. It was here ten thousand years ago, and it is here to-day.”

“But you and I!—how quickly age will come to us!” she said.

“How foolish, then, to waste our youth!” he urged. “Sometimes I feel angry at those days which slip by empty of ecstasy. Waste! It’s all waste! Waste of days, of months, of years! Just because we refuse to take what life offers us. We do not live for ever, and the things that taste sweet to-day will in a few years be but bitterness and ashes.”

He allowed his wine-glass to slip from his lax fingers on to the grass.

“Let us walk,” he said; “I’m restless.”

So they rose and walked slowly towards the lake.

“What is that parcel you are carrying?” he asked, when they were near the lake’s border.

“Oh, I thought perhaps I’d do some sketching when we got to the lake. We can sit down, and you may smoke while I work. No, thanks: I can easily carry it myself.”

They walked on in silence. Then:

“You were talking about waste,” she said.

“Was I? Yes. But it’s a dreary subject. I was lecturing you, really, you know; for you’re wasting my life as well as your own. You’re destroying these days. It’s just a week since you told me you loved me.”

“Yes, but I said ‘if you call it love.’ To you love is one thing; to me, another.”

“Why? What do you imagine is my idea of love?”

“Just appetite—the satisfaction of an appetite.”

“And your idea?”

“Service.”

He laughed on a high note of contempt.

“You deceive yourself,” he said. “Do you think I don’t know you? Do you think I live with my eyes shut? If you were to confess that your idea of love is a means of obtaining security against life, I’d believe you. In other words—you like me in my brutal moods, don’t you?—if I asked you to marry me, you would serve me for what I would give you in return. Is that what you mean by service?”

“You believe, then, I would accept your invitation if you asked me to marry you?”

“Most assuredly. Let’s finish this subtle, month-old fight of ours, and speak in plain words.”

“But we understand each other so well without plain words!” she protested.

“Do we? I wonder. Tell me, then: why don’t I ask you to marry me?”

“Because you don’t love me. Your body merely aches for mine. You suffer, I know.”

“Yes, I do,” he acknowledged; “but I can endure pain. Most men can’t: that is why they are willing to incur the discomfort and long penance of marriage—anything rather than continue to suffer.”

“Then why don’t you go away? Why don’t you leave me altogether?”

But he did not answer.

“Is it,” she asked, “because you still hope to win me without marriage?”

He turned upon her savagely.

“Temptress and taunter!” he exclaimed. “I know your sort. You love to feel your hideous power. You suck delight from my misery.”

He drew nearer to her and seized one of her wrists.

“I love you,” he whispered; “isn’t that enough?”

They were in a little pathway among the rushes by the lake’s side. Suddenly, she wrested herself away from him and, raising her right arm, threw the parcel she carried into the lake. It floated on the surface, and the gentle south wind moved it slowly across the water in the direction of Langaza village, a couple of miles away.

She looked at him with a mocking smile.

“Let us go back,” she said, “for this is merely the waste of another day.”

“Why have you thrown your sketching things away?” he asked, stupidly.

“I haven’t. The things I have thrown away were once yours. Then they became mine. They will belong to the person who finds them.”

The words came hysterically, and she trembled a little.

“What are they?” he asked.

“Your letters to me. I have finished with you. This is the end.”

He began to laugh, but his laughter quickly died in his throat.

“You fool!” he exclaimed; “you spiteful little devil! My name is on each of those letters.”

He quivered with anger, and raised his fist as though to strike.

“I know,” she said. “That is one of the reasons why I threw them away. It is time your folly was known to others besides me.”

She looked upon him with malice, delighting in his anger. Then she laughed softly, taunting him.

“Can’t you swim?” she asked. “See, it isn’t very far off.”

But he strode away in the direction of the motor-car. She called after him, gently, lovingly.

“Guy! Guy!”

He stopped and turned, his face and attitude contemptuous. Running up to him, she threw her arms about his neck and, half-sobbing, half-laughing, stammered:

“Guy! Dear Guy! I was only fooling you. They were not your letters—not one of them. Your dearest letters I carry in my breast, next to my heart.”

He pressed his face hard against her neck.

“You little devil, you! Why do we torture each other like this?”

She clung to him desperately.

“Marry me! Marry me!” she implored.

“Yes, I will: I’m damned if I won’t. But, I warn you—look out! We shall both have a hell of a time.”

“But there’ll be a month or two of heaven first,” she said, and, opening his shirt at the neck, she kissed him low down on his breast.

THE STORM

To
Mary Harrison

XAVIER PETROVSKI was English in spite of his name, appearance, and his temperament.

“As for his appearance,” said Judith Lesueur to her sister, Marian, “well, it’s too ravishing for words. Eyes that melt, my dear—melt with their own fire.”

Marian laughed.

“I never like your little gods, your little tin gods; your little gods of flesh and blood. And I particularly hate the melting variety. Just like the butter you get in the Café Roma in August.”

His temperament was melancholy, for he was cursed with a hot, uneasy ambition that goaded him on to work till his body grew tired, his brain stale, and his spirit dejected. He believed himself to be a musical composer.

“I have genius: I know I have genius,” he said, over and over again in spring nights when he lay in his lodging overlooking the sea.

And then he would sleep and dream, his brain ravished by sumptuous harmonies, his very flesh soothed by sound.

For a living he played the violin in the Orient Café, for he was a member of the Ostrovsky Quartet. From three o’clock in the afternoon till midnight he played, whilst the loose men and women of Salonika danced and drank and ate. In the mornings he composed music and counted up the money he had saved. For Xavier was nothing if not practical. He was not going to miss the reward of his genius by foolish conduct or faulty management of his affairs. Already he had saved £800. Not a penny was spent that could by any contriving be added to his hoard. In a little while he would take his money to London, and then! Oh, then he would show them! The finest orchestra in the world should play his music and the critics should praise it; it should be printed and sold; his name should be on the lips of every man. Fame: money: the companionship of the great: the smiles of women: the intoxication of life lived to the full. All should be his. In a little while. He was sure of it.

At least, sometimes he was sure. In his happy moments, his moods of exaltation. But there were black moods.

“Is it possible that I have written these inanities?” he would sometimes ask himself. “I am a fool, sick with vanity, eaten up with egomania.”

In one of these unendurable moods he met Judith Lesueur, the most beautiful and most cultured demirep in all Salonika.

“Oh, Miss Lesueur,” he exclaimed, “do help me.”

“What is it?” she asked, smiling. “Has someone been horrid to you?” (She always treated him as though he were a child.)

“No: but I’m terribly depressed: my music won’t come right. I looked at my String Serenade this morning, and it is inconceivable that I should have written such ridiculous stuff. And when I was writing it I thought it was so splendid.”

“It probably is splendid,” she said, sympathetically; “everyone has moods. Come to the Café and drink with me.”

“Oh, no!” he protested. “This rotten feeling—I must walk it off. Drink would only make me worse.”

But, instead of going a long tramp as he had intended, he returned to his lodgings, and sat brooding at his open window. His thoughts turned to his dead father: he also had been a composer of music, and he had been one of life’s failures. He had worked hard and very patiently, but no one had ever played anything he had written.

Xavier rose from his chair and walked across the room to a big chest full of MSS., all in his father’s neat writing. He turned over page after page—symphonies, overtures, songs, string quartets. How like his father this music was!—mystical, tender, exquisite. “Like the poems of Rossetti,” Xavier murmured to himself. Soon he became so absorbed in his father’s work, that he nearly lost consciousness of himself. The music he was reading murmured and sang in his ears. His father’s very spirit seemed to suspire from the pages. Almost could his voice be heard. It was as though the soul of the dead man was brooding over his living son....

Some of the music had been written only ten years ago: it was very much in advance of its period, and perhaps it was for this reason that both publishers and conductors had disdained it. Xavier’s father had lived in London where, it is true, good music cannot for long go unrecognized; but he had been proud and almost vainly sensitive, and the rejection of a composition used to throw him into a condition of despair so great, that months would pass before he could persuade himself to give the work another chance. His sensitive pride had been his ruin....

Xavier, wrapped up in his own work, had not for some years examined his father’s music, and had never divined its true quality; but now he recognized its extraordinary distinction, its peculiar originality, its brooding power and barbed eloquence. Oblivious of time, he read on until his landlady entered with his lunch.

“We are going to have a thunderstorm,” she said, looking at the copper sky.

“Very likely,” he said, his eyes still on the music.

And while he ate his frugal meal, he continued reading his father’s music; he absorbed it until it was time to go to the Orient Café. As he walked slowly thither, he felt that during the last few hours his personality had undergone a strange metamorphosis. He was not himself: something had been added to him: some luxury, a kind of mental wantonness—had entered his spirit unawares. His mind was larger, his imagination more rapid and higher in its flights.

There was something ghostly in this, something, perhaps, even threatening. But no doubt the minatory feeling came from the sulphur sky that hung so low, a sky heavy with electricity and sulky with spleen....

The dances he and his comrades played that afternoon and evening meant less than nothing to him, for he did not even hear them. One performs mechanically the acts one performs frequently. The music that was in the air about him was the music he had read that morning.

At midnight, the day’s work over, he left the Café and sought his lodging. There were no stars. Thunder had begun to mutter, but as yet no rain had fallen. Faint fires trembled in the sky. Xavier felt the excitement of something important about to happen. His brain teemed with ideas. As soon as he got home, he would begin to compose.

“‘The Storm!’” he said, suddenly, speaking aloud. “The storm that never breaks—that’s an idea, and a damned good one, too. The storm that is always threatening and never begins. Something brooding, something gathering itself together, something couching, something licking its chops. And nothing ever happening.”

He knitted his brows in deep thought, and by the time he had reached his room, musical ideas for his composition were already filling his mind.

He sat down and wrote. Muted horns cried mysteriously on the paper before him in discords that were continually on the point of being, but never were, resolved.... At the end of an hour he read what he had written; from the very first bar it was good. It was with difficulty that he kept his excitement under control. He worked without effort, without thought, but with deep and disturbed feeling. His pen moved mechanically, and he could but wonder at its strange activity.

Just before dawn, he lay down and fell asleep. At the end of the third hour of his slumber, he awoke suddenly, all his senses fresh and alert. The sun was in his room. Anxiously he bounded out of bed, and sat down at his little table near the window, scanning his MS. with eager eyes. The muted horns made magic music. Yes—it was fine! Every note of it was fine! How mysteriously yet significantly the strings stirred! How broodingly the wood-wind kept suggesting the principal theme that was never fully stated!

It was with a trembling fear that he took his pen in hand. Had his inspiration failed? Had that mood gone? No: without effort he began at the point at which he had left off. Though it was happy day outside, the storm was still brewing on his paper. Little flickers of flame danced on his sky’s edge: a black turbulence was at his zenith....

Three days later, his Symphonic Poem was finished, and he sought out Judith Lesueur that she might share his joy.

“Oh, Miss Lesueur,” he said, bursting into her flat, “do sympathize with me!”

“What is it?” she asked. “Has someone been horrid to you?”

“No: I’m so happy I can’t remain alone. I’ve written a wonderful work: I can’t believe it is I who have written it. And really—don’t laugh at me!—it just seemed to me all the time that somebody else was writing it for me.”

“Oh, I’m so glad. If you weren’t so terribly virtuous, I would kiss you.”

Involuntarily, he moved a pace or two away from her. She held out her hand.

“Don’t be afraid, dear friend!” She smiled on him. “If you are happy, I am also. And now, I suppose, you’ll be going to London and I shall see you no more. Poor Judith!”

“Yes,” he answered, “I shall be going soon. It describes a storm—the gathering of a storm: clouds coming out of the vacant blue and massing together: yellow, treacherous vapours emerging from God knows where: enmity in the air. But the storm never breaks. All the thick, heavy passions of nature mingle until they become clogged. And then the music stops, choked by its own congestion.”

Judith did not understand him: he was just a little mad, she thought.

“I do hope it will be a success,” she said. “I’m sure it will. But I wish I was coming to London with you to hear it.”

He glanced at her rather shyly.

“Do you?” he asked. “Do you, really?”

“Why, of course I do. I want to see your success: I want to be with you in the midst of it.”

“Perhaps, some day ...” he said, vaguely, blushing a little. “Well, good-bye,” he added, “I must be off to the Café now.”

London was much kinder than Xavier Petrovski had anticipated, for he had not reflected that all cities, all people, are kind to men who have money to spend. He came with letters of introduction, and was soon on friendly terms with many musicians, critics, and people of social influence. A German firm of publishers had already accepted a volume of his songs, and the wealthy amateur, Countess Idionowsky, had arranged for an evening of his music to be given at her house in Portman Square. His timid manner, his air of distinction, and the “melting” eyes, which Judith had tried to describe to her sister, made him very popular with women, and he received more invitations than he could accept.

More satisfactory than anything else, he had been able to secure Queen’s Hall for an evening in the first week in June, and Marcel Xystobam was to conduct for him, and the great soprano, Alice Gardner, was to sing a group of his songs and a scene from his opera Dido.

On this concert, and in advertising it, he had spent a large portion of his hoard. All his hopes for the future were centered on this event. If it failed, his life would be broken, his ambition killed. But the thought of failure rarely entered his mind, so full were his days of happiness, so continuous was the flow of praise he received from his new friends.

In the afternoon of the day before his orchestral concert, a stranger called to see Xavier at his hotel. He was a tall ascetic-looking man, fashionably dressed, courteous, even a little deferential.

“My name is Shaw—Geoffrey Shaw,” he said, “and I have called to see you because I knew your father well: indeed, he was a dear friend of mine.”

Xavier, who had been writing at a desk when the stranger entered, rose excitedly to his feet.

“You knew my father?” he asked.

“Yes. I was with him when he died. In those days I was not so ... so well-circumstanced as I am now, or perhaps he would not have died when he did. I was one of those who had faith in him—in his genius.”

“Tell me about him. You know, I was only fifteen when he died, and during the last two years of his life I never saw him at all.”

So the stranger told Xavier of his father’s last years—of his patient courage, his extraordinary capacity for work, his sensitiveness.

“He really had very great powers,” Shaw continued, “but the weakness in him was that he had not sufficient faith in himself. His faith came and went. A single hostile word was sufficient to make him suspect his own genius.”

He stayed for half-an-hour and then rose to go.

“I am going to your concert to-morrow, of course,” he said; “perhaps you will come and sup at my flat when it is over. My place is in Oxford Street, less than five minutes’ walk from Queen’s Hall.”

“I shall be delighted.”

There are few experiences so salutary, and yet at the same time so galling, as that undergone by an inexperienced composer when he listens to the first performance of his orchestral works. His music may look extraordinarily lucid on paper, but in actual performance all kinds of elaborately calculated effects fail to “come off”: they are destroyed by lack of balance between the different sections of the orchestra. The ideas are there, but they are not heard.

At the long rehearsal of his music, Xavier suffered deeply. It seemed to him that his compositions were like exquisite paintings at which handfuls of mud had been thrown: the tender sound would suddenly become meaningless noise: muddy patches here and there stopped and choked the logical continuity of his work.

When he first noticed this, his instinct was to throw the blame on his conductor, Marcel Xystobam, but two or three minutes’ reflection disclosed to him that the fault was in the writing itself, and not in the manner of its interpretation. Only one work, “The Storm,” came out in sound precisely as he had heard it in his inner ear; his other compositions were palpably the work of an untried, though gifted, amateur.

Xavier Petrovski sat writhing at his own music.

The large audience was obviously bored; even Alice Gardner’s appearance did not lift them out of their apathy. During the interval many left the hall. The applause bestowed on each composition could only just be heard. All the critics were already congregated round the refreshment bar. Nothing but a miracle could prevent the concert from being the most conspicuous failure of the season.

There was nothing from which Xavier could derive consolation. The fault was his own. His music was the music of a man who had not learned the technique of his art; the sounds that reached him from the orchestra were not the sounds that had come to him in the silence of his room in Salonika; through lack of skill—through want of experience—he had failed to record what he had heard.

After what to the composer seemed hours of misery, the last work was reached. He knew well that if the audience were in a mood to listen, “The Storm” could not fail of its effect. In rehearsal, it had been peculiarly impressive. Not a single note was miscalculated: it was the work of a mature mind: it had all the attributes of genius.

And to-night, the very first bars gripped the tired and disappointed listeners. They forgot their disappointment in listening to this strange disturbing sound. Brooding yet passionate, the music filled the hall: it flickered like flame; it rolled, like heavy waters; it menaced, like distant, just-heard thunder. It made its listeners believe that something terrible was about to happen. And when all the black beauty of it had passed away without its threatened terrible culmination, the listeners felt an exquisite relief that expressed itself in thunderous applause.

Not until the conductor had signified with an expressive gesture that the composer was not present and could not therefore bow his acknowledgments from the platform, did the audience begin to disperse....

At the entrance of the hall Xavier Petrovski found his new friend, Geoffrey Shaw, waiting for him. The meeting of the two men was constrained; it seemed almost as though they were enemies compelled to meet on a matter of business. They began to walk towards Oxford Street.

“I wish to God I had stayed in Salonika,” said Petrovski, at length, “for it’s all been waste.”

His companion tried to comfort him.

“You have not yet had the experience that every composer needs before he can become successful—the kind of experience that you can’t get out there in Greece. You must stay in London—live here. You would learn quickly all that is required.”

“But my ‘Storm’ succeeded, didn’t it?”

For a moment Shaw made no reply. Then:

“Yes,” he said; “that work was a great success.”

“But they tell me the critics did not stop to hear it. They all left the hall long before the concert was finished. I do not blame them, but it’s a pity they did not hear my best work.... I feel like a beginner, Mr. Shaw—I have everything yet to learn. And for some years I have been flattering myself that I was a master of my art.”

“Don’t be too despondent, my dear fellow. You’ve got the stuff in you all right: it only wants bringing out and putting into proper shape.”

“Yes; but the curious thing is that my work, ‘The Storm,’ is absolutely free from all faults of inexperience. It might almost have been written by another man.”

They had now reached Shaw’s flat. His host unlocked the door and led him to his dining-room where supper was laid.

Shaw’s sympathetic kindness and, no doubt, the wine also soon put Petrovski into a more hopeful frame of mind. When they had finished supper, Shaw invited his guest into his library. The room contained nothing but books, a desk, and a couple of easy chairs.

“I have something here I want to show you,” he said, very gravely. “It is a MS. of your father’s—he gave it to me a few weeks before his death. I happen to know it is the only copy in existence; and I was present when he destroyed the preliminary sketch on which this composition is founded.”

Taking a thin volume from a cabinet, he opened it at the first page and placed it before his guest.

At the very first glance Petrovski uttered an exclamation of surprise. Then, bending over it, he examined it hurriedly and with the utmost agitation. His hands trembled so violently that he could scarcely turn over the pages.

“Good God!” he exclaimed at length; “it’s ‘The Storm'—note for note—my own work!”

He transferred his gaze from the MS. to his host.

“What does it mean?” he asked; “in God’s name, what does it mean?”

THE MAN WHO GAVE HIS SOUL

To
Walter H. Mudie

DMITRI passed his life in doing good. In that lay all his happiness. In the whole of Salonika there was no man or woman so vile, so incorrigibly steeped in iniquity, as to fail to stir his compassion. All men were his brothers: all men, he sometimes thought, were himself.

He preached in the streets and in the markets, and this is the gospel the young man brought to his hearers.

“All forms of consciousness are God. If the trees are conscious, then they are part of God. If lions are conscious, they also are God. The more alive a man is—the more conscious he is of himself and his environment—the more of God’s spirit does he possess. For God is a vast, infinite, potential Intelligence that is conscious of itself only through us—and, perhaps, through forms of life that are not human, and, maybe, through certain minerals and gases that appear to have some of the attributes of consciousness. Of these last things I do not speak with certainty. But sure it is that each man and woman has within him and her something of the Holy Spirit. God sees through our eyes and hears with our ears. Therefore, we are all God: we are all the same. Between the ‘wicked’ man and the ‘good’ man there is no shadow of difference. If one hates another, he is hating himself.”

His pleasant, eager smile, his vehement eyes, and his tall, athletic frame made many women desire him, but he went to bed with none, for all the grosser appetites of his body seemed to have been sublimated into an ecstatic spiritual passion that spent itself in a thousand deeds of compassionate love.

They thought him mad, but they never reviled or taunted him, for he was known throughout the entire breadth of that city as a man of noble deeds and imperishable kindness.

“Poor boy!” said Susannah, the Jewish woman who sold vegetables, “’tis a pity so fine a fellow should be wasted. Those lips of his were made for kissing.”

“You say what is right,” agreed Zacyntha, a lewd Greek woman. “A night of love with him would but whet one’s appetite.”

Strange it was that none of those women of the half-world ever attempted to tamper with him, but vileness must always recognize and fear what is pure. They gazed at him often with eyes of longing, it is true, but the gaze he gave in return was always the very negation of sex.

“A fool! A Parsifal!” commented the respectable ladies, for most of them would most gladly have lost their respectability had Dmitri been willing to snatch it from them.

Now, in a dark street of that city it was that Dmitri dwelt, inhabiting two rooms in the house of Jacques Laborde, a young Frenchman who taught many languages. Jacques and his wife, Madelein, loved him for his goodness, but a time came when they were afraid on his account.

“You have noticed something, eh?” asked Madelein one night, as she and her husband sat alone.

“About him?... Yes, yes. How can one express it? It is just as though he had begun to lose himself, as though he had spent so much of himself that there was little left to spend—less every day.”

“Yes—that’s it. Yet his appetite is good, he is as strong as ever, and he has never been more cheerful.”

“Do you ever feel,” asked Jacques, after a pause, “do you ever feel when he is talking to you, that he is giving you something of himself—merging his personality into yours?”

“That is the feeling. I don’t like it. Just as though his soul was escaping from his body into mine.... Sometimes, Jacques, I’ve felt as though something of his personality—something ghostly, ghastly, too—had floated from him to me. It’s made a change in me. It’s coloured me faintly, like a few drops of red wine in a glass of water. Is such a thing possible?”

“I don’t know,” answered her husband, uneasily. “Tell me: has the change in you been for evil or for good?”

She pondered a minute.

“Neither one nor the other, I think,” she answered. “The change has made me more vivid: it has sharpened me—put an edge on my feelings. Perhaps, really, it has made me more myself.”

“Why have you not spoken of this before?”

She laughed, nervously.

“Because it was uncanny, and I was uncertain. I’m not certain even now. One gets fanciful in my condition. Mamma has warned me to expect strange thoughts.”

Jacques clenched and unclenched his fists.

“It’s only fancy—of course it’s only fancy.”

“Yet there is a change in Dmitri!” urged Madelein.

“Yes. But if Dmitri changes, we don’t.”

He put an end to the conversation by going into the kitchen to draw beer.

But when, later that evening, Dmitri entered the house and looked into their room for a chat before going to bed, they were immediately startled by his appearance and manner.

“Is all well with you?” asked the young Greek, standing in the doorway.

“Yes, indeed,” answered Jacques. “And you?”

“I am so happy,” answered Dmitri, “that I could almost shout with it. I am getting to the heart of the Great Secret at last. I am beginning to prove from my own experience that what I have always preached is true.”

His large, magnetic eyes dropped their gaze first upon Jacques and then upon Madelein: upon her eyes his gaze floated, and then sank into them. He was not looking at her eyes, nor yet beyond them: he was penetrating within them. The woman did not flinch, but greedily drank his gaze.

“What are you doing?” she asked, in a whisper.

“Do you not feel,” he asked, slowly, “that you are not now what you were a minute ago?”

“Dmitri! Dmitri!” exclaimed Jacques; “you must not do that.”

But the Greek did not move his gaze from the woman’s face.

“We are all one,” he said; “there is no real separation between any of us: it is merely these houses of flesh that keep us divided. When our bodies die, all our souls will merge into one Soul.”

Jacques rose timidly, and put his hand on Dmitri’s arm.

“You must not do that!” he said, gently.

And because Dmitri still gazed into Madelein’s eyes and she into his, Jacques placed himself between them and broke the spell.

“Sit down, Dmitri,” said Jacques.

Dmitri’s face had the look of a man whose soul is being disintegrated. He had lost his personality. His eyes were dull, his face was lifeless. His body, his movements, his attitude still suggested abundant strength: simply, his spirit had suffered eclipse.

“I want to give myself to my fellows,” he muttered, “but no one will take me. I am the rejected of all men. My soul is sent back to its home each time it tries to escape.”

He sat down heavily, and brooded.

There, a little later, they left him, for his mood of gladness had been transformed into one of gloom, and though next morning, as he dressed, Dmitri sang out of a deep heart filled to the brim with joy, Jacques looked significantly and sorrowfully at his wife. She, in turn, questioned him with her eyes. But neither spoke.

A week passed.

There came a day when Dmitri, feeling that almost any time now his soul might leave his body never to return, decided to stay indoors and give a final revision to the little book he had written.

His bedroom window looked upon a narrow street. Across the way was a wine-shop, and even at this early hour a few men were sitting drinking at the little tables placed on the pavement. For a few minutes Dmitri stood gazing lovingly and compassionately at the passers-by; then, abruptly, and with a sudden sigh, he turned away, and sat down at a small table upon which he had placed the MS. of his book.

He read steadily from the beginning. Half-way through he came upon this passage.

The soul clings to its body; the spirit yearns for its companion-flesh. Is it true that only death can separate them?

It is impossible for us to love others more than we love ourselves, if our souls cling to us in this despairing way. Loving is giving: loving is surrender of one’s self: one’s self is one’s soul.... But my soul refuses to be surrendered. It will not leave me. Even when, because of my love for others, I try to banish it from my body, it will not go, or, if it does go, it soon returns. Is it refused, I wonder, by those to whom I give it?

Often I feel people wanting me; often I feel them asking for me. The magnetic ones draw me.

He sat and pondered. He recalled how, throughout the whole of his life, he had with joy spent himself upon others. A passion for giving had always been his. As a boy, he frequently had felt an aching desire to give himself to the sea—to swim out into the depths and, spreading out his arms, swoon away into nothingness, making himself a part of that water. Sometimes, even, he had wanted to give himself to fire, to walk naked into a white, inviting furnace. And, always, when on the edge of a cliff, he felt the great pull of space—a quick eagerness to disappear, to dissipate himself into nothingness.... To give himself—no matter to what, if only it were greater than he—was the passion that haunted him continually. Not to cease his existence; not to cast the universe from him; not to repudiate the life that had been given him. But to live more fiercely in flame, more largely and grandly as a part of a great giant ocean, more freely as an atom in illimitable space.

Best of all, to give himself to humanity: not to live in one body, but in a million bodies....

As he sat, a thought came to him—a thought that thrust into and pierced him, as a sword thrusts and pierces, that shook him to the very foundations of his being.

“If one man cannot draw from me my soul, a great crowd of men may—nay, must,” he told himself; “I know that even one man or woman can take from me and absorb for a brief period something of my spirit; surely, when a thousand men and women are pulling at me like a thousand magnets, my spirit will go entirely out of me and live in them for ever.”

The argument seemed so logical and so obvious, that he wondered at himself for not thinking of it before.

He abandoned the reading of his MS., and began to pace the room. His excitement almost frenzied him, and his thoughts ran wildly.

“I must dress for the occasion. A purple robe. And a message. I shall give it out that I have a message. At the north of the Citadel it shall be, and as I talk to them I shall face the east.”

He visualized the waiting crowd so vividly that his body acted as though the occasion had already arrived. He stopped walking and threw out his arms. His eyes became dilated. His lips moved. And then from his moving lips a torrent of speaking poured. He held his hearers. Even the little children in his brain were awed: he saw them huddling against their mothers.... With a shudder he came to himself.

There were many newspaper offices to visit. One of them, in return for a column advertisement, agreed to publish an “interview” with him. He advertised his meeting outside the Citadel in every newspaper, however obscure, for he felt he had no further use for his savings. “When my soul leaves me altogether,” he whispered, to himself, “my body will die.” He bought a scarlet robe in the Bazaar.

Jacques and Madelein watched him anxiously during the following days. Several times he spoke to them of his “ending,” and told them it was near at hand. He put his small affairs carefully in order, and handed what remained of his savings to Jacques.

“I will keep it for you,” said Jacques.

“No: it is yours. In a day or two I shall have no further use for money. Only the husk of me will remain.”

Jacques looked at him very sternly.

“Have I been a good friend to you, Dmitri?” he asked.

“Why, yes. Always. You and Madelein have always been my best friends.”

“Well, then, tell me what you are going to do. Why do you hand me your money? Why do you speak of only the husk of you remaining? What is the meaning of your advertisements in the newspapers?”

Dmitri smiled.

“Do not be anxious about me, Jacques,” he entreated; “no harm will come to me—only a great good. The most wonderful thing that can happen to anybody is about to happen to me.”

And Jacques’ further persuasion had no power to make Dmitri speak.

As Dmitri, clad in his purple robe, walked through the streets of Salonika on the evening appointed for his meeting outside the Citadel, he was followed by a large crowd of friendly people; indeed, he walked in the midst of the crowd, talking as he went. He bore himself regally, and his face shone with joy.

He had only a mere handful of disciples, but there were very many, both rich and poor, who liked him, and there were still more who were driven by curiosity to that high ground outside the city walls, which looks towards the jagged mountains above Hortiach.

Having arrived at the place he had selected for the delivery of his Message, his disciples went among the assembled people, directing them where to sit. Men and women, to the number of nearly a thousand, seated themselves in a semicircle on the higher slopes of the hill; on the hill’s summit stood Dmitri, looking down upon the faces lit by the sun in its setting.

Bareheaded, he stood and raised both arms for silence. The eager speech of his beholders died suddenly. Dmitri stood for a long minute without a word: then, just when the silence was becoming uncomfortable, he spoke in his golden voice.

“Many of you have come here from curiosity; a few have come because of their love. But I have the same message for everyone. All the great teachers of the world have loved their fellows: no man can teach or be taught without love. Because I desire to teach you something now, I ask any of you who hate me, or secretly jeer at me, or despise me, to kill that hate and that mockery and that contempt. Indeed, no man among you can hate me without also hating himself. For we are all one. We are not a thousand different souls, but one soul. There is only one soul in all the wide world, but each of your bodies contains a part of that soul: the great, brooding spirit of the Universe is split up into millions of parts. Of those millions of parts I possess but one. It is the dearest thing I have: it is the only thing I have. My body is nothing—just dust. It is the same with you all: your bodies are merely the prisons of your souls.

“Many of you will not understand me now, but I ask you, when I am gone from among you, to consider my words. You will all, however, understand this: no man gives unless he loves. If I want to give you something, it is because I love you. I do want to give you something. I want to give you myself: my soul. It is yours. Take it.”

He paused. The blank faces of the men and women hurt him. They thought him mad. He could see that many of the people were whispering to each other. Some were even smiling.

“Listen!” he shouted, passionately. “I want to give you myself so that I may prove to you that we are all one—that our souls are one soul. If my soul can depart from my body into your bodies, then you will know that we are, in truth, all one, and that to hate or hurt your neighbour is to hurt and hate yourselves, and that to injure yourselves by wickedness is to injure all the souls in all the world.

“I ask all who love me, and who have understood the words I have spoken, to make themselves ready to receive me.”

With excitement and passion, he attempted to confuse his mind and reduce it to chaos by inviting a multitude of varied thoughts. He stiffened his muscles and opened his eyes to their widest. He willed his soul to depart. Madness painted his face a ghastly white, his features became convulsed, the veins in his forehead stood out horribly....

And now the onlookers stared in fascination. A few murmured with fear and disgust.

For a minute and more Dmitri stood in silence, goading himself on to unrestrainable madness. His mind broke. He began to paw the air with his hands. And then, smiling stupidly, he sat down and played with his fingers.

His disciples rushed upon him.

“The miracle has come to pass!” exclaimed one.

“Poor Dmitri!” said a man who was not a disciple; “he gets worse and worse! His madness is incurable.”

Hundreds of men and woman crowded round him, but Jacques was one of the first to reach his side. With the help of others, he led Dmitri from the crowd and took him home.

A month passed.

Dmitri came downstairs to the room in which Jacques and Madelein were sitting. His face had no meaning. His eyes were empty.

He sat down at the table, and tears began to run down his cheeks.

Jacques stared at him for some little time in profound distress.

“We must get rid of him,” he said, aloud, to Madelein, “if only for your sake.”

“Yes,” answered his wife, sorrowfully; “I can bear him no longer. He must go.”

THE STRANGER

To
Adrian L. Burns

WHEN my friend Trevor Hempel disappeared from among all his friends, he left me the following letter:

I am off to Australia to-morrow, and I’m going without saying farewell to any one. It is a choice between my committing murder and leaving Europe for ever. Nature has played me false—has tricked me. Between my wife and me she has placed something monstrous: a “sport” so hideous that to live any longer as a husband would mean a swift corrosion of anything good that is left of me.

I felt, my dear old friend, that I must speak out my mind to some one. It is a selfish feeling. I want to rid myself of the obsession of this wickedness. I want you to share its knowledge with me. The thing is of such a kind that it ought not to have happened. Nature ought not to lie in wait for us and spring out like a baboon from behind a tree. We know Nature is cruel, but not until lately did I know she could be malignant, damnably malignant, looking years ahead, calculating craftily all the time....

It is nine years since I met the woman who afterwards became my wife. I was in Salonika on one of my quarterly business visits. At the house of Madame Leconte de Stran it was that I met Judith for the first time. Her husband was with her: a dark evil man, short, with a great head and depth of chest and long, deformed arms. She was as spiritual as he was gross: very quiet, but full of character, and with a mind both strong and active.

I remember going up to Madame de Stran.

“Who is that woman standing against the piano?” I asked.

“Mrs. Sterling. Don’t you know her?”

At the word “Mrs.” I felt that quick annoyance that sometimes comes to one when one hears for the first time that a woman one admires is married.

“No. Is her husband here?”

She indicated the shambling figure I have described to you.

“That!” I exclaimed. “That evil-looking beast her husband? Impossible!”

Madame de Stran gave me a quick, inquisitive look.

“Professor Sterling,” she said, “is perhaps the most distinguished man of science in Salonika. Why do you call him a beast?”

“Did I? I’m sorry. Tell me more about him.”

“Well, he describes himself as an experimental psychologist. He experiments in hypnotism, vivisects brains, and.... Last year he published in Rome a book that is talked about rather secretly.”

She stopped for a moment, and then laughed.

“All this sounds rather horrible,” she added, “but I suppose it isn’t really. At all events, he is greatly respected here by all men of learning.”

“If an opportunity arises,” I said, “will you introduce me to her? What I mean is, I don’t want the introduction to be conspicuous.”

She nodded and smiled.

“You’ll find her very charming,” she said, as I walked away.

And later on Madame presented me to Judith.

From the very first moment we talked without restraint. But then, as I learned afterwards, she was never restrained with anybody. She was utterly frank and natural; interesting, too; full of curiosity about life.

What appealed to me most in her, I think, was her careful choice of words when discussing any subject that really mattered. Her speech was free from all exaggeration; she never invented opinions on the spur of the moment as so many people do in casual conversation. This pleased and attracted me. But there was something in her that repelled—that kept me at a distance. All the time we talked, I felt that the best part of her—the most exquisite part—was on the other side of the room with her husband. She was not really with me: she was with him. I resented this. I had no right to resent it; but I did. For, already, I was in love with her.

Lovers move craftily. So I sought out her husband and was presented to him. He looked me over carefully.

“You have been talking to my wife,” he observed.

“Yes,” said I. “We have been talking to each other.”

His rather large mouth smiled insincerely.

I felt he had guessed my secret. Certainly, his personality emanated a faint hostility. He turned to Luigi Papash, ... the man who has since become famous as a poet, and began to talk to him. I was dismissed....

You would be bored if I were to describe to you my feverish lover’s restlessness during the next three weeks. I did many foolish things—neglected my business, wandered about alone, and sought every opportunity to be within sight and sound of Judith. I had only to shut my eyes to see her eyes, calm and grey, her pale oval face, her dark hair. She seemed pitiful. My jealousy burned me. It was impossible for me to see her and her husband together without a horrid excitement.... But you know these things: all men feel the same about them.

I learned very little more about her. The previous year, I was told, she had had a child, a baby-boy, who had died when eight months old. She had been married three years. Her husband kept his work hidden from her. He never discussed it, never referred to it. But of their mutual idolatry there was no shadow of doubt. No two people were more essential each to the other; yet (or do I mean because?) they were entirely different.

At the end of three weeks I went back to Athens.

Madame de Stran knew my secret; oh, I suppose every one knew it. Every one except Judith who, absorbed in her husband, never exercised her intuitions with regard to myself. Madame wrote to me occasionally; she was very kind. Just news of Salonika people. And somewhere in each letter would be a sentence: “The Sterlings are still here”; or, “Professor Sterling has just published a pamphlet on ‘The Nature and Origin of Cancer': I am sending you a copy”; or, “When I told Mrs. Sterling I was writing to you, she wished me to send you her remembrances.”

Then, one morning, opening a letter of Madame de Stran’s before I touched any of my other correspondence, I read: “Professor Sterling is seriously ill. They say he has brain fever.”

He would die: I knew it. I prayed that he should. I willed it. I thought of nothing else all day. That detestable, dark man must die. Judith must be released....

“Released”? What arrogant vanity distorts the vision of all lovers! Released? Why, she was happy. Her husband’s brain was not for her a prison: it was the wide world. His enfolding arms were freedom....

That same evening I took the steamer from Le Pirée to Salonika....

I want to describe that night to you, because it was the happiest in my life. You must remember that for a long time I had been suffering under a strain so cruel that my nerves and brain were bruised and quivering. The sea—the stars—space! They brought me solace.

I remember leaning over the rail and looking down at the sea; it was saturated with stars and moonlight. It seemed to me that I became part of what I looked at. Does that convey anything to you? I was released from myself. I had got rid of myself. I had become renewed.... It is impossible, my dear friend, for me to describe what change took place in me for that one night. It was a sudden cessation of pain, a freeing of the soul, an accession of power. Illusion, no doubt—I mean the consciousness of power. If I had been Zeus himself——!

At all events, no sleep came to me that night: I wanted neither sleep nor rest. I was not going to Judith, for Judith already was with me. She was with me more closely that night than she ever was, though I married her. My mind was full of poets’ phrases: “His silver skin laced with his golden blood”: lines from “Annabel Lee”: the “magic casements” of Keats: some stupendous things from Whitman. These did not tease or worry me: they were like the potent delicate fumes of a drug. All life was poetry: there was no possible interpretation of life except the romantic interpretation. Happiness lay not in gathering and garnering beauty, but in surrendering oneself to beauty. And, in a burst, Wagner’s “Tristan” rushed flood-like upon me; I was drowned in its pleasure-pain——

Well, he died. He was dead when I arrived at Salonika. The news gave me no pleasure, for what had happened I had known would happen.

Madame de Stran received me.

“You look ill,” she said; “or perhaps you are tired?”

I made her sit down and tell me all she knew about Judith.

“I wish to God she had never borne him a child!” I said, when she told me she had seen a photograph of the baby taken just before the illness from which it died.

“He was very like his father: dark, misshapen, vulpine,” said Madame.

“Don’t speak of him. The father and the child are dead: only she remains. Has she any close friends in Salonika?”

“No—not one that is very close, though many people like her. She did not make intimacies. You see, her husband absorbed her.”

“And now what will happen?”

Madame told me that she had already written to Judith offering her help: probably a reply to her letter would come in the morning. She promised to summon me if I could be of the slightest use, and with this small comfort I returned to my hotel to brood. Inaction lay so heavily upon me that it was scarcely to be endured. I wanted to help—to be something to her.

That night I lay awake in dark dejection. In those days I was not used to suffering, to anxiety. At length I slept....

Day after day I stayed on, hoping to be summoned, Madame de Stran giving me all the comfort she could. He was buried. Judith shut herself up in her house! At night I would walk from my hotel towards Kalamaria and, in the complete darkness, wander in the garden surrounding her home. I remember that I used to touch the flowers with my fingers. I used to put my foot on the pathway and say to myself: “Her foot has been there!” The garden was magical with remembrances of her. Yet she was absent, and the ache in me grew and grew. My eyes used to become hot with unshed tears. Though it was torture to linger there, yet I could never draw myself away until very late, and one night, sitting down on a bank, I fell asleep. As I woke, the scent of dew-laden roses weakened me unmercifully; and I sobbed without tears....

I must tell you all this: it matters: it is the heart of the tragedy that has happened to me: that, and the remembrance of her brute-husband who so wickedly, so monstrously, still lives in my son....

One night, while in her garden, I saw her. I was standing in a little grove of pepper-trees. She came slowly towards me. I stepped back to conceal myself. Her little feet on the grass made no sound. What were her thoughts? Oh, of him—him whom she had loved and was still loving. It was he who for her haunted this garden, not I. If my body had been multiplied a hundred-fold and all my hundred bodies were hiding there in the trees, she would have felt nothing. She passed and repassed, and then disappeared into the gloom of the house.

At length, under the implacable pressure of my own self-torture, I wrote to her. I told her I knew of her grief, that.... In short, I asked to be allowed to come and see her.

Months later, she told me that my letter had terrified her. Some phrases in it had called up many dead memories and, pondering, she had seen in a flash that I loved her. Her spirit was too sore even for sympathy, and offering her love was like offering her an unsheathed sword. My letter brought no answer, and two days later Madame de Stran told me mournfully that Judith had left Salonika for Constantinople....

Four months passed; to me, working in Athens, they were four years. I did not deceive myself by telling myself I would try to forget her: no man ever tries to forget the woman he loves. Madame de Stran wrote occasionally, promising, and repeating her promise in each letter, that she would tell me as soon as she received news of Judith’s return. My business prospered: you know, I have always been successful. I threw myself into my work, and exhausted my false, feverish energy by violent exercise. I rode my horse an hour each day: I swam: I walked: and, occasionally, I sought the baleful comfort of drink.

September came and went. Then in October I was visited by a mood of such unremitting desperateness that I suddenly stopped my work and my violent exercise. I felt incapable of any action, for I had exhausted all my energy. I had used up my capacity for suffering; I could feel neither pain nor pleasure. For days I sat stupidly in my office, staring at nothing. I closed my door to all visitors; I transacted no business; I answered no letters.

Then, one morning, as I was moodily pacing up and down my private room, a clerk entered with a telegram. Idly I tore open the envelope and read its contents. It was from Madame—just one word, “Come.” But that word meant everything: it changed the whole world for me....

Two days later I was in Salonika. I did not wait even to call on Madame de Stran, but went straight to Judith’s house.

It was early afternoon. I was admitted. The room into which I was shown was empty. Already greatly agitated, I felt my excitement increasing almost beyond bounds whilst I waited. What should I say when she entered? Would she still be thrall to her dead husband? Would his personality still envelop hers and obscure it?

She entered so silently that, though my eyes were fixed on the door, I scarcely realized she was there. A swift searching of her face told me she was well.

She was courteous, she was kind; but she was timid. She spoke of her friends in Constantinople.

“I have been very busy with my work,” she said, smiling.

As she looked at me it seemed to me that she was doing everything possible to be gentle with me; it was as though she knew she had the power to hurt me, and was afraid that some chance word might wound.

“Work?” I asked.

“Yes. My husband left his last book half finished—a great mass of notes, and a rough synopsis of each chapter. I wrote the book as he wished it to be written. He helped me all the time.”

“He helped you!” I exclaimed, shocked.

“Yes. You do not believe in communication with the dead? He did not speak to me, it is true, but he guided me.”

I felt suddenly sick and cold.

“You must not believe it!” I exclaimed. “It is impossible! Such things do not happen! You may think it happened, but it didn’t!”

She smiled gently, as she said:

“Ah! But I know!”

“But, dear Mrs. Sterling ... why, such a thing has never come to pass in the whole history of the world. Why, then, should it happen to you?”

She shook her head.

“Do not let us discuss it,” she said. “Besides, the book is finished.”

“And does he still communicate with you—guide you?”

“No,” she answered sadly; “all that is finished—he has gone from me—gone, I am convinced, for ever.”

“I also have been working,” I said, “working hard.”

“You look tired. Have you been in Salonika long?”

Our talk drifted to commonplace things, and soon I rose to leave.

Next day I sought her again. She was in the garden, for, though it was now late October, the weather was very warm and sunny. She seemed disturbed, but not surprised, when she saw me. We wandered slowly under the trees; their leaves left the branches as we came and fell upon our way. I did not feel that she was unhappy. I asked if I might come to see her every afternoon.

“Why, yes,” she said, “if it pleases you.”

So every afternoon I spent an hour with her, and, when the cold weather came with the Varda winds, we sat indoors.

By Christmas she had promised to marry me....

Now, my dear friend, you must understand that even before our marriage I realized that she was not, nor ever could be, wholly mine. In some inexplicable way, she still belonged to him. Many women are like that: the best women are. Sterling’s name was never mentioned; after our engagement he was not referred to even remotely. Yet she was his. Then why, you ask, did she marry me? Out of pity; I am sure of it. Yet, in a way, she loved me and loves me still. No one could have been more tender, more generous, more self-sacrificing: it weakens and unmans me to think of these things....

I took her away with me to Athens. I was very happy. I had never believed such unalloyed bliss as mine was possible. It never faded. And Judith, in her fashion, was happy also.

Sometimes, it is true, Sterling passed ghost-like between us. There were occasions when ... but let me give you an instance.

One day, in the April after our marriage, we went to Eleusis by rail and wandered over the ruins of that once-wonderful place. Tired, we sat down to rest on a broken column. We were silent and alone. There came upon me one of those moods of gentle ecstasy in which the soul seems to nestle softly in one’s body, satisfied and glad to be there. Judith’s hand was in mine: I felt she was really with me, in body, in mind, in soul. My ecstasy increased. Lifting my eyes to her face, I saw that she also was a-thrill with bliss. Her eyes were softened with unshed tears. Her throat trembled visibly. Her breath came quickly.... But, Christ! not for me! Not for this moment, nor this place! But for him! For some day of long ago—for some never-forgotten hour of love with him....

Gently, very gently, though I suffered as never before, I withdrew my hand from hers. She trembled violently, turned her face to mine and, with a little cry, flung her arms about me.

“Oh, little one!” she cried; “forgive me! Forgive me!”

And the tears that had gathered for him were shed for me....

And now I have to tell you of the slow horror that began to creep upon me—upon us both. For a long time, I thrust it away with my hands, I closed my eyes to it, my mind refused to admit it. Only to-day, indeed, for the first time, do I really accept and believe it, though for years it has hung about my neck most loathsomely.

A year after our marriage Judith bore me a male child—a healthy baby who came into the world without unnecessary fuss and who continued to thrive from the moment of his birth. Though, of course, I was very fond of the little chap, I did not see much of him. Indeed, as you know, I am not the kind of parent who gloats over his offspring.

We employed a nurse, and both baby and nurse lived in the rooms set apart for them. When I returned home from my work each evening, our baby was generally asleep, and I rarely saw him on these occasions. If I did go to his cot, Judith always accompanied me; indeed, I used to tease her on account of her appearing never to wish me to be alone with our child.

Two months after his birth I went alone to London on business, expecting to be away a month or so. But I was detained in England much longer than I had expected, and when at length I returned to Athens I had been away four months....

When, my dear fellow, I began this letter, I meant to tell you all my tragedy in detail, but now, when I reach the very heart of it, I feel I must hurry its telling.

I saw my son—a little black creature—and it seemed to me he looked at me with eyes of hate. He was not mine: I could not feel that he was mine. His nurse, looking from him to me, said kindly:

“He is very like you, sir—he has your forehead.”

“Yes,” breathed Judith, who stood by my side; “we have often said that, haven’t we, nurse?”

I turned to look at her, but she fluttered away to the other end of the room, and I could not see her face. So, with an effort, I bent low over the cot in which my son lay and scrutinized each feature of his face in turn. But I could see none of my blood in him. Nothing of mine was his.... The dead past had come to life. Sterling still survived....

I am sure that my manner of living at this time puzzled and distressed my friends—you, in particular. If you will carry your mind back to two years ago, you will recollect how I plunged myself into wild dissipation for a time, and how in a fit of most reticent yet hot anger I left wife and home for Persia, then India, then China. All the time I was away—until, indeed, yesterday when I returned home after my long absence—I was trying to forget. To forget my son, I mean. For a time I hated Judith. It was through her that Nature had dealt me this blow. If she had not so dearly loved Sterling, I thought, this thing could not have happened to me. But as the months went by I softened to my wife; my hatred of her broadened into a hatred of life itself.

In the letters she wrote me she never made even passing mention of our son.

Then, yesterday, I returned. Judith was expecting me. Her manner, generally so calm, was disturbed, agitated. She has grown very thin, very old.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Upstairs—in the nursery. But do not go to see him now,” she urged. “Stay with me a little while.”

And she put her arms about my neck and kissed me fondly. My flesh responded to hers. But whilst we stood locked in each other’s arms, my memory, hating me, threw up before my eyes a vivid picture of the dark little creature I left behind two years ago. I shuddered. My braced arms slackened. I turned away.

“I must see him now,” I said; “is he well?”

“Yes,” she answered—regretfully, I thought.

We went to the nursery. He was sitting on the floor, playing with his toys. She stood between him and me, as though shielding him. It was Sterling—Sterling as he must have looked at the age of two and a half—an eager, intelligent face, long, deformed arms, a great breadth of chest, a vulpine look in his eyes....

As his eyes caught mine, his whole body stiffened. He put up a little hand against his face and made a sound of rage.

I do not know what movement I made, but Judith, suddenly stooping, caught her child up from the floor and folded him in her arms.

“You must not touch him!” she said, pale and distraught.

And she placed a hungry kiss upon his lips....

And so, my dear friend, farewell.

A LITTLE CORRESPONDENCE

To
Bertram Pace

MARRIAGE seemed to Katya a much jollier game than she had anticipated. She liked her house, her garden, her servants; as for Guy, he was too utterly adorable for words. Most of all, she liked patronizing those of her friends and acquaintances who were less fortunate than herself: she enjoyed giving them little dinners during which she would speak a few barbed, malicious words that made her listeners wince.

One afternoon, sitting among her roses in the silent garden, she began to think of Captain Pierre Lacroix, her Brussels lover, in whose arms she had nestled so often the previous year. He had really been quite perfect, and since she had returned home to Greece she had frequently, when lying awake at night, reproached herself for not having yielded to his wild solicitations. Never in the years that remained to her was she likely to meet so fine an animal, so fierce a lover, so fascinating a personality.

Her husband, Guy Fallon, was adorable, but he was not Pierre Lacroix. God had made only one Pierre. And he was thousands of miles away in Brussels. Still, she could write to him; if she could not throw herself into love’s furnace, she could at least play with love’s fire....

So she left her roses and went into her cool house with its tiled floors, it great entrance-hall where a white fountain so cleverly made a mist of water, its great walls on to which hung, like butterflies, so many Segantinis, and its wide passages that somehow made her feel like a princess of Ancient Rome.

Her boudoir, however, was rather small. Its furniture was of inlaid rosewood. There were many full-length mirrors sunk deeply into frames of unusual shape, and the stove was made of porcelain, painted green. Sitting down near the open window, she began to write.

“My dear Pierre,—Do not be grieved. I always promised you I would never marry any one but you, but I have been unable to keep my word. What fool was it who years ago said the flesh is weak? My flesh is not like that. It is too strong. It has overwhelmed me. I am married. Yes: it is the end. One is finished when marriage comes. There is nothing left but to sit down and wait until the children arrive.

“When we meet, we must not kiss each other as we used to. You may kiss me like a brother; I, in return will, like a sister, kiss you. That will be all, but even that will be nice. Do you think you will ever be able to come to Salonika to be my brother? No?

“It is strange that, though I have been married so short a time, I should still be thinking of the boulevards, the Avenue Louise and the Bois de la Cambre—that I should still be thinking of you, and you, and still you. This is naughty of me, I know, but sometimes I wish that in those days I had not been quite so ... what is the word?... timid?—proud?—cruel?

“Never mind: do not be angry that I was married six weeks ago. You will soon recover from your disappointment, your love-hunger.

“As for me, I am happy. My husband is rich: he adores me. I have many friends. I play the piano better than any one in the whole city of Salonika. And, dear Pierre, I have you to dream of in my idle hours.... Take my advice and marry a nice simple girl and settle down; but she must not be so clever as I am, nor so beautiful, nor so mysterious. And you must not love her as much as you once loved (and perhaps now love?) me.

“Do not forget: when we meet we must kiss as sister and brother.

“From your Katya.”

She read her letter over and liked it.

“If he can leave, he will surely come!” she told herself.

And, rising from her chair, she walked to a large oval mirror and gazed at herself smilingly. Then a thought struck her: she was tired: she would go to bed and rest.

Her bedroom was very long and rather narrow; at each end was a large window. In this room also were many full-length mirrors. Several of them were on movable stands furnished with castors. Three of these she so arranged that they formed a kind of triangle, the mirrors facing inwards. Stripping herself nude, she stepped within the triangle, and placed herself in such a position that she could see the reflection of every part of her body. For a little while she gazed at herself critically, anxiously, a small frown crinkling her forehead; but the frown gradually disappeared, and in a minute or two criticism had changed to whole-hearted admiration.

“Why, I do believe I am more beautiful than ever,” she said as she slipped her warm body between the cool sheets.

Placing under the pillow the letter she had written to Pierre Lacroix, she was soon slumbering.

* * * * *

A fortnight later there came for her a letter with the Brussels postmark. She pushed it under her plate, for she and her husband were at breakfast, but as soon as the meal was over she sought her rose-garden, tore open the envelope and read what follows.

“Madame,—What is it you mean by writing to my husband of kisses? It is shameful, incredible! For three days he was strange to me. I knew not why. But now I do know, for this morning I found your letter in a secret pocket of his coat. I do not know you; I do not want to know you. If you write to him again, your letter will be returned to your husband. I have been married to Pierre a year: already I have a baby and another is on the way. Kisses, indeed!

“Jeanne Lacroix.”

Katya was both angry and amused.

It amused her to know that her letter had lain close to Pierre’s body for three days, but she was very angry that he had married. Why, he must have sought a bride within a few weeks of her leaving Brussels for Salonika. It was evident he had married a fool, a breeder of children, a jealous woman who could not write a clever letter. It was good that he should have married a fool. But it was an evil thing that he should so soon have forgotten her for whom he had vowed he would remain single for ever....

Her thoughts wandered from her to her husband, and she felt a sudden passionate desire. Having torn Mrs. Lacroix’s letter into tiny pieces, she made a hole in the flower-bed with a broken stick, thrust in the bits of paper, and covered up the hole with the heel of her shoe.

Then she called to her husband who, at her summons, came from the house to meet her.

“Hello!” he said.

She put an arm round his neck and drew his face down to hers.

He smiled and began to tease her.

“Is our honeymoon going to last for ever?” he asked, holding his head back so that his lips did not quite touch hers.

“Very well, then,” she said; “I don’t want to kiss you.”

He looked up the garden to the field where the thick weeds grew profusely many feet high.

“Shall we hide ourselves in the grass?” he asked.

She pretended to draw away from him. So he put his arm about her waist and compelled her to walk by his side. They passed through the flowers and reached the edge of the field. When they stepped into the luxuriant weeds, the grasses almost touched their shoulders. At the field’s centre they stopped.

“I love you much better than Pierre,” she whispered.

“Who is Pierre?” he asked indifferently, taking his lips from her neck in order to speak.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “I have forgotten.”

THE DEAF-MUTE OF KILINDIR

To
Christina Walshe

AT Kilindir two men loved the same woman. Marania was tall and dark and gentle; he had the devotion of a dog; his instinct for self-sacrifice was as great as that of a good woman for the husband she loves. Sobraji, on the other hand, was small and fair and cunning; as a boy he tortured animals, and as a man he tortured his mother and sisters.

The name of the woman was Pabasca. She was very dainty and pretty, and her cheeks were like red poppies seen in the half-light. But she was also very evil.

It was Sobraji whom Pabasca loved, but Sobraji was poor; Marania, on the other hand, owned land and cattle.

“If I am careful,” said Pabasca to herself one evening, as she sat outside her mother’s cottage, “if I am careful, I can have both Sobraji’s love and Marania’s money. It has been done before—I have seen it.”

This thought had lain broodingly in her mind for weeks, but she had spoken of it to no one—not even to Sobraji. And yet if she were to carry her plan into effect, Sobraji was the one man in all the world who must be told.

It was time something was done, for the ardent love of the two men was wearing her down. Only this morning she had received another of Marania’s strange letters. She could remember some of its phrases.

“Last night I lay awake listening to a nightingale; your voice was in that bird’s throat.... The rushes bending in the wind this afternoon were like your supple body.... I sometimes think your soul is in my hands.”

It was impossible not to be pleased by these phrases that her mean little soul could only half understand, but her pleasure was tinged with contempt.

Sobraji did not make love in that way. He wrote no letters. When he met her at night he whispered amorous indecencies in her ear which made her laugh and laugh.

Nearly every sentence began with: “How I would like to ...!” and there was no end to the ingenious ways of love his cunning mind devised.

But she had kept her body untouched by both men. Though love was heady and intoxicating, she was too calculating, too distrustful, to give her body: when the time came, her body should be sold. But Sobraji had begun to demand, and Marania to pray for, an answer to the question each had put so many times. It was tiresome, she thought, to be driven to speech when she was not ready for speech. If Sobraji came to-night, she would have to tell him her plan.

He did come. It was dark. He crept among the bushes, and she heard him. Then, stealthily, he emerged from the plantation and touched her on the shoulder. His hand slid down her arm to her hip and lingered there. She bent over to him, and he seized her roughly, brutally, as a faun might seize a virgin, and pulled her body to his.

“Oh!” he half whispered, half groaned, “how I would like to....”

Almost she swooned with ecstasy.

“Come into the plantation!” he urged.

She obeyed, and when they were among the trees, he seized her so savagely that she turned upon him with fear and anger.

“What are you doing?” she asked, placing her hands on his shoulders and pushing him violently away.

“Well, you won’t marry me!” he protested. “What is a man to do if the girl he loves won’t marry him? It isn’t as though you don’t love me—you do: you know you do.”

“If I married you, I should starve,” she said; “or, at all events, I should have to work so hard that I should have no joy in you. Listen while I tell you something.”

And then in a very low voice she revealed her plan to him.

“I will be Marania’s wife, but you shall be my lover. We will meet in secret. And some of the money he gives me I will hand over to you.”

She spoke for a long time, her voice excited but very low, urging upon him the advantages of this scheme. She explained how he had everything to gain and nothing to lose, whilst she stood to lose everything.

“But if he found out!” interrupted Sobraji, “he would kill me! Surely he would kill me!”

Pabasca stirred angrily in his arms.

“You must risk that!” she said disgustedly, though she knew very well that Marania was too gentle, too long-suffering, and too profound a believer in Fate, to wish to kill any one.

“When will you marry him?” he asked.

“Soon. Now. In a fortnight.”

“Very well,” said he; “then let me love you now.”

But she drew away from him, pushing him back with her white arms.

“Your beautiful teeth—how white they are!” he said; “and I can almost see your white breasts through your....”

“Hush!” she warned, as she heard footsteps on the pathway leading to the cottage. “It is Marania. I will go to him and tell him I love him and will marry him.”

Sobraji lingered a minute after she had gone, his body a-tremble with desire. Then, in the dark, he parted the bushes with his hands and went his own way.

Marania met Pabasca with a smile that could be seen even in the darkness. He took her hand in his for a moment and patted it gently.

“Though I cannot see you,” he said, “I know you are as beautiful as the night itself.”

He led her down the pathway on to the ill-made road. Embarrassed, she remained silent.

“Listen!” he said; “that’s the nightingale I heard last night—I’m sure it is—the one I wrote to you about.... Did you like my letter?”

“Oh, yes: of course I did. But what did you mean when you said my voice was in its throat?”

“Well, as I lay in bed, it was so easy to imagine that it was you singing.”

“But I never sing.”

“No? But if you did, you would sing like that. Listen!”

They stopped walking, and he placed his hand upon her shoulder.

“When I think of you, that’s how my heart feels,” he said. “All people must be happy when they think of you.”

“Marania, you think too well of me,” she said craftily.

“My heart is empty because you do not love me, and my house is as empty as my heart. Think of it!—that big house with no one in it save myself and my deaf and dumb servant, Cesiphos. It is not a home: it is only a house. No house can be a home without children.”

“Yes, children,” she said softly, deceiving him. “And a woman is not really a woman until she has borne a child.”

She had read that in a book and had wondered at it; she was very glad that she had remembered it now.

“Won’t you marry me, Pabasca?” he asked hopelessly, for he had asked this question many times, and had always been blankly refused.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

His heart leapt and he drew nearer to her, placing his arm about her waist. They were still standing, and the nightingale was pouring out his heart. He held her firmly and, stretching out his arm to its utmost limit, his hand closed gently on her breast.

“You are changing?” he asked; “you are growing to like me better—to love me?”

Her body yielded to his embrace and she turned to face him.

“Kiss me, Marania,” she said, panting a little, and pouting her lips.

But he kissed her brow instead of her mouth. A wave of irritation passed over her.

“You do not love me!” she said.

“Not love you, little dear?”

He held her away from him for a few moments, looking inquiringly into her face; but she closed her eyes and set her mouth. “How stupid he is!” she thought. He could just see the dusky red of her cheeks. The nightingale’s song ceased suddenly.

“Not love you?” he repeated. “Why, you are everything to me—the moon and the stars, my food and drink, my dreams and my work. You are a part of everything that is good.”

He again drew her to his breast. Her thoughts fastened on Sobraji, her imagination transforming Marania’s body into that of the man she loved. She threw her arms about him wildly.

“Kiss me!” she murmured; “kiss me on the mouth!”

Incredulous, he hesitated a moment; then, with a smothered cry, he placed his lips on hers, and he stood in that deep silence lost in the sweet bitterness of unaccomplished love.

Cesiphos, the deaf and dumb servant of Marania, had no interest in life save to please his master. His happiness was greatest when Marania, with a smile and a sign, thanked him for some work he had done. On these occasions, Cesiphos would return to his quarters with a glad heart and singing eyes. His master was pleased with him: that was all that mattered.

But when Marania brought home his wife, Pabasca, Cesiphos felt cold and angry. No longer would he be first in his master’s eyes. The work in which he took so much delight would be done not for Marania alone, but for Marania’s wife also; moreover, Pabasca herself would superintend the working of the household, and he, Cesiphos, would be relegated to the position simply of a paid servant.

But matters did not turn out quite as Cesiphos had anticipated. It is true that he had to work for Pabasca as well as for his master, but he was mistaken in thinking she would superintend the household. Pabasca did nothing at all. She conducted herself like a Salonika lady. All day long she was idle and peevish, and whilst Marania was sweating in the fields she was either lying in bed or wandering aimlessly about the house.

One day when Cesiphos was working with the other men in the orchard, he looked down from the ladder on which he was standing and saw Pabasca staring at him in a most curious manner. He flushed hotly and went on with his work, and though he could feel that his master’s wife was still gazing upon him, he did not look down again. His figure stretched to its full extent was that of a giant, and his long arms, busy among the branches, were brown and muscular.

Like many people of bright intellect who are deprived of one or more senses, Cesiphos appeared to possess a sixth sense, and there was little that transpired in Marania’s household of which he was not conscious. He soon discovered that Pabasca had no love for her husband; so he watched her—always watched, suspicious, contemptuous, angry.

There came a day when Marania announced that he was going to Salonika for four days on business. When he signalled this news to Cesiphos and told him that he was leaving his wife in his servant’s charge, Cesiphos, proud and grave, inclined his head, and then turned his gaze swiftly upon Pabasca who, in return, gave him the curious look she had bestowed upon him in the orchard. It was a look of invitation, of lust. Cesiphos’ stern face did not betray that he had understood, or even noticed, the look she had given him.

At midday Marania departed, and immediately he had gone Pabasca’s spirits rose. She took from a cupboard her three dresses and, leaving her bedroom door open, tried on each in turn. Then she went into the room which Cesiphos used as a kitchen and prepared herself a meal. Towards dusk she left the house, but returned soon and went to bed.

Cesiphos sat up smoking his pipe. After a time, he rose, climbed rather noisily upstairs, went to his room and closed the door. For a little while he stood motionless as though listening; then, having taken off his boots, he opened his bedroom door with elaborate carefulness, stepped on to the little landing, closed the door silently, and crept soundlessly downstairs.

Some instinct told him that Pabasca would not sleep alone that night, and he knew very well that her visitor would be Sobraji, for many times before her marriage, Cesiphos had seen her and Sobraji together at night in lonely places. In all probability, Pabasca had given him the key of the front entrance; indeed, when Cesiphos examined the door and found it unbolted, he was sure of this. So he took up his place in the entrance and waited.

After Cesiphos had waited a long time, the door opened slowly and Sobraji entered. In the darkness he did not see Marania’s servant crouching there, and without hurry he closed the door behind him and locked it.

Then suddenly Cesiphos sprang upon him, his large hands encircling Sobraji’s throat; squeezing his victim hard, he banged his head against the wall, until the little man hung heavy and limp in Cesiphos’ hands. Then the servant unlocked the door and opened it; gathering Sobraji in his arms, he threw him out into the night and locked the door upon him.

During his struggle with Sobraji, Cesiphos had been too excited to pay any attention to Pabasca, who, almost as soon as the struggle had begun, had come downstairs with a lamp. She had stood quietly by watching eagerly. It was too late for her to interrupt; indeed, after her first shock of surprise and dismay, she had no wish to do so. She was thrilled by Cesiphos’ strength, by his skill, by his machine-like calmness.

Cesiphos, having locked the door, turned round and saw Pabasca. The light of the lamp fell full on her face, and she smiled at him. In return, he frowned, looked away from her, and quickly made his way upstairs. He entered his room and closed his door. Almost immediately Pabasca followed him, and placed the lamp upon the floor.

Approaching Cesiphos, she took his hand, gazed lingeringly into his eyes for a moment. He shook himself free from her, and his eyes blazed. Again she approached him, her arms outstretched; but his anger became so fierce and his face worked so terribly, that she shrank from him, and, leaving the lamp on the floor, hurriedly went to her own room.

During the days that passed before Marania’s return, Cesiphos went about his work with a grave face. Whenever he was in Pabasca’s presence, he averted his eyes. Each night when he went to rest, she could hear him dragging his bed across the floor and fixing it against the door.

His simple nature was badly bruised by what had happened. He had always known that life was not all good, but evil had never come so close to him as now. All through the day and during a portion of each night he tortured himself by asking how much, or how little, he must tell his master when he returned. Clearly it was his duty to disclose to Marania the conduct of Sobraji, but it seemed to him unwise to tell the story in such a way that Pabasca would be implicated. Besides, he had no proof that Pabasca had expected Sobraji to visit her, though in his heart he knew that an assignation had been made and nearly kept.

Upon one thing he was resolved: he would say nothing about Pabasca’s overtures to himself, for that might lead to unimaginable misery for all of them. Nevertheless, it tortured him to keep any of these things secret, but he knew not a soul to whom he could unburden his mind.

On the evening of the fourth day Cesiphos slipped unseen from the house and went to the station to meet his master. It was a cool evening with a feeling of largeness in the air, but Cesiphos was weighed down with anxiety and nervousness. How much should he tell? In what manner should he tell it? Should he break straight into the subject, or should he introduce it in a roundabout fashion?

These questions which he had been asking himself for four days were still unanswered when he saw Marania, carrying two very large parcels, step from the train. Cesiphos hurried up to him, and Marania placed both parcels on the ground whilst he shook hands with his servant. He was in good spirits and glad to be home again. Cesiphos, having picked up one of the parcels, led the way from the station, his chin upon his breast, his heart heavy within him.

They had covered but a short distance when Cesiphos plucked his master’s sleeve and indicated that he wished to speak with him. With a sigh of impatience, Marania put his package on the ground and sat upon it. Cesiphos followed his example, and began to talk on his fingers by the light of the moon.

“Master, I have something I would tell you.”

Marania bowed his head.

“Very late in the night following the day you left, Sobraji entered your house. He had a key, the door was unbolted.”

He stopped, hoping his master would say something; but Marania only stared at him wonderingly and again bowed his head.

“I was waiting for him....”

Marania interrupted his servant by placing a hand upon his arm.

“Why were you waiting for him?”

Cesiphos fumbled with his fingers, but spelled out not a single word. Marania struck him lightly on the arm and again asked:

“Why?”

“Because ... because, somehow, I thought he was coming. The door was unbolted.”

His master shook him angrily.

“Why were you waiting for him?” he asked a third time. “How did you know he was coming?”

Cesiphos began to tremble. He did not know why he had believed Sobraji would come that night. Something in his mind had whispered it to him—instinct, suspicion, hatred. But he could not explain this to Marania. So he sat fumbling with his fingers. At length his master signed to him:

“Go on with your story.”

“I was waiting for him behind the door. He entered and closed it after him. I sprang upon him and nearly choked him. I banged his head against the wall. Then I opened the door and threw him outside.”

“Does your mistress know of this?”

“Yes. She came down with a lamp in her hand and watched us.”

His hands stopped working. Very deliberately Marania rose, lifted his parcel and proceeded on his way home, Cesiphos followed him in deep dejection. The servant knew that his master had not accepted his story: yet it was true—every word of it.

They soon reached Marania’s farm. Pabasca was waiting outside to receive her husband. She ran to him with a cry of delight and threw her arms about his neck. He embraced her, at first tenderly, then with passion.

In the meantime, Cesiphos had carried his package into the house and had begun to prepare food for his master. It was with a great effort that he moved his body about, so sick he felt, so dismayed, so full of apprehension. Through the open door he saw his master and mistress go to their living-room. He could feel them talking together. For a long time they talked until, suddenly, with blazing eyes, Marania entered, rushed up to his servant and dealt him a heavy blow between the eyes. Cesiphos staggered and fell. He rose, whimpering.

Marania then went to the entrance-door and opened it wide. Pointing with one hand to the door, he seized his servant with the other and violently dragged him into the passage. Still whimpering Cesiphos stumbled into the night. The master whom he had loved and served now hated him.

Marania locked and bolted the door, and returned to his wife.

But though she was weeping he would not comfort her, and that night and for ever afterwards he slept in the room that Cesiphos had occupied.

LA BELLE
DAME SANS MERCI

To
G. A. E. Marshall

IT has always seemed to me a most extraordinary thing that Victor Lovelace should have been able to speak five languages. He was English, and Englishmen are notoriously stupid in this respect. But Lovelace spoke his languages perfectly, and as he was extremely obliging and full of information he was far and away the most popular waiter at the Jupiter Hotel in Athens.

I have never believed Lovelace was his real name; but that concerns neither you nor me. Lovelace has a romantic sound, and this young man of twenty-three looked romantic. Tall he was and slim: he carried himself well: unlike all the other waiters in the whole world, he looked you in the eyes when he spoke to you, and the eyes that looked into yours were large, brilliant, and unquestionably full of passion.

In April 1914, I stayed at the Jupiter Hotel, and at dinner on the day of my arrival I sat down at a table occupied solely by an Englishwoman who appeared to be travelling alone. Lovelace waited on us. Before we were half-way through our dinner I was convinced that the Englishwoman—her name was Dorothy Langdon—was in love with him. Whenever he brought her food, she looked quickly up into his eyes, and once I observed her touch his hand lingeringly as she assisted him in supporting the dish from which she was helping herself to vegetables.

I confess I was interested: people always do interest me. And I said to myself: “Is this love? Or is it passion—a very frenzy of the senses?”

Lovelace, for his part, showed neither desire nor distress. Perhaps he was a little more assiduous in his waiting on the lady than he was in attending to my wants; but this might mean simply that she was a woman and I was merely a man.

During dinner Miss Langdon and I talked.

“You arrived to-day?” she asked.

“Yes, I came from Marseilles by the Ispahan. Do you know the Messageries Maritimes boats?”

“Jolly little things, aren’t they?” she said, smiling. “I like the cosmopolitan passengers they carry, and I love curry for breakfast.”

She was very fair. Her neck, wrists and ankles were exquisite, as thoroughbred as the human animal can ever hope to be.

“What I liked most of all,” said I, “was the rummy little music room on the deck with the piano that made such tender, melting sounds. I used to feel tremendously sentimental in the evenings. There was an Italian girl who sang Neapolitan songs as though she really meant them.”

“I know,” she said eagerly; “wouldn’t it be fine if all life were like that? But I suppose it wouldn’t, really. Sweetness so soon cloys.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “we all require bitter days in between: they add zest to our appetite when the good days come along.”

We talked obvious things of this kind all through the meal.

“Will Madame have coffee here or in the lounge?” asked Lovelace when we had finished our fruit.

She looked up at him and smiled divinely, and in return he smiled a pleasant English smile that meant nothing of what she wished it to mean.

“It all depends on Monsieur,” she said, turning to me. “Shall we have coffee here?”

“As you please,” said I.

“Very well, then, here.”

She took the cigarette case that was lying on the table at her side and offered me a smoke.

“This hotel is very pleasant,” she remarked; “have you ever stayed here before?”

“No, this is my first visit to Athens. And you?”

“I also have never been here before.”

Our little table was in a corner of the room farthest away from the door. All the diners except ourselves had left. Lovelace stood some little way off, waiting I suppose, to minister to our possible wants. Suddenly, he put down the table-napkin he was holding, and began to move towards the door. Though my companion was not facing him, she saw—or felt—his withdrawal.

“Lovelace!” she called softly.

He turned and approached our table.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To wait on the ladies and gentlemen in the lounge,” he answered.

“Must you go?”

“Not if Madame desires me to stay.”

“You may please yourself, of course. But if you went I should miss you.”

Without embarrassment he bowed, walked a few paces away, and stationed himself out of reach of our talk.

I do not think my attempt to look unconcerned was entirely successful, and I betrayed myself, I am sure, by asking:

“Have you been here very long?”

(What I meant, of course, was: “Do you know Lovelace well?”).

“Just five days,” she said, as though I had asked the most ordinary question in the world. Then, after a pause, she asked: “I surprise you?”

“No, why?”

She smiled.

“You lie so well,” she said, “that I feel I can trust you.”

I feebly protested my sincerity.

“I knew him last year in Oxford,” she explained; “but he refuses to know me now. He is afraid of me.”

“Surely not!” I exclaimed. “Why should he be afraid?”

She did not answer me, but went on to speak of other things.

“Will you promise me something?” she asked.

“Of course I will. What is it?”

“I want you to promise always to sit at this table for your meals. They never lay more than two places here. If you speak to the head waiter, he will reserve that place for you.”

“You are very kind,” I said; “I shall be delighted. Thanks awfully for asking me.”

And, this time, I meant every word I said.

In a few minutes we rose from the table and prepared to leave the room. She preceded me, and, in passing Lovelace, gazed at him with a look so despairing and beseeching that I could but wonder he maintained so undisturbed a countenance.

Having reached the door, she turned.

“Good night, Lovelace,” she said.

And behind me I heard his voice, low and grave:

“Good night, Madame.”

If she was beautiful that night, she was still more beautiful next morning at breakfast. Poets have described the kind of woman she was: I cannot. I can but give you a few clumsy hints. She was as delicate as porcelain. Her hair had the colour and the sheen of polished brass, and her face, when composed, was all innocence and trust. Her innocence was a lure. One felt her sex. In the corner of her lips there lurked a mysterious suggestion of cruelty—or was it of hunger?

Though she chattered a good deal whilst we ate, I felt that she was preoccupied. Whenever Lovelace approached her, she seemed to expand and open like a flower in the sun; whenever he withdrew, she closed in upon herself again. She rarely spoke to him without addressing him by name.

Of the two it was he who interested me most, and after breakfast I sought an opportunity of talking to him.

I asked him about—the best means of getting there, its distance from Athens, and so on.

He answered my questions with politeness, but without deference; his manner was easy, even polished. It was quite evident he was a gentleman, and a gentleman of culture and experience.

I told him that I had recently attended a course of lectures at Oxford on the social life of ancient Athens, and at the word Oxford he started a little and flushed. A minute later I noticed he was trembling and that his cheeks were pale.

“She is getting on his nerves,” I said to myself.

I had little compunction in trying to solve this mystery, for I had, so to speak, been dragged in to sit and watch its development. And after my ten minutes’ conversation with Lovelace I formed the theory that he was as deeply in love with Miss Langdon as she was with him; but whereas her love was mingled with triumph and cruelty, his was strained with fear. His love urged him to remain, but his fear, I thought, was continually warning him to escape.

Though I had business elsewhere, I returned to the Hotel Jupiter for lunch, thinking I might witness the “curtain” of the first act of this almost silent drama; but she did not appear. Lovelace was pale and, I thought, anxious; but he kept himself so well under control, and he smiled so pleasantly when I made a joke about King Constantine, whom I had that morning seen outside the Palace, that I felt his seeming anxiety must be only the product of my imagination. His attitude towards me was both aloof and friendly: he was determined to keep his “place,” yet I was sure he liked me. I had copies of that month’s Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century in my bedroom, also three or four recent numbers of Punch; these I brought downstairs and gave to him, though I remember that, as I did so, the thought flashed into my mind that I might appear to him to be trying to purchase his confidence. But if he had such a suspicion, he did not show it.

I spent that afternoon in the Museum, visiting the Temple of Jupiter before returning to the hotel. The enervating climate of Athens in the early spring had tired me, and I felt a little depressed as I walked across the Palace Square. On entering the hotel I heard a woman’s voice singing in the drawing-room. Opening the door, I discovered Miss Langdon, the only occupant of the room, sitting at the piano, accompanying herself. Seeing me, she rose.

“May I come in and listen?” I asked.

“Do. I love having an audience. Do you play?”

“Yes. Rather well. At least, I accompany well. You were singing Reynaldo Hahn, weren’t you?”

“Yes—I’ve only just got to know him. Rather like overripe fruit, don’t you think? Only, of course, the very best fruit.”

She laughed.

“Come and play for me,” she said.

“Thanks awfully. I was hoping you would ask me to.”

Quite the most exciting occupation in the world is to read new pianoforte music for a good singer. Reynaldo Hahn is the most atmospheric of composers, the most delicate, the most decadent: not a great man, of course, but an interesting man. Like my companion’s voice, his music has no colour: it consists of whites, blacks, and innumerable shades of grey.

“You play almost as well as I sing,” she remarked, after we had gone through an entire volume of songs.

“You make me play well,” I said; “you are sympathetic. That’s a silly word—but you know what I mean.”

“But it’s really very heartless music,” said she; “it’s so sentimental, so insincere. It suits me. I can’t do the real things—not even the modern people—Hugo Wolfe, for example. The great men lacerate me so, and I don’t like being lacerated.”

“No,” said I mischievously, “you’d rather lacerate other people. Your friend from Oxford for example.”

“Ah! Lovelace, you mean. I thought you would be curious about him.”

“Well, I confess it: I am curious.”

She laughed teasingly.

“If you wait long enough, you will find out everything. But there goes the first dinner-gong, and you’re not dressed.”

I hurried away to change. Though I dressed as speedily as possible, the dinner had begun when I entered the dining-room. As I noticed that Lovelace was bending low over the table at which Miss Langdon sat, and that she was speaking to him with some vehemence, I approached them very slowly and deliberately; even so, their conversation was not finished when I had sat down at my place.

“ ...And what happened to Walter had nothing to do with me,” she protested, though she knew I was present; “and if it had—what then? Am I to love all the men who love me? Are men children that they require nurses?”

“No, Madame,” he said. “Will Madame take thick or clear soup?”

“I will take no soup at all. Write down your answer on a piece of paper and bring it with the entrée.”

He departed, white and trembling, and for a minute my sympathy was entirely with him.

“What surprises me,” I said to her, “is that you asked me always to sit at your table.”

Though a minute previously she had been speaking passionately, almost angrily, to Lovelace, she now turned to me a face at once gentle and beseeching.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

“Well—no. To be perfectly frank, you do make me feel a little uncomfortable. Lovelace is a gentleman. Even if he weren’t, I shouldn’t like to interrupt your private conversations with him.”

“But you don’t,” she protested.

“Well, then, I don’t like overhearing them.”

“That,” said she, “is unavoidable. Believe me, you are doing me a kindness by sharing my table. If you didn’t sit there somebody else would—and I trust you. Really, you are doing me a great kindness.”

“Very well, then. If that is the case, I don’t mind—or, at all events, I shall try to mind as little as possible.”

Presently, Lovelace brought our entrées.

“Where is my answer?” she asked.

Without a moment’s pause, he replied:

“The answer, Madame, is ‘No.’”

“But,” said she firmly, as though stating an incontrovertible fact, “but you will change your mind.”

When he had left our table, she turned to me with a smile.

“Have you ever been in love?” she asked.

“Well, I have often thought I was in love. But it soon passed. It always passes.”

She shook her head and smiled.

Immediately after dinner she disappeared.

The night was ghostly with a swollen moon. Looking from my bedroom window at about ten o’clock I saw white buildings with ink-black shadows. The streets were almost deserted. Somebody out there was singing a restless song, and the restlessness of the music awakened in me an almost insufferable pain—an ache—a dark turbulence of the spirit. I felt my heart beating wildly, and in my soul there was a deep desire to scatter myself on the night. What was the matter? Was I in love once more? And if so, with what?—with whom?... When one asks questions of this kind, one already knows the answers; nevertheless, one does not stop asking those questions. I was in love with her.

I left my room and sought her vainly in the lounge and in the drawing-room. Then I went to the deserted entrance-hall and thence to the open door. On the top step Lovelace was standing irresolutely, his hat on. I stepped up to him.

“Don’t go!” I said in a low voice.

It was a random shot, but it hit the mark.

“I don’t wish to,” he said, “but she draws and pulls.”

He was trembling violently.

“I thought of visiting the Acropolis,” I said, though indeed I had no such thought.

“After dusk one requires a ticket to pass through the gates,” he said. “She is there. She will be standing like one of the Caryatides, the moon on her face, hatless. And perhaps her feet will be bare.”

“Oh, but this is madness!” I exclaimed. “What is she to you or you to her?”

“I wonder,” he answered helplessly. Then, obeying an impulse he seemed unable to control, he held out a ticket.

“Take this!” he said. “It will admit you through the gates. She will be waiting.”

“No,” said I. “It is you she wants.”

“But I can’t go. I may not. I daren’t. I told her I wouldn’t.”

And, with a deep sigh, he turned and walked into the hotel.

All that night I lay midway between reality and dreams. My senses mingled, and I knew not what was reality and what was phantasy. Was it possible I should see her at breakfast next morning? Was there really such a woman or had I imagined her? Had I been dreaming these last thirty-six hours?

The spirit of her was in my brain and in my veins like a drug. At length I must have slept, for I heard whisperings and a voice of menace, and again a loud voice threatening mankind and me, and then voluptuous sighings and secret whisperings; mænads rushed to and fro in ghostly meadows, and on them the moon poured golden blood; and then again the voice reached me and each word it uttered was like a heavy weight falling upon my bleeding heart.

I awoke and sat up in bed and:

“Lovelace! Lovelace!” I heard, or seemed to hear, breathed through the corridor.

“The huntress!” I exclaimed. “The authentic vampire! The incarnation of hungry sex!”

Shuddering I rose, raised the blind and leant through the open window. The world outside was unreal: it brought me no solace. The houses were insubstantial; the solidity of my own body was incommunicable to my senses; all the world was an illusion; nothing existed save the brain that had placed things there....

A cold bath early next morning did little to restore my nerves to health. My soul was sick: it was covered with indestructible dust from the vampire’s wings.

I arrived at our table before she did. Lovelace brought me food. Though his manner was calm, his face was deathly pale. Had he, like myself, been agonized through the night? I spoke to him, and he looked into my eyes distrustfully.

“I am going to Eleusis to-day,” I said. “Can you get a few sandwiches made up for me? And some fruit and a bottle of wine?”

“Yes, certainly. I will tell the head waiter. But be careful. Don’t go into any of the cottages, for fever is raging there.”

“Thanks, I won’t.... I say, Lovelace.” I spoke low, and he bent down to catch my words. “Lovelace, I say. Tell me: what is the meaning of all this—of everything? Do you not believe I am your friend?”

“But you love her!”

“Or hate her!” I exclaimed. “Which is it?”

“They are both the same,” he said.

And then, most quietly and with a wild mænad-look in her eyes and about her lips, she sat down and:

“Good morning, Lovelace,” she said.

“Good morning, Madame.”

I could see that he was putting forth a great effort in order to master himself.

She turned to me and began to talk of the weather. With difficulty I met her gaze. Yes, there was a wild look in her eyes; it was as though she had learned some secret in the night. Though she sat quite calmly, she seemed to be shedding vitality all around her. Her presence quickened me. And the sound of her voice was both a lure and an excitement.

“I am going to Eleusis to-day,” I told her, “but I shall be back for dinner.”

“And what do you expect to find there?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid. Just a heap of broken marble.”

“But underneath the marble are the Mysteries—the Eleusinian Mysteries. Do you know what they were?”

“No,” said I; “does any one?”

“Yes: I do. They were sex mysteries. The Ancient Greeks worshipped woman in the form of a goddess. They sacrificed to her. In those days they feared women, and they were continually trying to propitiate them. But since then they have tamed my sex. Only a few of us remain.”

“‘Us'?” I queried.

“Yes—the devastators—the women who have no use for a man once they have known him. You have heard of the marriage in the sky?”

I shook my head.

“The queen bee marries the best male of the hive high in the blue of heaven, out of sight. The ecstasy over, the male drops down to earth, dead. You will find it all in Fabre.”

“Yes? And then?”

“Nothing—that’s the end of it.”

“Was that the end of Walter?” I asked, goaded on by I know not what. And, as she did not reply, I added: “Is that to be the end of Lovelace? Is that why he is afraid of you? Do you carry about with you some evil spell?—some enchantment of death?”

She drew away from me a little and sat back in her chair.

“You are afraid of me,” she said.

“I think not,” I answered, “but you disturb my dreams. Most horribly you disturb them.”

“So already it has begun to work on you,” she said with mild interest.

“Have you cast a spell upon me?” I asked. “Am I in a state of semi-hypnosis?”

“I have done nothing. It is not you whom I want. It is Lovelace.”

I made but a scanty meal, and as I walked to the station I was resolved that Miss Langdon should not enter my thoughts all day. She had spoken the truth: I was afraid of her. I feared her as the drunkard fears alcohol, as the morphinomaniac fears his drug.

But who can command his thoughts when those thoughts have for their breeding-place senses that have been whipped to excitement by the invitation of sex? I was unhappy all day.

From Eleusis I walked along a narrow track to the sea. I bathed, and then sat naked in the sun. Again I bathed among the rocks, and once more sat gazing upon the blue islands and the purple islands and the green land near. No human being was in sight, no dwelling-place, no sign of life. Even the sky was empty of birds.

It was not difficult for me to imagine it was two thousand years ago. Then everything—sky, sea, and land—would appear exactly as it did now. Perhaps in those times men were wiser than they are to-day. True, mankind had collected and co-ordinated a few million facts unknown to the men and women who worshipped and sacrificed in the Temple of Demeter, but, after all, what are facts? Are they not the very masks of truth, as a man’s face is the mask of his soul?...

Almost could I see her in the divine Temple, worshipped and feared.... Woman enthroned; man on his knees, craving a boon. Woman in league with Nature: man Nature’s victim. Woman accepting; man giving....

I dressed, and ate the food I had brought with me. The wine enervated me, and soon I slept.

Again she sent her thoughts to me, and my dreams were soaked through and through with her rapacious personality. I was being nailed down under a rich carpet in Samarcand. In another room of the Palace were proud music and rejoicings....

Haunted myself by those dreams, I will not stain this page by recording them....

I awoke.

“If sleep means this,” I exclaimed aloud, “I’ll sleep no more.”

On my way back to Athens I told myself that on the following day I would set out for Corinth. I would escape. But I must see the Parthenon first. I would borrow Lovelace’s ticket and go to-night. There would be a moon....

There were no bounds to my relief when Lovelace, bringing me my soup at dinner-time told me, in answer to my inquiry, that Miss Langdon was resting.

“Madame has a headache,” he said, “and will dine in her own room.”

Immeasurable relief—yes! But profound disappointment and anxiety also!

What an unaccountable hunger mine was! Love-hunger! The wish to love what one fears and perhaps hates!

“You look ill, Lovelace,” I said.

“I am feeling ill,” he confessed.

“And so am I. Not sick in body, but sick in soul.”

“I also,” he said.

“Come nearer, Lovelace. Bend down. Now—” I lowered my voice almost to a whisper—“won’t you tell me? Please tell me.”

“It’s happened before in the world,” he said, “many times. Keats wrote about it in his ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’”

“But this is different,” I urged.

“No, I think not. It is much the same.”

“But that was poetry and this is madness.”

“All things are very much the same. Even fire and water are not so much opposed as we sometimes believe, and I remember being taught at school that diamonds and charcoal are first cousins.”

“Yes—but about Walter. Who was Walter? What did she do to him?”

“She killed him,” said Lovelace; “he shot himself. He was my brother.”

“Oh, do forgive me for asking you. I had no idea—I say, Lovelace, I’m leaving to-morrow. I can’t stand it any longer.”

“You are very wise. I am going also.”

He moved away—this man who was a stranger to me, but whom I seemed to know so well.

I could eat very little, so I left the dining-room for the lounge, where I ordered a large brandy-and-soda. I stayed there smoking and drinking for some time, but she did not come, and, at length, I rose and sought Lovelace. He was wandering about aimlessly in the hall.

“I’m going to the Acropolis,” I said; “would you be so kind as to lend me your ticket—that is, if you are not going to use it yourself.”

He gave me a strange, inquiring look.

“Certainly. I have it with me—here it is.”

I went alone, half hoping, wholly fearing, that Miss Langdon might be there.

Passing the Temple of Jupiter, I walked up the steep road that winds along the side of the Acropolis. Nothing stirred. The moon seemed to be fixed in the sky by its own cold passion. The thick dust on the road looked like powdered silver. A few crickets chirped. Up above, within the Parthenon itself no doubt, a man was singing one of the Dichterliebe. It was a night of intolerable heartache. My soul seemed to melt and diffuse itself through every part of my body....

I arrived at the gates and, refusing the proffered services of a guide, was admitted. Above me the columns of the Parthenon gleamed coldly in the light of the moon. I mounted the marble steps, reached the nearest column, and touched it. For a moment I felt soothed. Sitting down, I pondered on that turn of Fate which had brought me to Athens, had directed me to that hotel, had guided me to that table. Even here where I sat her spirit was about me. Oh, if only she were there by my side! If only my lips were on hers and her hand on my heart!

Almost suffocated with longing, I arose and wandered to and fro, looking at everything, but seeing nothing.

Then, near the Caryatides, I stumbled upon her. She was lying full-length on the ground.

“So you have come, Victor,” she said.

For a moment I paused, breathless and afraid.

“No: it is I.”

“You?”

“Lovelace lent me his ticket.”

“Thinking he himself would escape?”

“I don’t know what he thought. I am not in Lovelace’s confidence.”

“Sit down by my side!” she commanded.

I dropped to the ground and lay down; my lips closed on hers; she rested in my arms. Neither of us spoke; nor did we move. For some minutes we had remained thus, when I began to experience a sensation of vague discomfort which rapidly changed to one of fear. Something inimical and powerful emanated from her body to mine. I withdrew my lips and she sought them with hers. I slackened my arms and hers tightened about me.

“Let me go!” I exclaimed. “What are you? For God’s sake, let me go!”

Brutally I tore her arms away and flung her from me as a man would fling away a snake that had coiled round him in his sleep. She sighed deeply and moaned.

“Pray do not leave me. I am ill.”

But I walked rapidly away, unheeding. In an instant she was with me, soft-footed, eager-eyed. She watched me as a panther watches its prey. Her mouth smiled with mysterious knowledge, and her intuitive elflike hands were spread out before her. In my terror I imagined I could feel evil oozing from her pores.

“Stay with me! Love me!” she said in a voice of most treacherous music.

I turned upon her with arms upraised and fists clenched, threatening her, but she sank all shuddering upon my breast.

It was then that I was overcome by panic fear. Tearing her from me, I ran to the entrance-gate, rushed down the pathway and on to the road, and escaped to the hotel. Then I sought Lovelace.

“Here is your pass,” I said.

“Ah, you have escaped! She was there?”

“It was an ‘escape’ then?” I asked. “She really is evil?”

“She is very much to be feared,” he said.

That night I slept not at all. I did not wish to sleep: I was afraid to surrender myself to the Unknown. I kept my light burning and, to pass the time, ruled many sheets of paper with the bass and treble clefs, and began to write down Beethoven’s “Sonate Pathétique” from memory. Strange how this noble music seemed to decay as it passed through my mind! Strange how the familiar melodies were tinged with wickedness!...

Night passed and dawn came early. At seven o’clock I rang my bell and when the chambermaid appeared I ordered my breakfast.

“Will Monsieur have it in his room?”

“No” said I. “I will have it downstairs in half an hour. Please have my bill made out ready for me.”

The dining-room was deserted as I sat down. A waiter came.

“Where is Lovelace?” I asked.

The man hesitated a moment.

“Where is Lovelace?” I asked again; “I wish to see him before I leave.”

“Lovelace, sir? Monsieur will not betray my confidence?”

“No, no. What is it? What has happened?”

“We have orders not to speak of it. But Lovelace was found dead in his bedroom an hour ago. He has shot himself.”

INTO DUST

To
Vernon W. S. Ply

JASON and Artemis had been married only two years when they learned, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the sickness from which Jason had for some time been suffering was consumption. They were both young and very brave; nevertheless, they bowed their heads in resignation. Jason was doomed. Three brothers and sister had already died of the disease; consumption had killed his mother and his paternal grandfather. Decay had been poured into his blood-vessels by both father and mother, and there was no course open to him but to submit to Fate.

For ten hours a day they stitched carpets at the big factory near the Cathedral, earning enough money to keep them in tolerable comfort in their two-roomed lodging in Rue Egnatia. But the time soon came when Jason was unfit for work, and the twenty-five drachma note that Artemis carried home each week had to provide for the needs of both. Artemis made a great show of eating big meals, but she denied herself even the necessaries of life in order that Jason might have the costly foods that nourished him.

If she had loved him in health, she now worshipped him in sickness, for Jason was not only husband—he was like a son as well. And, indeed, he soon became as helpless as a little child. Her grief was bearable because she was so constantly employed that she had no time in which to brood upon it; the circumstances that poisoned her mind was that she could not tend him in the daytime, for she was compelled by her work to leave him in the care of their landlady.

Very soon their savings came to an end. Medicines and rich foods exhausted her weekly wage two days after she received it, and it became imperative to earn a much larger sum.

“Dear Artemis,” said Jason one evening, as he lay in bed watching her mending a stocking, “it’s wonderful how far you make the money go. But I think I can guess how you manage it. You don’t eat enough yourself. You are pale and thin, and your beautiful hair is losing its lustre.”

With her needle poised in the air, she turned to him with a smile.

“I don’t eat enough? Why, I sometimes think I eat too much. I know I’m pale and perhaps a little thin, but just think of the weather we’re having! It’s the hottest August we’ve had for years and years. Besides, I never was one to have much colour.”

She continued looking at him, for she loved his handsome dark face, now grown weirdly beautiful with the ravages of disease.

“I wish the end would come more quickly,” he said. “Sometimes I think it is wrong for me to take medicines and eat costly food. No one can save me—what’s the use of it? Why prolong my wretched life?”

“Because, living, you make me happy. In all the world I have only you, Jason. Do not leave me an hour before you must.... But we must not talk like this; we must not grow sad when the evening comes. I’ll light the lamp; it will be a companion for us. And then, if you like, I will sing you a new song I learned to-day from one of the girls at the factory.”

But though she spoke so cheerfully, her heart was as heavy as lead. She had come to the end of her money, and Jason’s food for the morrow had yet to be bought.

As she crossed the room to light the lamp, the half-conscious thought that had lain buried in her mind for weeks stirred uneasily and leapt up, alive and clamant. Instantly she acquiesced in its demands. If that was the only way out, that way must be taken.

The little lamp on the wall burned well.

“Which do you think is more companionable—a clock that ticks and makes a noise, or a lamp that burns and makes a light?” she asked.

“Oh—a lamp. I love light, and silence doesn’t trouble me a bit. But I would like to hear you sing. Sing softly—just for you and me to hear.”

It was a Neapolitan song she had learned, a barcarolle that swayed easily with the movement of a swung hammock or of a little boat on gentle, regular waves. It told of a love that was constant, of a love that would hold through all the sorrows of life, that would survive old age, and cleave its way through the darkness of death.

And if, when I am dead, my heart
Turns into dust, to dust my face,
I’ll ride upon the swiftest wind
And find your burial place.

“Again,” he said, when she had finished.

So she sang it through a second time, her sweet, low voice vibrating with passion.

“Love must last—it will,” he said; “it is the only thing that can never die.”

He turned over on his side and closed his eyes.

“Do you feel ready for your sleep?” she asked, for Jason nearly always slept uninterruptedly from nine till midnight.

“Yes: I think I do.”

So she went over to him, smoothed his pillow, drew the sheet above his shoulders, and kissed him.

“Good-night, husband,” she said, and kissed him again. “Good-night, little boy,” she added, kissing him a third time.

She resumed her work; but after a time, when she was sure he was safely asleep, she rose, put on her hat, turned out the lamp, and crept softly to the door.

Out in the street, she began her mission, doing with a brave heart but with shrinking flesh what tens of thousands of women have done for the husbands they have loved.

Turning down Rue Venizelos, she reached the quay and entered a café where loose women plied their wares. She did not dare to sit down, for she had no money with which to purchase a drink; so she walked slowly through the café as though seeking some one.

Now, Artemis was not beautiful, but she possessed something more powerful, more subtly attractive than beauty. She had innocence—innocence dwelt on her face, and the spirit of innocence surrounded her like a halo. She was afraid of what she was about to do, but she did not hesitate. She remembered that it had been said that there was no greater love than the love which constrains a man to lay down his life for his friend. But honour was dearer than life.

She loitered in the noisy café for a minute, and as she was about to turn and leave, a man’s insistent gaze caught her eyes and held them. She smiled. He beckoned her. Walking towards him, she sat down at the table by his side.

“You are new to this game, aren’t you?” he said frankly, but not unkindly. “What can I order you?”

A waiter brought her coffee. Her companion examined her closely, admiring her dainty hands, her clear eyes, her wealth of golden hair.

“Do you know me?” he asked.

“No: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”

“Well, you must call me Onias. And I would like to call you by a pretty French name I know—Lucette. Do you like your name, Lucette?”

“Yes, I think I do. But do you think it suits me?”

“Yes. It is dainty and so are you. And it is pretty and innocent, and I think you are pretty and innocent also.”

“But, Onias!” she objected. “That doesn’t suit you at all. Onias ought to be fat and shapeless, with marks of grease on his waistcoat.”

He laughed, pleased that she could talk as well as look pretty.

“But,” he said, “Onias is my real name. Still, I’m glad I don’t live up to it.”

“You’re nicer than Onias,” she said, and as she spoke, she suddenly felt afraid of her glibness. She had forced herself to forget her husband for these hours, but without warning their little bedroom was before her eyes. She shivered.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No, no. Quite, quite warm, thanks.”

“This place is very noisy,” he said, “shall we go?”

He preceded her, and at the counter bought her a box of chocolates.

“Don’t do that!” she said piteously. “Don’t buy me anything!”

“But, Lucette—”

“I don’t want you to be kind to me,” she murmured; “I only wish....”

But he took the box that was handed to him across the counter, and carried it under his arm.

The quay was thronged, and Onias offered Artemis his arm. After a little hesitation, she took it. Though she herself was tall, he was very much taller. He had the bright distinction of a man accustomed to issue orders that were instantly obeyed.

“You will come to my house?” he whispered, a little shyly. “I am a bachelor and live alone with two servants. But perhaps you would like some supper first?”

“No—no thanks. I am not a bit hungry. And—I am so sorry—I can only stay with you a little while.”

“Why?” he asked; “stay all night with me—do!” he urged.

“I am so very sorry,” she replied, “but it’s impossible. I must be home by midnight.”

“Very well,” said he, patting the little hand that rested on his arm, “it shall be as you wish. But I’m terribly disappointed. Perhaps some other night?”

“No—indeed,” she said, “I must always be home at midnight, and later on it may be that I shall not be able to come out at all in the evenings.... Do not be angry with me!”

“I am not angry: I am only sorry. Do not distress yourself, my dear. You are very good and honest not to try to deceive me. Here we are: this is my house.”

He opened a massive iron gate that gave on to a garden of trees. A broad pathway led to a detached house some distance from the road. He could feel that she was trembling a little.

“Do not be afraid,” he said, “I shall treat you kindly.”

He took her hand in his and pressed it gently.

“I am not afraid of you,” she said; “I am just a bit afraid of what I am doing.”

He unlocked the front door, and they entered a large hall. An elderly woman came in response to his ring.

“Serve supper for two in an hour’s time,” he ordered. Then, turning to Artemis, he asked: “Do you like wine, Lucette?”

“Oh, no, no. Do not order me any supper, I beg. I shall not be able to eat to-night.”

Puzzled and a little disturbed, he said:

“Very well, dear. It shall be as you wish.”

He dismissed his servant and turned to Artemis.

“Do not be afraid. No harm shall come to you.”

An hour later they were again in the hall.

“You can find your way home? You will be quite safe?” he asked.

“Oh yes: I shall be quite safe.”

“You will come to see me again?”

“Oh, no, no!... But perhaps I must. But I cannot think of that now. Good-night, Onias.”

“You are satisfied? You have enough money for what you need?”

“You have given me more than I expected,” she said innocently.

“And you do like me a bit?”

“How can I say I like you? Indeed, I ought to hate you, but that would be unreasonable. But, Onias.... Let me go.”

“You are free to come and go as you please. If you wish to see me again in the evening of any day, come to the café. If I am not there, I shall be here and shall be very, very happy to receive you.”

He opened the door and offered her the box of chocolates. Gently shaking her head, she refused his present.

“Au revoir, Lucette,” he called softly when she was half-way down the pathway.

But though he listened very carefully, he did not hear her voice. Indeed, by this time he was no longer in her thoughts. The three twenty-five drachma notes he had given her were crushed into a ball in one of her cold and trembling hands.

When Artemis reached her lodgings, her husband was still asleep; but he had evidently been very restless, for she could see by the light shed by the lamp in the street that the sheet that had covered him was flung to one side. He was lying on his back, with his arms stretched out on either side of him.

Cold and trembling, she stood looking down upon him in the half-darkness. Soon her face was wet with tears, though she made no sound; with a gesture of annoyance, she stopped weeping and conquered her mood of self-pity.

Having undressed, she crept into her little bed at the other side of the room, and lay still, waiting for Jason to waken. The clocks outside struck midnight. But Jason slept on in silence, and soon Artemis began to wander in that land which lies midway between sleeping and waking.

It was nearly two o’clock when her husband’s voice wakened her.

“Yes, dear, I am here,” she said, slipping out of bed.

She lit the lamp, went into their other room, poured a glassful of milk into a pan, and brought it to their bedroom where she heated it over the lamp.

“It’s nearly two o’clock,” she said; “you haven’t had such a good sleep for a long time. Are you feeling better?”

“Yes, I think I am.”

She held the cup while he drank its contents. Then she smoothed his pillow and, taking a thin blanket from a cupboard, spread it over him.

Without a word he closed his eyes and in a few minutes he slept.

But there was no more sleep for Artemis. Though she had not a single regret, yet she felt unspeakably miserable. Her reason approved of what she had done, but her spirit revolted against it. She lived over and over again the hours she had spent between nine and midnight, torturing herself by remembering every detail.

Soon after dawn she rose, dressed, put on her hat, and went forth to buy food for Jason.

What must be, must be, and it is only the hypocritical sentimentalist who feels remorse for an act which he intends to commit again when the occasion arises. Artemis neither suffered from remorse nor indulged in it. Nor did she rail against the fate that compelled her to sell her body in order that Jason might live. In certain moods she gloried in the desecration of her body as a martyr glories in the flames that consume him.

At the end of a fortnight, the seventy-five drachmas she had earned from Onias was all but spent. Her spirits were very low. She felt weak and ill, and as she stared at her reflection in the mirror she realized for the first time that less money would come to her if she allowed herself to look jaded and ill-nourished.

Early one Sunday evening she left her lodgings, telling her husband that she was going to visit her mother who lived two miles away on the Kalamaria Road.

When she entered the café it was nearly empty, for the evening was yet young; so she sat down, ordered coffee, and waited, examining the half-dozen demireps who had already arrived. They talked at each other in hard, loud voices. Three, sitting together, sparkled with the vulgar arrogance of diamonds; they behaved as though they had just been injected with cocaine. After a glance at Artemis as she entered, they paid no further attention to her.

Customers began to drop in in couples, and by half-past eight the place was nearly full. Artemis, shrinking in a corner, glanced eagerly at each fresh face. She was looking for Onias. Perhaps she might have attracted the attention of some other man if she had tried, but Onias had wished to see her again, and he had at least treated her kindly. Besides, this evening she was full of lassitude, and too timid to seek a new customer. She would wait a little longer; if he did not come, she would go to his house.

But presently he arrived with a woman—a frail creature who looked and moved like a sulphur-coloured butterfly. Neither saw Artemis as they passed, and her heart sank. He had forgotten her. He had asked her to come again, not because he wanted her, but because he pitied her. She must nerve herself to the point of engaging the interest of a stranger. So she called for a glass of wine.

In the meantime, Onias had passed up the café with his companion; finding no vacant chairs at the far end, they retraced their steps and sat down at a table only a few yards from Artemis.

A waiter brought her wine and, as she glanced up at him, she saw that Onias’ eyes were upon her. She heard his voice.

“Ah, there’s Lucette!” he exclaimed.

And, leaving his companion, who appeared to be quite indifferent to his movements, he came across to Artemis, sat by her side, and smiled gaily upon her.

“Where have you been all this time, my dear?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he continued: “But you are looking pale and tired, Lucette. You have not been taking care of yourself; why have you not been to see me?”

She did her best to meet him in his mood.

“I have seen no one,” she answered, “and the reason why I came here to-night was because I hoped to meet you.”

“That is very kind of you. Do you know Maisie, the English girl?”

He indicated the sulphur-coloured butterfly.

“No, I don’t know any one.”

“Ah, well! It does not matter. You will come with me to-night?”

Her grave, innocent face showed a moment’s confusion.

“Thank you, yes. But I must be home early.”

He laughed deprecatingly.

“But Lucette, you mustn’t thank me. I am only too glad to have you. Some time, perhaps, you will stay all night with me?”

“Oh, no: I don’t think I shall ever be able to do that. You promised you would not be angry with me?”

“I don’t like you to say things like that, Lucette; of course I am not angry with you, and I never shall be while you are so honest and truthful. But you, in your turn, must not be angry with me if I make you eat something. I’m going to have some supper: I can’t eat alone: you must join me.”

“Very well,” she said, “I will.”

She almost liked him, so indulgently did he treat her.

“Excuse me a minute, please, while I explain to Maisie.”

He went over to the beautiful girl, bent over her, and spoke a few words. In reply, she shrugged her shoulders and turned away.

“Ought you not to ask your friend to sup with you as well?” asked Artemis when he had returned.

He smiled.

“Oh, Maisie and I are old friends; we understand each other.”

He ordered wine and food.

“But,” he said, turning to Artemis, “perhaps you would like us to have supper in a private room?”

“I should—very much,” she half-whispered, “for I feel strange here among all these people.”

“And so would I,” he agreed.

“The summer-house, Monsieur, is not being used, if you would like that,” said the waiter.

Onias questioned Artemis with his eyebrows, and she nodded in reply.

The large summer-house was cool and cushioned; concealed from the rest of the garden by a high hedge, they were alone and unobserved. Onias took his Lucette in his arms and kissed her gently.

“I feel so sad about you,” he said; “won’t you tell me what is the matter?”

“Please don’t ask me about myself,” she said softly; “you must just think of me as—as someone who pleases you for an hour.”

“But perhaps I can help you?”

“You have helped me. You must let me keep my sorrows to myself.”

With their supper the waiter brought a little lamp with a shade the colour of the evening sky. It was now almost dark in this garden. Two large white moths dashed themselves impetuously against the lamp, their eyes shining with excitement. Excited, too, was the owl that called and called somewhere in the grove of pepper-trees behind them....

As Artemis was about to leave Onias’ house that night, he placed five twenty-five-drachma notes in her hand.

“It is too much,” she said involuntarily.

“Oh no: I like to give it to you.”

“If it were for myself, I should not take it all; but it is for some one who is dying.”

“Poor Lucette! Some one you love?”

“Yes. He has nothing but what I give him.”

“I did not know that,” he said gravely. “Has life always been hard to you?”

“Oh no! It has been beautiful—beautiful. If only Jason were well, it would be beautiful still. You know, Monsieur, he is like a little child.”

“Hush! hush! You must not call me Monsieur. To you I am Onias; to me you are Lucette.... A little child?”

“Yes. So helpless, so dependent upon me. And he does not want to die.”

Sadly she turned away and walked towards the door.

“You will see me again?” he asked.

“Yes—I will see you again.”

He pondered a minute.

“Now,” he said; “may I ask?—is Jason your husband?”

“Yes, oh yes.”

“You love him?”

“He is all I have—all I need.”

“Well, then, you must come here no more. I will send you money.... But while you love your husband, you must not do this. You have been driven to my arms: it is wrong. Yes, I will send you money. Or, if you would like it better, I will leave it each Saturday at the café. I will write on the envelope ‘For Lucette.’ I will tell the waiter who served us to-night. If you ask him each time you call, he will give you the money.”

“But, Onias, I can’t take it. I shall not have earned it.”

He turned on her angrily.

“Don’t talk nonsense! I have plenty of money. I don’t want it. If it pleases me to give it to you, I shall give it to you.... Come, Lucette, be sensible. We shall meet again, some day, and then we can kiss each other without—without this guilt.”

She took his hand impulsively in hers and kissed it.

“Good-bye, Onias,” she said softly.

“And you will call at the café each Saturday?”

“I will.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

During these last September days Jason rallied. His appetite improved, he grew stronger, and every day he was well enough to get out of bed, dress, and sit in an easy-chair for two or three hours. He ceased to lose flesh, and his eyes no longer had their unnatural brightness.

The old Greek doctor studied him attentively from day to day, and one Saturday morning when Artemis was away at her work, he took Jason by the hand and said:

“You are not going to die, my son. You become healthier every day. A miracle has happened.”

“A miracle?” asked Jason.

The doctor smiled.

“Well, when we medical people come across something we don’t understand, we call it a miracle. But you must continue to take the greatest care of yourself, especially when the cold weather comes. If you could go to Egypt for the winter....”

Jason laughed.

“Flying to the moon is not more unlikely than my going to Egypt....”

When Artemis returned from her work early in the afternoon, tired, but not unhappy—for the improvement in her husband’s health had filled her with hope—Jason was up and dressed.

“A miracle has happened!” he announced, laughing. And then, hurriedly and impetuously, he told her of the doctor’s visit.

“Oh, is it true?” she asked. “It is too wonderful! I daren’t believe it, Jason.”

Placing the parcels she was carrying on a chair, she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him.

“Oh, my boy, my boy!” she cried.

Worn out with the week’s work in the daytime and the nursing by night, she could not keep back her tears; her sobs, deep and convulsive, revealed to him the extent of the suffering she had so bravely endured through the past few months....

At teatime he returned to bed, and she prepared to go out.

“Sleep, if you can, Jason dear,” she said. “I am going to do the shopping for the weekend.”

She hurried off to the café with a light heart. The envelope with her weekly seventy-five drachmas was waiting for her. As she was leaving, she met Onias at the entrance.

“Hello, Lucette!” he said, smiling and shaking hands; “how are you?”

“Oh, Onias—Jason is getting better! The doctor came this morning and said he wouldn’t die. If great care is taken of him, he will live. I am so happy that I can hardly contain myself—and if it had not been for your money....”

Her eyes were now bright with tears.

“Are you in a hurry to get home?” he asked.

“No, not if you want me.”

“I should like to take you for an hour’s row. You look so tired and pale, and it will do you good. Will you come?”

“Oh yes: I should like it.”

Artemis’ experience of the world was very narrow. Until recently she had always believed that men and women were either definitely good or unmistakably evil. Onias, she supposed, was “bad,” and yet it was hard to believe that this gentle, kind-hearted fellow was even tainted by evil. She was quite sure now that she really liked him—not because of his handsome looks and his fine, strong body, but because....

It was very pleasant to be with him here on the cool sea....

At nine o’clock she returned home, her arms full of parcels.

Jason, a little feverish, was tossing on his bed. He was frowning, and he looked angry.

“You have left me alone for a long time,” he said; “where have you been?”

Startled, and having no answer ready, she said:

“I went to see mother. Have you been wanting me, dear?”

“No. Had your mother any news?”

Artemis suddenly felt sick: she had told one lie, and now she would be compelled to tell many more.

“Nothing much. But I felt I had to tell her about you. She was simply overwhelmed with joy, as you can well imagine, and she sent all sorts of nice messages to you.”

Jason sat up in bed, his face wet with perspiration. His eyes were brilliant with the brilliant hardness of polished glass. He looked at Artemis imploringly.

“I don’t know what has happened to me—to us,” he said. “Why do you tell me such lies?” The sound of that last word seemed to whip him to anger. “And where have you been getting all your money from?”

She shrank away from him and went to the table near the window.

“I’ve told you where the money comes from. My brother in London sends it. He has sent it regularly ever since I told him you were ill.”

But she knew that the very tone of her voice betrayed her.

“You only tell lies to me because I am helpless; you wouldn’t dare to do it if I were well and strong. You have not seen your mother to-day. She came here just after you left, and went home only half an hour ago.”

He lay down on his pillow, exhausted and breathing heavily.

With feverish anxiety Artemis searched her mind for another lie that would reconcile her own statement with the real facts. But she could find none.

“I have deceived you, Jason,” she said.

“I know, I know,” he said sorrowfully.

He did not ask her why, but turned his face to the wall. After a few moments’ silence, he said:

“You will find a letter on the mantelpiece: it is from your brother in London. When you told me that he was sending you money, I wrote to thank him. But he now asks what I mean. He says he has never sent you a penny, and cannot do so as his wife is seriously ill.”

Artemis sat down heavily.

“Don’t say anything unless you can tell me the truth,” went on Jason; “I will try to believe you had a good reason for what you have done.”

Artemis, feeling that her small world had suddenly fallen into a black abyss, sat still and silent for a long time; then, with an effort, she stirred herself and went about her work.

She dared not speak, for perhaps a single word would betray her. Her secret would lie between her and her husband for ever, separating them wider as the years passed, until, perhaps, they became strangers, even enemies.

Ten days later Jason died in bed whilst Artemis was away at her work. In a prolonged fit of coughing he broke a blood-vessel, and passed away with his mind full of dark suspicions regarding his wife.

Artemis, worn out with anxiety, her mind poisoned, her spirit broken, felt no shock at his death. She was already numb with suffering: she could feel no more.

She buried him without tears, and a few days later left her lodgings and took a single room in one of those ill-famed streets that lead down to the quay. To her mother’s invitation to make a home with her she replied that for the present she preferred to be alone with her grief.

Throwing herself into her work with a feverish anxiety to forget, she passed a few days, successfully keeping at bay the suspicion—now almost a certainty—that she was even now only in the midst of her calamities. Even if she could forget, her sorrows were not yet over.

One restless night, when sleep was impossible, her spirit threw off its numbness, and for the first time for many weeks she looked facts in the face, and, speaking aloud, said:

“I am with child, and the father of the child is Onias.”

At the end of November the Varda winds came. Artemis never ventured out of doors except to go to and from her work and to buy the simple necessaries of life. Since her husband’s death she had not visited the café. She had, however, written to Onias, thanking him for his generosity, and telling him of the death of Jason. At the same time she asked him not to send her any more money, as she no longer needed it.

During these months her mind had been full of evasions and duplicities. To think was to suffer; to look into the future was to be filled with anxiety. If, as so often happened, thoughts of Jason came to her, she thrust them from her.

Day by day Onias meant more to her. Each Sunday, as she sat sewing little garments for his and her baby, she tried to recall every word he had spoken to her. There were hours when she thought of him with tenderness, almost with love. He was the father of her child. Jason had never been that.

She began to make discreet inquiries about Onias, but without much result. As she sat in her little room during the winter evenings, she dreamed impossible dreams. She pictured herself married to Onias, protected and loved by him. There was no more anxiety about money, no more fear of the future. Her child would....

In the middle of one of these dreams, she was thrown back into the realities of life by the flame of her lamp burning low and expiring. She had neither oil nor money. She must sit in darkness.

But why should she endure small privations day after day when Onias was ready and anxious to receive her? After all, he wanted her and, in her heart of hearts, she wanted him. She must conquer her timidity. If she told Onias what had happened to her through him.... Well, why shouldn’t she? She would claim nothing from him; she would ask for nothing. She would go to see him as an old acquaintance, an old friend.

She sat in the dark screwing her courage to the sticking-point. She longed yet dreaded to go. At last—

“I will go to the café—he may be there,” she said. “I will meet him as though by accident.”

Having hurriedly donned her hat and cloak, she went out into the bitter, stormy night....

The warmth of the café welcomed her. The place was crowded, and for a few moments she could not distinguish one person from another in the smoke-laden atmosphere.

When half-way down the long room she felt a gentle pressure on her arm and, turning, saw Onias.

“Well, Lucette!” he exclaimed, holding out his hand.

She smiled up at him, her face radiant with joy. His very voice seemed to caress her. He took her hand and held it for a few moments.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered; “may I sit with you?”

“Will you? Come along—I’ll find you a chair.”

He had been sitting with a group of men and women friends, but he left them and, taking Artemis’ arm, led her to the farthest end of the café where, in a little alcove, he found a vacant table with two chairs.

“Now tell me all the news. What has happened to you since your husband died?—good things or bad?”

“Nothing—nothing,” she said. “I felt very lonely to-night, so I came here.”

“Poor little Lucette! And are you happy?”

“Yes—now, I am happy with you.”

“And to-night?” he asked in a low voice. “You will come to my house to-night? You will stay till to-morrow?”

“I should like to, but, Onias....”

“Yes, Lucette? Don’t be afraid. What is it you want to tell me?”

“You will not mind?”

His face suddenly changed its expression.

“No, I shall not mind,” he said.

A waiter came to their table for orders.

“You will have wine, won’t you, Lucette?”

“Please. Some Mavrodaphne, I think.”

When the waiter had gone, Lucette still remained silent.

“Now,” said Onias, “tell me.”

“I am going to have a baby,” she said haltingly.

“Oh! A baby? You are going to have a baby?”

All the pleasantness had gone from his face.

“Yes,” she answered; “and the baby is....” She hesitated in confusion. Then: “Yes, I am going to have a little baby,” she added.

There was a long silence during which Onias drew away from her.

“Are you glad?” he asked at length.

Her hands were clasped very tightly, and she pulled savagely at the wedding-ring she was wearing.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

The waiter returned to their table with their drinks. Onias gulped his down hastily.

“I am going to Marseilles to-morrow,” he said casually.

“Oh!” exclaimed Artemis, in sudden pain. “Marseilles is a long way off, isn’t it?”

“Yes, a very long way. I shall be there for a year.”

His voice was cold, his manner distant. He took a cigar from his pocket and began to smoke it.

“Won’t you drink your wine?” he asked.

She sipped it for a moment, and then put the glass down.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I—I think I’d like to go home.”

“Shall I order you a cab?”

“Oh, no, no! I will walk.”

They rose simultaneously.

“Please stay where you are,” she said; “I would much rather go by myself. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” he said, striving to hide the relief he felt.

THE GRANDCHILD

To
X

Scene I
In Guy Fallon’s Garden

Katya. What you have never understood, dear, is that mamma is terribly indelicate. Proper people nearly always are.

Mariana. Yes, but.... How can she?

Katya. I don’t know. But she’s doing it now, this very minute. Imagine Guy’s blushes.

Mariana. Poor Guy! But, really, if it’s any one’s duty to ask him, surely it’s yours?

Katya. But I have asked him! He always says no. He detests children—or, at least, he says he does. It’s a disease with mamma. “How I should like to hold a grandchild on my knee ... the patter of its little feet ... its first childish attempts to talk ... its soft smooth cheeks.” That’s how she goes on. Really, she embarrasses even me.

Mariana. Well, I s’pose it’s only natural. But what does your papa say?

Katya. Oh, it hasn’t got as far as that; I hope it never will. You see, mamma will only amuse Guy; papa would make him angry. After all, dear, it’s very soon. And you must remember that even mamma only had one.

Mariana. ’M yes. She needn’t talk, need she?

Katya. But she does. She has asked me all sorts of questions about Guy.

Mariana. Yes? What sort of questions?

Katya. Mariana! As if I’d tell you!

Mariana. Do—please!

Katya. Can’t you guess?

Mariana. I’ve tried—hard. But, you see, I know so little about these things. In fact, I know nothing at all.

Katya. These things?

Mariana. Well, you know what I mean.

Katya. Oh! you might mean anything.

Mariana. I do.

Katya. If you were married, now, I might.

Mariana. I should love to be there, listening.

Katya. It’s a grandson she wants. She’ll order it from Guy. And he will look so awfully solemn and feel so frightfully tickled.

Mariana. Oh, I do wish I was married. It must be so tremendously—well, exciting. So unexpected, you know—the things that happen, I mean.

Katya. Well, it is rather wonderful at first. I have a friend in Brussels—Elise Deschamps. The other day she wrote me such a funny letter. She wanted to know whether she ought to behave just naturally or pretend to be shy.

Mariana. And what did you say?

Katya. What could I say?

Mariana. Really, Katya, you’re frightfully exasperating. You always seem to be on the point of telling me things, but you never do.

Katya. Well, there’s nothing to tell—nothing, that is, that you don’t know already.

Mariana. Oh, how dreadfully disappointing! Isn’t there really more in it than that?

Katya. Than what?

Mariana. Than what I know already.

Katya. But what do you know?

* * *

Scene II
In Guy Fallon’s Library

Mrs. Kontorompa. I was just saying the same thing as I came upstairs. “What an exquisite day!” That’s what I was saying.

Guy. But a trifle too hot.

Mrs. K. Ye—es. [A long pause.] Oh yes, quite.

Guy. Seen Katya?

Mrs. K. I waved my hand to her in the garden as I came up the drive.... How is Katya, Guy?

Guy. Tophole.

Mrs. K. [Significantly.] Have you anything to tell me about—well, about Katya?

Guy. Let me see, now.... N-no; I think not. She bought three new hats yesterday, but I haven’t seen them yet.

Mrs. K. What I meant was.... Well, it’s no use beating about the bush—how is she?

Guy. But I’ve already told you, mamma. She has the appetite of a horse.

Mrs. K. Nothing at all? well—quite?... no sign that?... you know!

Guy. I wish I did. What is it you want me to tell you?

Mrs. K. Just the truth—the honest, simple truth.

Guy. [Wilfully misunderstanding her.] Oh, your new toque! How stupid I am! I think it’s simply splendid. But you always do look nice in pink.

Mrs. K. [Beaming.] How sweet of you, Guy! But that wasn’t it.... Have you ever considered, Guy, that I should like to be a grandmother?

Guy. No. Would you really? Really and truly?

Mrs. K. Yes, Guy. The patter of little feet, the ... the soft, smooth cheeks....

Guy. But I detest children.

Mrs. K. Ah! You’ll never make me believe that. No good man hates children.

Guy. No, I s’pose not. But then, mamma, I’m not good. I remember that when I was a boy....

Mrs. K. But poor Katya! Consider her. Consider me.

Guy. In what way?

Mrs. K. You—you know perfectly well what I mean. If I could only be the grandmother of one child—well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?

Guy. It would be a great deal.

Mrs. K. For my part, I had four brothers and three sisters. My grandmother had seventy-three grandchildren.

Guy. Yes, people were very thorough half a century ago. Quite like the Old Testament.

Mrs. K. But you will promise, won’t you?

Guy. Do you know, mamma, you have the manner of being most direct and open, but as a matter of fact you are speaking in riddles. Now, tell me—what is it you want me to promise you?

Mrs. K. I don’t quite know.

Guy. I thought you didn’t.

Mrs. K. You see, Katya is so reticent in these matters. But you’ll do your best, I’m sure. To win over Katya, I mean. That is, if it is Katya.

Guy. Who is to blame, you mean?

Mrs. K. Oh, I shouldn’t say “blame.” Although if it goes on much longer, I may. But you’ll think it over, eh? That is the most I can expect at our first interview on this subject.

Guy. There are to be others?

Mrs. K. If necessary.

Guy. But, mamma, you don’t know how much at sea I feel. As a matter of fact, I’m not absolutely certain that we’re both talking about the same thing. Will you tell me what you have been talking about?

Mrs. K. N-no. You tell me first.

Guy. I daren’t.

Mrs. K. That’s it! We are talking about the same thing. I felt sure we were.

Guy. Well, so long as you’re satisfied, mamma....

Mrs. K. I shall look forward to it with the greatest pleasure. You see, you’ve got such a big house. I should have this room, if I were you. Bars across the windows, and so on.

Guy. But the stairs!

Mrs. K. A little wicket gate on the landing. They begin to prowl about quite early. I remember Katya eighteen years ago—always on her hands and knees!

Guy. She’s in the garden with Mariana.

Mrs. K. Yes, I saw her.... Well, then, that’s settled.

Guy. One can only do what one can.

Mrs. K. Yes, win her over, Guy: win her over.

* * *

Scene III
In Guy Fallon’s Garden

Mrs. Kontorompa. What an exquisite day! How do you do?

Mariana. How do you do? Yes, isn’t it?

Guy. We’ve been talking, Katya.

Katya. Yes?... I think the fuchsias are better than ever this year, don’t you, mamma?

Mrs. K. Yes, darling. Oh, Katya, I am so pleased.

Katya. How nice, mamma! I like you to be happy. But what has happened?

Mrs. K. Oh—er—nothing. Nothing that I know of. But Guy has promised to....

Mariana. I’m afraid I must be really going now, Katya, dear.

Mrs. K. Oh, don’t run away just because I’ve come.

Mariana. Oh, Mrs. Kontorompa, it wasn’t that. But, you see....

Katya. Mariana feels embarrassed.

Mariana. Oh—no, dear: why should I?

Guy. You felt that mamma was going to say something.

Mrs. K. Yes—that’s quite right. You’ve reminded me. Katya, I was going to say that Guy has promised to....

Guy. To do my best to....

Mrs. K. Win you over.

Katya. Me? Win me over? To what?

Guy. Bars on the window—a wicket-gate on the landing.

Katya. But I am won over. I always have been.

Mrs. K. Then it is your fault, Guy.

Guy. If I’d only known! You see, you never told me.

Mariana. How mysterious all this sounds.

Mrs. K. Well, Mariana, this is how it stands. You see, Guy and Katya have been married three years and....

Mariana. Oh yes: quite. I understand. Good-bye, Mrs. Kontorompa. Good-bye, Katya. Goo....

Guy. Really, mamma.

Katya. Really, mamma.

Mrs. K. Oh, dear, dear! What have I said?

Katya. Ah, here’s tea coming!

Mrs. K. Oh, I can’t stop. I must hurry home and tell papa the good news. So very satisfactory! These modern times—the things people do. Don’t they, dear?

Mariana. And don’t do, too.

Mrs. K. Yes. Well, Guy, I keep you to your word. I shall expect to hear some news shortly. Good-bye, dear Katya. So satisfactory. Take care of yourself, dear.

Guy. Why, what has happened, Katya?

Katya. Nothing. Mother merely anticipates.

NERVES

To
Sieveking Pollard

WHEN Dr. Julian Sylvester arrived at Doiran, he took a room at the house of Draco’s mother, and his mule was put to grass in the fields behind the town. Draco, rather shy, but hot with curiosity, carried his baggage upstairs—a large trunk, six wooden boxes clamped with iron, and a small sack of provisions. Placing these on the floor against the wall, he turned to leave, but stopped when Sylvester called him.

“You speak Greek, eh?” asked the doctor.

“Yes, sir, and Bulgarian as well.”

“Well, I’m going to stay here a week—see? And I want you to get me a young and strong guide—a man who knows the country—every yard of it. I’m collecting butterflies and taking photographs.”

Draco’s face lit up and shone.

“See here—this is the kind of thing,” said Sylvester, going down on his knees and opening one of the wooden boxes with a key he took from his pocket. “By the way, what is your name?”

“Draco.”

“Draco—right. Well, mine is Sylvester.”

“Xilvesta?”

“That’s near enough. Now, Draco, look at these bottles. Butterflies—all butterflies, see? And here are some photographs I took outside Salonika. I want more butterflies, more photographs. Ten drachmæ a day for the man who’ll come with me and show me where to find what I want.”

“I’ll come, sir.”

“Will you? Yes, I think you’ll do. You look strong enough.”

Draco was dark and bronzed and tall. He had quick, restless eyes, and a smile that said: “How fine it is to be alive!”

“Well, that’s a bargain, see?” said Sylvester. “We’ll start to-morrow at six.”

If ever there was a man made for the open air, that man was Draco. He accepted his mother’s cottage as one of the unavoidable evils of life. And he was a born hunter. His eyes swallowed everything, and his quick elastic step was as graceful as the walk of a thoroughbred. His mind was stored with facts. To look at his eager face with its large, vehement eyes and sensitive mouth—all so desperately alive—was to receive the impression that here was a man who, even in his sleep, could never be entirely at rest. The sun, one felt, was in his blood. He was as unstable and fluid as quicksilver.

Sylvester took to him at once, and in their day-long walks over the lonely, uninhabited mountains he learned many curious things from the man who, engaged as a servant, at once became a friend.

It was during one of these walks that, peering over a precipitous cliff, they saw a golden eagle standing on a ledge below them. They lay watching it for a long time, the almost vertical sun smiting their prone bodies.

“Its nest is sure to be somewhere near, Draco. I would give a hundred drachmæ to get a photograph of the female sitting on her eggs.”

“That is the female,” said Draco, who was examining the bird through Sylvester’s field-glasses.

Presently, the great bird rose, flapped its heavy, bright wings, and flew upwards until it had reached a ledge thirty feet below the two watchers. There, just visible, was its nest.

“Ah!” breathed Sylvester, drawing himself away, and sitting down well out of sight of the eagle. “Can it be done, Draco? Can we get down to her?”

Draco was still looking down at the bird, his face alive with excitement. He stayed there a long time. When, at length, he joined Sylvester, his face and bared chest and arms were covered with sweat. He pressed his hands to his forehead.

“Yes, it can be done. But we shall want ropes. I could climb down with the camera, fix it up a yard or two from the nest, return here and pull up the rope. After that, it’s simply a matter of waiting for her to settle again. The only thing is—have you got enough tubing? I reckon you’ll want about thirty-five feet.”

“Oh yes: I’ve plenty of tubing. It’s a great find this, Draco. If only we can pull it off, see? Now, what do you say?—shall we leave it till to-morrow, or go back home now, get our ropes and tubing, and come back this evening an hour or so before sunset?”

“Just as you like. But this evening would be a splendid time; for we shall then have the sun shining straight on the nest.”

As he spoke, he again pressed his hands against his forehead. He licked his lips with the tip of his tongue.

“You look a bit overwrought, Draco. Are you feeling all right?”

“Well, it’s my eyes. The sun has got into them. My head aches a bit—but it’s nothing.”

They made their way down the hot, broken rocks until they saw Doiran, white and gleaming, at their feet. Beyond was the wonderful blue lake, and beyond the lake rose the Belashitza Mountains cutting the sky with their fanged crests.

“How wonderful it is!” exclaimed Sylvester.

Draco gazed on the scene with his swollen pupils.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I never, never get tired of it. I was born down there.”

It was now midday and the sun was at its hottest. The atmosphere danced before them liquidly. No birds sang, for it was Pan’s hour. The sun had smitten that world to silence.

Five hours later they were again climbing the mountains. Draco’s head was one intolerable ache, but he made no complaint. He had been like this before; it would soon pass.

But when they had nearly reached their destination, he was compelled to stop and lie down in the shade of a rock.

“You are feverish, Draco, see?” said Sylvester. “You really ought not to have come out a second time. You’ve got a touch of the sun. Look here: we’ll go back and come again to-morrow.”

“No,” said Draco, “no.”

And he tried to rise; but, his legs crumpling up beneath the weight of his body, he fell down and lay full-length on the bare rock.

Sylvester sat down by his side, took off his coat, folded it into a pillow, and placed it beneath Draco’s head.

For half an hour they remained in silence; then:

“I feel better now,” said Draco.

“Good. But you mustn’t go any farther. Do you feel fit to walk back?”

“You go alone—to the nest, I mean. Can you climb down the rope and up again?”

“Oh yes: I’ve done that sort of thing many a time.”

“Well, you go alone. I’ll wait here until you return. As soon as it gets cool I shall feel much better. You are bound to come this way on your way back.”

“Very well, I’ll do that. Sure you’re well enough to be left alone?”

Draco, his eyes large and bloodshot, glanced at his companion and laughed.

“Of course. This is not the first time I’ve been left alone in the mountains.”

Sylvester disappeared round the corner, and Draco, closing his eyes, soon fell asleep. He breathed heavily, and for two hours he did not move. The air grew cooler, and the sun was lurching fantastically behind the mountain-tops when he awoke. The pain had gone, but he awoke with an acute feeling of apprehension. For a moment or two, he could not remember where he was or how he came to be there. Then, remembering Sylvester,

“It’s time he was back,” he said to himself.

He looked at the sun: in an hour it would be dark.

Scrambling to his feet, he hastened up the mountain, his heart beating rapidly with a fear that he had never felt for himself. He blamed himself for allowing Sylvester to go alone, for, after all, it was a job for two men. Increasing his pace every minute, he reached the place, breathless and alarmed.

The rope was there. One end of it was securely fastened round a boulder. Lying down at the edge of the cliff, Draco peered over and saw the other end of the rope resting on the ledge; by its side was the camera. But there was no sign of Sylvester.

Seized by panic, Draco shouted into the chasm below.

“Dr. Sylvester! Dr. Sylvester!”

But the great spaces swallowed up the sound of his voice. A vulture swam past him and disappeared. Again he called and, straining, listened. No answer. No sound. Almost mad with a fear that crawled into his very vitals, he shouted again and again without pause.

Dark blue shadows crept out of the rocks; the purple sky darkened. He could no longer see the ledge below him.

It was then that his nerves conquered him and he became their victim.

He rose and, running, retraced his steps. Anxiety made havoc of his reason. If only he knew the worst! Almost blindly he ran, but instinct and knowledge guided him.

Half-way down the mountains he pulled himself up suddenly. He had thought himself incapable of further suffering, but now he felt a pain like a fretted blade sawing at his brain. Why, they would say that he had murdered Sylvester! Who would believe his story? Would even his mother believe it? It was as clear as the sun. He had taken Sylvester up into the mountains, had robbed him, and then thrown him over the cliff! His body would never be found in those inaccessible heights!

He stood, chilled and trembling. Oh, God! if he only knew!

Then reason left him. He scrambled hither and thither on the rocks on hands and knees, calling “Sylvester! Sylvester!” as he went. His hands and knees were bleeding, and something like blood seemed to be washing about within his brain. Occasionally, he stopped with exhaustion, but on each occasion before he had got back his breath he started again, saying aloud: “I must waste no time. Where is he? Where is he?”

The inhumanly human cry of jackals desolated the night. He paused and imitated them. Then, having scrambled faster and faster in the dark, he lay full-length, his airless lungs seeming to be about to burst open his great, hairy chest.

The pale-green dawn came up the sky and washed the rocks with its colour. Looking around him he saw close at hand the rope by which Sylvester had climbed down the face of the cliff. The place seemed friendly: here he could find release.

He stepped to the edge of the cliff and looked down. A faint mist clouded the hollow below where his companion was lying. For a moment he swayed, and then, with a start, drew back. He tried to totter over the brink, but could not. Something held him back—fear!

With an effort he fixed his mind on death and on the desire for death. And again he tried to let his body go. But it hung stupidly back: he had a coward’s body.

He would try another way. Having walked fifty paces away from the cliff’s edge, he turned about and began to run, his crimson hands and knees dropping blood as he went. As he neared the edge, his body instinctively tried to stop. But it was too late, the momentum he had gathered was too great. Mind had conquered matter, and he ran and vanished into space.

At that moment, Dr. Sylvester, tired and weary-eyed, entered the cottage of Draco’s mother. He had been walking all night.

THE END

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Table of Contents

- TALES OF A CRUEL COUNTRY
- CONTENTS
- THE TWO LOVERS
- KATYA KONTOROMPA
- THE BATHS MURDER
- THE DREAMER
- WHEN THE GREEN ROSES CAME
- PAUL OF TARSUS
- THE MOON MAN
- HOW HIS FRIENDS DESTROYED HIM
- THE VICTIM
- TRENCH MADNESS
- LOOT
- HOW IT GREW
- KATYA’S WOOING
- THE STORM
- THE MAN WHO GAVE HIS SOUL
- THE STRANGER
- A LITTLE CORRESPONDENCE
- THE DEAF-MUTE OF KILINDIR
- LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
- INTO DUST

- THE GRANDCHILD

- Scene I In Guy Fallon’s Garden
- Scene II In Guy Fallon’s Library
- Scene III In Guy Fallon’s Garden

- NERVES

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE