CHAPTER V
“Why are you bringing me to Olympia?”
That question, unuttered by her lips, was often in Rosamund’s eyes as they drew near to the green wilds of Elis. Of course they had always meant to visit Olympia before they sailed away to England, but she knew very well that Dion had some special purpose in his mind, and that it was closely connected with his great love of her. She had understood that on the Acropolis, and her “farewell” had been an act of submission to his will not wholly unselfish. Her curiosity was awake.
What was the secret of Olympia?
They had gone by train to Patras, slept there, and thence rode on horseback to Pyrgos through the vast vineyards of the Peloponnesus—vineyards that stretched down to the sea and were dotted with sentinel cypresses. The heat was much greater than it had been in Athens. Enormous aloes hedged gardens from which came scents that seemed warm. The sandy soil, turned up by the horses’ feet, was hot to the touch. The air quivered, and was shot with a music of insects faint but pervasive.
Pyrgos was suffocating and noisy, but Rosamund was amused by democracy at close quarters, showing its naked love of liberty. Her strong humanity rose to the occasion, and she gave herself with a smiling willingness to the streets, in which men, women, children and animals, with lungs of leather, sent forth their ultimate music. Nevertheless, she was glad when she and Dion set out again, and followed the banks of the Alpheus, leaving the cries of the city behind them. It seemed to her that they were traveling to some hidden treasure, secluded in the folds of a green valley where the feet of men seldom, if ever, came. Dion’s eyes told her that they were drawing nearer and nearer to the secret he knew of, and was going to reveal to her. She often caught him looking at her with an almost boyish expression of loving anticipation; and more than once he laughed happily when he saw her question, but he would not give her an answer.
Peasants worked in the vineyards, shoulder-high in the plants, brown and sweating in the glare. Swarthy children, with intelligent eyes, often with delicate noses, and those pouting lips which are characteristic of many Greek statues, ran to stare at them, and sometimes followed them a little way, but without asking for alms. Then the solitudes took them, and they wound on and on, with their guide as their only companion.
He was a gentle, even languid-looking youth, called Nicholas Agathoulos, who was a native of Patras, but who had lived a good deal in Athens, who spoke a few words of English and French, and who professed a deep passion for Lord Byron. Nicholas rode on a mule, leading, or not leading as the case might be—for he was a charmingly careless person—a second mule on which was fastened Rosamund’s and Dion’s scanty luggage. Rosamund, like a born vagabond, was content to travel in this glorious climate with scarcely any impedimenta. When Nicholas was looked at he smiled peacefully under his quiet and unpretending black mustache. When he was not looked at he seemed to sleep with open eyes. He never sang or whistled, had no music at all in him; but he could quote stanzas from “Don Juan” in Greek, and, when he did that, he woke up, sparks of fire glowed in his eyes, and his employers realized that he shared to the full the patriotism of his countrymen.
Did he know the secret of Olympia which Dion was concealing so carefully, and enjoying so much, as the little train of pilgrims wound onwards among fruit trees and shrubs of arbutus, penetrating farther and ever farther into a region sweet and remote? Of course he must know it.
“I shall ask Nicholas,” Rosamund said once to Dion, perversely.
“What?”
“You know perfectly well what.”
His face was a map of innocence as he touched his thin horse with the whip and rode forward a little faster.
“What is there to see at Olympia, Nicholas?” she said, speaking rather loudly in order that Dion might hear.
Nicholas woke up, and hastily, in a melodious voice, quoted some scraps of guide-book. Rosamund did not find what she wanted among them. She knew already about the ruins, about the Nike of Paeonius and the Hermes of Praxiteles. So she left the young Greek to his waking dream, and possessed her soul in a patience that was not difficult. She liked to dwell in anticipation. And she felt that any secret this land was about to reveal to her would be, must be, beautiful. She trusted Greece.
“We aren’t far off now,” said Dion presently, as they rode up the valley—a valley secluded from the world, pastoral and remote, shaded by Judas trees.
“How peaceful and lovely it is.”
“And full of the echoes of the Pagan feet which once trod here.”
“I don’t hear them,” said Rosamund, “and I am listening.”
“Perhaps you could never hear Pagan echoes. And yet you love Greece.”
“Yes. But I have nothing Pagan in me. I know that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You are the ideal woman to be in Greece with. If I don’t come back to Greece with you, I shall never come back.”
They rode on. Her horse was following his along the windings of the river. Presently she said:
“Where are we going to sleep? Surely there isn’t a possible inn in this remoteness?—or have they build one for travelers who come here in winter and spring?”
“Our inn will be a little above Olympia.”
The green valley seemed closing about them, as if anxious to take them to itself, to keep them in its closest intimacy, with a gentle jealousy. Rosamund had a sensation, almost voluptuous, of yielding to the pastoral greenness, to the warm stillness, to the hush of the delicate wilds.
“Elis! Elis!” she whispered to herself. “I am riding up into Elis, where once the processions passed to the games, where Nero built himself a mansion. And there’s a secret here for me.”
Then suddenly there came into her mind the words in the “Paradiso” which she had been dreaming over in London on the foggy day when Dion had asked her to marry him.
The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence from warm love and living hope which conquereth the Divine will.
It was strange that the words should come to her just then. She could not think why they came. But, repeating them to herself, she felt how very far off she was from Paganism. Yet she had within her warm love surely and living hope. Could such things, as they were within her, ever do violence to the Kingdom of Heaven? She looked between her horse’s perpetually moving ears at the hollow athletic back of her young husband. If she had not married she would have given rein to deep impulses within her which now would never be indulged. They would not have led her to Greece. If she had been governed by them she would never have been drawn on by the secret of Olympia. How strange it was that, within the compass of one human being, should be contained two widely differing characters. Well, she had chosen, and henceforth she must live according to the choice she had made. But how would she have been in the other life of which she had dreamed so often, and so deeply, in her hours of solitude? She would never know that. She had chosen the warm love and the living hope, but the Kingdom of Heaven should never suffer violence from anything she had chosen. There are doubtless many ways of consecrating a life, of rendering service.
They came into a scattered and dingy hamlet. Hills rose about it, but the narrowing valley still wound on.
“We are close to the ruins,” said Dion.
“Already! Where are we going to sleep?”
“Up there!”
He pointed to a steep hill that was set sheer above the valley.
“Go on with the mules, Nicholas.”
Nicholas rode on, smiling.
“What’s that building on the hump?”
“The Museum.”
“I wonder why they put the inn so far away.”
“It isn’t really very far, not many minutes from here. But the way’s pretty steep. Now then, Rosamund!”
They set their horses to the task. Nicholas and the mules were out of sight. A bend of the little track had hidden them.
“Why, there’s a village up here!” said Rosamund, as they came to a small collection of houses with yards and rough gardens and scattered outbuildings.
“Yes—Drouva. Our inn is just beyond it, but quite separated from it.”
“I’m glad of that. They don’t bother very much about cleanliness here, I should think.”
He was smiling at her now. His lips were twitching under his mustache, and his eyes seemed trying not to tell something to her.
“Surely the secret isn’t up here?”
He shook his head, still smiling, almost laughing.
They were now beyond the village, and emerged on a plateau of rough short grass which seemed to dominate the world.
“This is the top of the hill of Drouva,” said Dion, with a ring of joy, and almost of pride, in his voice. “And there’s our inn, the Inn of Drouva.”
Rosamund pulled up her horse. She did not say a word. She just looked, while her horse lowered his head and sniffed the air in through his twitching nostrils. Then he sent forth a quivering neigh, his welcome to the Inn of Drouva. The view was immense, but Rosamund was not looking at it. A small dark object not far off in the foreground of this great picture held her eyes. For the moment she saw little or nothing else.
She saw a dark, peaked tent pitched in the middle of the plateau. Smoke from a fire curled up behind it. Two or three figures moved near it. Beyond, Nicholas was unloading the mules.
She dropped the cord by which she had been guiding her horse and slipped down to the ground. Her legs were rather stiff from riding. She held on to the saddle for a moment.
“A camp?” she said at last.
Dion was beside her.
“An awfully rough one.”
“How jolly!”
She said the words almost solemnly.
“Dion, you are a brick!” she added, after a pause. “I’ve never stayed in camp before. A real brick! But you always are.”
“Aren’t you coming into the camp?”
She put her hand on his arm and kept him back.
“No—wait! What did you mean by shaking your head when I asked you if the secret was up here?”
“This isn’t the real secret. It wasn’t because of this that I asked you suddenly on the Acropolis to say ‘farewell’ to the Parthenon.”
“There’s another secret?”
“There’s another reason, the real reason, why I hurried you to Olympia. But I’m going to let you find it out for yourself. I shan’t tell you anything.”
“But how shall I know when——?”
“You will know.”
“To-day?”
“Don’t you think we might stay on our hill-top till to-morrow?”
“Yes, all right. It’s glorious here; I won’t be impatient. But how could you manage to get the tent here before we came?”
“We’ve been two nights on the way, Patras and Pyrgos. That gave plenty of time to the magician to work the spell. Come along.”
This time she did not hold him back. Her eagerness was as great as his. Certainly it was a very ordinary camp, scarcely, in fact, a camp at all. The tent was small and of the roughest kind, but there were two neat little camp-beds within it, with their toes planted on the short dry grass. In the iron washhand stand were a shining white basin and a jug filled with clear water. There was a cake of remarkable pink soap with a strange and piercing scent; there was a “tooth glass”; there was a straw mat.
“What isn’t there?” cried Rosamund, who was almost as delighted as a child.
A grave and very handsome gentleman from Athens, Achilles Stavros by name, received her congratulations with a classical smile of satisfaction.
“He’s even got a genuine Greek nose for the occasion!” Rosamund said delightedly to Dion, when Achilles retired for a moment to give some instructions about tea to the cook. “Where did you find him?”
“That’s my secret.”
“I never realised how delicious a camp was before. My wildest dreams are surpassed.”
As they looked at the two small, hard chairs with straw bottoms which were solemnly set out side by side facing the view, and upon which Achilles expected them to sink voluptuously for the ritual of tea, they broke into laughter at Rosamund’s exaggerated expressions of delight. But directly she was able to stop laughing she affirmed with determination:
“I don’t care what anybody says, or thinks; I repeat it”—she glanced from the straw mat to the cake of anemic pink soap—“my wildest dreams are surpassed. To think”—she spread out her hands—“only to think of finding a tooth glass here! It’s—it’s admirable!”
She turned upon him an almost fanatical eye, daring contradiction; and they both laughed again, long and loud like two children who, suddenly aware of a keen physical pleasure, prolong it beyond all reasonable bounds.
“What are we going to have for tea?” she asked.
“Tea,” Dion cried.
“You ridiculous creature!”
From a short distance, Achilles gazed upon the merriment of theses newly-married English travelers. Nobody had told him they were newly married; he just knew it, had known it at a glance. As he watched, the laughter presently died away, and he saw the two walk forward to the edge of the small plateau, then stand still to gaze at the view.
The prospect from the hill of Drouva above Olympia is very great, and all Rosamund’s inclination to merriment died out of her as she looked upon it. Even her joy in the camp was forgotten for a moment.
Upon their plateau, sole guests of the bareness, stood two small olive trees, not distorted by winds. Rosamund leaned against one of them as she gazed, put her arms round it with a sort of affectionate carelessness that was half-protective, that seemed to say, “You dear little tree! How nice of you to be here. But you almost want taking care of.” Then the tree was forgotten, and the Hellenic beauty reigned over her spirit, as she gazed upon the immense pastoral bounded by mountains and the sea; a green wilderness threaded by a serpentine river of silver—a far-flung river which lingered on its way, journeying hither and thither, making great curves as if it loved the wilderness and wished to know it well, to know all of it before being merged irrevocably with the sea.
“Those are the valleys of the Kladeos and the Alpheios.”
“Yes.”
“And that far-off Isle is the Island of Zante.”
“Of Zante,” she repeated.
After a long pause she said:
“You know those words somewhere in the Bible—‘the wilderness and the solitary places’?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve always loved them, just those words. Even when I was quite a child I liked to say them. And I remember once, when I was staying at Sherrington, we drove over to the cathedral. Canon Wilton took us into the stalls. It was a week-day and there were very few people. The anthem was Wesley’s ‘The Wilderness.’ I had never heard it before, and when I heard those words—my words—being sung, I had such a queer thrill. I wanted to cry and I was startled. To most people, I suppose, the word wilderness suggests something dreary and parched, ugly desolation.”
“Yes. The scapegoat was driven out into the wilderness.”
“I think I’d rather take my sin into the wilderness than anywhere else. Purification might be found there.”
“Your sin!” he said. “As if——” He was silent.
Zante seemed sleeping in the distance of the Ionian Sea, far away as the dream from which one has waked, touched with a dream’s mystic remoteness. The great plain, stretching to mountains and sea, vast and green and lonely—but with the loneliness that smiles, desiring nothing else—seemed uninhabited. Perhaps there were men in it, laboring among the vineyards or toiling among the crops, women bending over the earth by which they lived, or washing clothes on the banks of the river. Rosamund did not look for them and did not see them. In the green landscape, over which from a distance the mountains kept their quiet and deeply reserved watch, she detected no movement. Even the silver of the river seemed immobile, as if its journeyings were now stilled by an afternoon spell.
“It’s as empty as the plain of Marathon, but how much greater!” she said at last.
“At Marathon there was the child.”
“Yes, and here there’s not even a child.”
She sighed.
“I wonder what one would learn to be if one lived on the hill of Drouva?” she said.
“It will be much more beautiful at sunset. We are looking due west. Soon we shall have the moon rising behind us.”
“What memories I shall carry away!”
“And I.”
“You were here before alone?”
“Yes. I walked up from the village just before sunset after a long day among the ruins. I—I didn’t know then of your existence. That seems strange.”
But she was gazing at the view, and now with an earnestness in which there seemed to him to be a hint of effort, as if she were, perhaps, urging imagination to take her away and to make her one with that on which she looked. It struck him just then that, since they had been married, she had changed a good deal, or developed. A new dreaminess had been added to her power and her buoyancy which, at times, made her very different from the radiant girl he had won.
“The Island of Zante!” she said once more, with a last look at the sea, as they turned away in answer to the grave summons of Achilles. “Ah, what those miss who never travel!”
“And yet I remember your saying once that you had very little of the normal in you, and even something about the cat’s instinct.”
“Probably I meant the cat’s instinct to say nasty things. Every woman—”
“No, what you meant—”
He began actually to explain, but her “Puss, Puss, Puss!” stopped him. Her dream was over and her laugh rang out infectiously as they returned to the tent.
The tea was fairly bad, but she defended its merits with energy, and munched biscuits with an excellent appetite. Afterwards she smoked a cigarette and Dion his pipe, sitting on the ground and leaning against the tent wall. In vain Achilles drew her attention to the chairs. Rosamund stretched out her long limbs luxuriously and shook her head.
“I’m not a school-teacher, Achilles,” she said.
And Dion had to explain what she meant perhaps—only perhaps, for he wasn’t sure about it himself,—to that classical personage.
“These chairs fight against the whole thing,” she said, when Achilles was gone.
“I’ll hide them,” said Dion.
He was up in a moment, caught hold of the chairs, gripping one in each hand, and marched off with them. When he came back Rosamund was no longer sitting on the ground by the tent wall. She had slipped away. He looked round. She must have gone beyond the brow of the hill, for she was not on the plateau. He hesitated, pulling hard at his pipe. He knew her curious independence, knew that sometimes she wanted to be alone. No doubt she had gone to look at the great view from some hidden place. Well, then, he ought not to try to find her, he ought to respect her wish to be by herself. But this evening it hurt him. As he stood there he felt wounded, for he remembered telling her that the great view would be much more beautiful at sunset when the moon would be rising behind them. The implication of course had been, “Wait a little and I’ll show you.” It was he who had chosen the place for the camp, he who had prepared the surprise. Perhaps foolishly, he had thought of the whole thing, even of the plain, the river, the mountains, the sea and the Island of Zante, as a sort of possession which he was going gloriously to share with her. And now——! He felt deprived, almost wronged. The sky was changing. He turned and looked to the east. Above Olympia, in a clear and tremulous sky, a great silver moon was rising. It was his hour, and she had hidden herself.
Again, at that moment, Dion felt almost afraid of his love.
His pipe had gone out. He took it from his lips, bent, and knocked out the tobacco against the heel of his boot. He was horribly disappointed, but he was not going to search for Rosamund; nor was he ever going to let her know of his disappointment. Perhaps by concealing it he would kill it. He thrust his pipe into his pocket, hesitated, then walked a little way from the camp and sat down on the side of the hill. What rot it was his always wanting to share everything now. Till he met Rosamund he had always thought only women could never be happy unless they shared their pleasures, and preferably with a man. Love apparently could play the very devil, bridge the gulf between sexes, make a man who was thoroughly masculine in all his tastes and habits have “little feelings” which belonged properly only to women.
Doric! Suddenly the word jumped up in his mind, and a vision of the Parthenon columns rose before his imagination, sternly glorious, almost with the strength of a menace. He set his teeth together and cursed himself for a fool and a backslider.
Rosamund and he were to be Doric. Well, this evening he didn’t know exactly what he was, but he certainly was not Doric.
Just then he heard the sound of a shot. He did not know what direction it came from, but, fantastically enough, it seemed to be a comment on his thought, a brusk, decisive exclamation flung at him from out of the silent evening. “Sentimentalist! Take that, and get out of your mush of feeling!” As he recognized it—he now forced himself to that sticking-point—to be a mush, the shot’s comment fell in, of course, with his own view of the matter.
He sat still for a moment, thinking of the shot, and probably expecting it to be repeated. It was not repeated. A great silence prevailed, the silence of the Hellenic wild held in the hand of evening. And abruptly, perhaps, from that large and pervasive silence, Dion caught a coldness of fear. All his perceptions rushed upon him, an acute crowd. He sprang up, put his hand to his revolver. Rosamund out alone somewhere in the loneliness of Greece—evening—a shot!
He was over the brow of the hill towards the west in a moment. All respect for Rosamund’s evening whim, all remembrance of his own proper pride, was gone from him.
“Rosamund!” he called; “Rosamund!”
“Here!” replied her strong voice from somewhere a little way below him.
And he saw her standing on the hillside and looking downwards. He thrust his revolver back into his pocket quickly. Already his pride was pushing its head up again. He stood still, looking down on her.
“It’s all right, it is?”
This time she lifted her head and turned her face up to him.
“All right?”
“I heard a shot.”
He saw laughter dawning in her face.
“You don’t mean to say——?”
She laughed frankly.
“Come down here!”
He joined her.
“What was it?”
“Did you, or didn’t you, think I’d been attacked by Greek brigands?”
“Of course not! But I heard a shot, and it just struck me——”
At that moment he was almost ashamed of loving her so much.
“Well, there’s the brigand, and I do believe he’s going to shoot again. The ruffian! Yes, he’s taking aim! Oh, Dion, let’s seek cover.”
Still laughing, she shrank against him. He put one arm round her shoulder bruskly, and his hand closed on her tightly. A little way below them, relieved with a strange and romantic distinctness against the evening light, in which now there was a strong suggestion of gold, was a small figure, straight, active—a figure of the open air and the wide spaces—with a gun to its right shoulder. A shot rang out.
“He’s got it,” said Rosamund.
And there was a note of admiring praise in her voice.
“That child’s a dead shot,” she added. “It’s quail he’s after, I believe. Look! He’s picking it up.”
The small black figure bent quickly down, after running forward a little way.
“He retrieves as well as he shoots. Shall we go to him and see whether it’s quail?”
“Another child,” said Dion.
He still had his arm round her shoulder.
“Why did you come here?” he asked.
“To look at the evening coming to me over the wilderness. But he made me forget it for a moment.”
Dion was staring at her now.
“I believe a child could make you forget anything,” he said.
“Let’s go to him.”
The gold of the evening was strengthening and deepening. The vast view, which was the background to the child’s little figure, was losing its robe of green and of blue, green of the land, blue of the sea, was putting on velvety darkness and gold. The serpentine river was a long band of gold flung out, as if by a careless enchanter, towards the golden sea in which Zante was dreaming. Remote and immense this land had seemed in the full daytime, a tremendous pastoral deserted by men, sufficient to itself and existing only for its own beauty. Now it existed for a child. The human element had caused nature, as it were, to recede, to take the second place. A child, bending down to pick up a shot quail, then straightening up victoriously, held the vast panorama in submission, as if he had quietly given out the order, “Make me significant.” And Rosamund, who had stolen away to meet the evening, was now only intent on knowing whether the shot bird was a quail or not.
It was a quail, and a fat one.
When they came to the boy they found him a barefooted urchin, with tattered coarse clothes and densely thick, uncovered black hair growing down almost to his fiery young eyes, which stared at them proudly. There was a wild look in those eyes never to be found in the eyes of a dweller in cities, a wild grace in his figure, and a complete self-possession in his whole bearing. The quail just shot he had in his hand. Another was stuffed into the large pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out and showed it to them, reading at a glance the admiration in Rosamund’s eyes. Dion held out a hand to the boy’s gun, but at this his manner changed, he clutched it tightly, moved a step or two back, and scowled.
“He’s a regular young savage,” said Dion.
“I like him as he is. Besides, why should he give his gun to a stranger? He knows nothing about us.”
“You’re immense!” said Dion, laughing.
“Let’s have the quail for our dinner.”
“D’you expect him to give them to us without a stand-up fight and probably bloodshed? For he’s armed, unfortunately!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Look here, Dion, you go off for a minute, and leave him with me. I think you get on his nerves.”
“Well, I’m——!”
But he went. He left the two figures together, and presently saw them both from a distance against the vastness of the gold. Bushes and shrubs, and two or three giant pine trees, between the summit of Drouva and the plain, showed black, and the figures of woman and child were almost ebon. Dion watched them. He could not see any features. The two were now like carved things which could move, and only by their movements could they tell him anything. The gun over the boy’s shoulder was like a long finger pointing to the west where a redness was creeping among the gold. The great moon climbed above Drouva. Bluish-gray smoke came from the camp-fire at a little distance. It ascended without wavering straight up in the windless evening. Far down in the hidden valley, behind Dion and below the small village, shadows were stealing through quiet Elis, shadows were coming to shroud the secret that was held in the shrine of Olympia. A slight sound of bells stole up on the stillness from somewhere below, somewhere not far from those two ebon figures. And this sound, suggestive of moving animals coming from pasture to protected places for the night, put a heart in the breast of this pastoral. Thin was the sound and delicate, fit music for Greece in the fragile evening. As Dion listened to it, he looked at that black finger below him pointing to the redness in the west. Then he remembered it was a gun, and, for an instant, looking at the red, he thought of the color of fresh blood.
At this moment the tall figure, Rosamund, took hold of the gun, and the two figures moved away slowly down the winding track in the hill, and were hidden at a turning of the path.
Almost directly a third shot rang out. The young dweller in the wilderness was allowing Rosamund to give a taste of her skill with the gun.
CHAPTER VI
Rosamund came back to the camp that evening with Dirmikis,—so the boy of the wilderness was called,—and five quail, three of them to her gun. She was radiant, and indeed had an air almost of triumph. Her eyes were sparkling, her cheeks were glowing; she looked like a beautiful schoolgirl as she walked in over the plateau with the sunset flushing scarlet behind her, and the big moon coming to meet her. Dirmikis, at her side, carried the quail upside down in his brown hands. Rosamund had the gun under her right arm.
“It’s a capital gun,” she called out to Dion. “I got three. Here, Dirmikis,”—she turned to the boy,—“show them.”
“Does he understand English?”
“No, but he understands me!” she retorted with pride. “Look there!”
Dirmikis held up the birds, smiling a savage smile.
“Aren’t they fat? Feel them, Dion! The three fattest ones fell to my gun, but don’t tell him.”
She sketched a delicious wink, looking about sixteen.
“I really have a good eye,” she added, praising herself with gusto. “It’s no use being over-modest, is it? If one has a gift, well one just has it. Here, Dirmikis!”
She gave his gun carefully to the barefooted child.
“He’s a little stunner, and so chivalrous. I never met a boy I liked more. Do give him a nice present, Dion, and let him feed in the camp if he likes.”
“Well, what next? What am I to give him?”
“Nothing dressy. He isn’t a manikin, he’s a real Doric boy.”
She slapped Dirmikis on the back with a generous hand. He smiled radiantly, this time without any savagery.
“The sort of boy who’ll be of some use in the world.”
“I’ll give him a tip.”
Rosamund seemed about to assent when an idea struck her, as she afterwards said, “with the force of a bomb.”
“I know what he’ll like better than anything.”
“Well?”
“Your revolver, to be sure!”
“My revolver to be suren’t!” exclaimed Dion passionately, inventing a negative. “I bought it at great cost to defend you with, not for the endowment of a half-naked varmint from the wilderness under Drouva.”
“Be careful, Dion; you’re insulting a Doric boy!”
“Here—I’ll insult him with a ten-lepta piece.”
“Don’t be mean. Bribe him thoroughly if you’re going to bribe him. We go shooting together again to-morrow evening.”
“Do you indeed?”
“Yes, directly after tea. It’s all arranged. Dirmikis suggested it with the most charming chivalry, and I gave yes for an answer. So we must keep on good terms with him at whatever cost.”
She cocked up her chin and walked exultantly into the tent. A minute afterwards there rang out to the evening a warm contralto voice singing.
Dirmikis looked at the tent and then at Dion with an air of profound astonishment. The quail dropped from his hands, and he did not even snatch at them as he listened to the remarkable sounds which, he could not doubt, flowed from his Amazon. His brows came down over his fiery eyes, and he seemed to stand at gaze like an animal, half-fascinated and half-suspicious. The voice died away and was followed by a sound of pouring water. Then Dirmikis accepted two ten-lepta pieces and picked up the quail. Dion introduced him to the cook, and it was understood that he should be fed in the camp, and that the quail should form part of the evening meal.
Very good they proved to be, cooked in leaves with the addition of some fried slices of fat ham. Rosamund exulted again as she ate them, recognizing the birds she had shot “by the taste.”
“This is one! Aren’t mine different from Dirmikis’s?” she exclaimed. “So much more succulent!”
“Naturally, you great baby!”
“Life is glorious!” she exclaimed resonantly. “To eat one’s own bag on the top of Drouva under the moon! Oh!”
She looked at the moon, then bent over her plate of metal-ware which was set on the tiny folding-table. In her joy she was exactly like a big child.
“I wonder how many I shall get to-morrow. I got my eye in at the very start. Really, Dion, you know, I’m a gifted creature. It isn’t every one——”
And she ran on, laughing at herself, reveling in her whimsical pretense of conceit till dinner was over.
“Now a cigarette! Never have I enjoyed any meal so much as this! It’s only out of doors that one gets hold of the real joie de vivre.”
“You’re never without it, thank God,” returned Dion, striking a match for her.
So still was the evening that the flame burned steadily even upon that height facing immensities. Rosamund leaned to it with the cigarette between her lips. Her face was browned to the sun. She looked rather like a splendid blonde gipsy, with loose yellow hair and the careless eyes of those who dwell under smiling heavens. She sent out a puff of cigarette smoke, directing it with ardor to the moon which now rode high above them.
“I’d like to catch up nature in my arms to-night,” she said. “Come, Dion, let’s go a little way.”
She was up, and put her arm through his like a comrade. He squeezed her arm against his side and, strolling there in the night on the edge of the hill, she talked at first with almost tumultuous energy, with an energy as of an Amazon who cared for the things of the soul as much as for the things of the body. To-night her body and soul seemed on the same high level of intensity.
At first she talked of the present, of their life in Greece and of what it had meant to her, what it had done for her; and then, always with her arm through Dion’s, she began to talk of the future.
“We’ve got to go away from all this, but let us carry it with us; you know, as one can carry things that one has really gathered up, really got hold of. It will mean a lot to us afterwards in England, in our regular humdrum life. Not that life’s ever humdrum. We must take Drouva to England, and Marathon, and the view from the Acropolis, and the columns of the Parthenon above all those, and the tombs.”
“But they’re sad.”
“We must take them. I’m quite sure the way to make life splendid, noble, what it is meant to be to each of us, is to press close against one’s heart all that is sent to one, the sorrows as well as the joys. Everything one tries to keep at arm’s length hurts one.”
“Sins?”
“Sins, Dion? I said what is sent to us.”
“Don’t you think——?”
“Sins are never sent to us, we always have to go and fetch them. It’s like that poor old chemist going round the corner in the fog with a jug for what is ruining his life.”
“What poor old chemist?” he asked.
“A great friend of mine in London—Mr. Thrush. You shall know him some day. Oh—but London! Now, Dion, can we, you and I, live perpetually in London after all this?”
“Well, dearest, I must stick close to business.”
“I know that. And we’ve got the little house. But later on?”
“And your singing, your traveling all over the place with a maid!”
“I wonder if I shall. To-night I don’t feel as if I shall.”
She stood still abruptly, and was silent for a minute.
“Don’t you think,” she said, in a different and less exuberant voice, and with a changed and less physical manner—“don’t you think sometimes, in exceptional hours, one can feel what is to come, what is laid up for one? I do. This is an exceptional hour. We are on the heights and it’s very wonderful. Well, perhaps to-night we can feel what is coming. Let’s try.”
“How?”
“Let’s just be quiet, and give ourselves up to the hill of Drouva, and Greece, and the night, and—and what surrounds and permeates us and all this.”
With a big and noble gesture she indicated the sleeping world far below them, breathless under the moon; the imperceptible valleys merged in the great plain through which the river, silver once more, moved unsleeping between its low-lying banks to the sea; the ranges of mountains which held themselves apart in the night, a great company, reserved and almost austere, yet trodden with confidence by the feet of those fairies who haunt the ancient lands; the sea which drew down the moon as a lover draws down his mistress; Zante riding the sea like a shadow in harbor.
And they were silent. Dion had a sensation of consciously giving himself, almost as a bather, to the sea. Did he feel what was coming to him and to this girl at his side, who was part of him, and yet who was alone, whose arm clasped his, yet whose soul dwelt far off in its own remoteness? Would the years draw them closer and closer together, knit them together, through greater knowledge, through custom, through shared joys and beliefs, through common beliefs, through children, till they were as branches growing out of one stem firmly rooted?
He gave himself and gave himself, or tried to give himself in the silence. Yet he could not have said truly that any mystical knowledge came to him. Only one thing he seemed strangely to know, that they would never have children. The sleeping world and the sea, and, as Rosamund had said, “what surrounds and permeates us and all this” seemed to permit him mysteriously to get at that one bit of foreknowledge. Something seemed to say to him, “You will be the father of one child.” And yet, when he came to think of it, he realized how probable, how indeed almost certain it was that the silent voice issued from within himself. Rosamund and he had talked about a child, a boy, had begun almost to sketch out mental plans for that boy’s upbringing; they had never talked about children. He believed that he had penetrated to the secret of the voice. He said to himself, “All that sort of thing comes out of one’s self. It doesn’t reach one from the outside.” And yet, when he looked out over the world, which seemed wrapped in ethereal garments, garments woven by spirit on looms no hand of woman or man might ever touch, he was vaguely conscious that all within him which was of any real value was there too. Surely he did not possess. Rather was he possessed of.
He looked at Rosamund at last.
“Have you got anything?”
But she did not answer him. There was a great stillness in her big eyes. All the vital exuberance of body and spirit mingled together had vanished from her abruptly. Nothing of the Amazon who had captured the heart of Dirmikis remained. As Dion looked at her now, he simply could not see the beautiful schoolgirl of sixteen, the blonde gipsy who had bent forward, cigarette in mouth, to his match, who had leaned back and blown rings to the moon above Drouva. Had she ever set the butt of a gun against her shoulder? Something in this woman’s eyes made him suddenly feel as if he ought to leave her alone. Yet her arm still lay on his, and she was his.
Against the silver of the moon the twisted trunks of the two small olive trees showed black and significant. The red of the dying camp-fire glowed not far from the tent. Dogs were barking in the hamlet of Drouva. She neither saw details nor heard ugly sounds in the night. He knew that. And the rest? It seemed to him that something of her, the spirit of her, perhaps, or some part of it with which his had never yet had any close contact, was awake and at work in the night. But though he held her arm in his she was a long way from him. And there came to him this thought:
“I felt as if I ought to leave her alone. But she has left me alone.”
Almost mechanically, and slowly, he straightened his arm, thus letting hers slip. She did not seem to notice his action. She gazed out towards Zante over a world that now looked very mystical. In the daylight it had been a green pastoral. Now there was over it, and even surely in it, a dim whiteness, a something pure and hushed, like the sound, remote and curiously final, of a quiet sleeper.
That night, when they went to bed, Rosamund was full of the delight of a new experience. She insisted that the flap of the tent should not be kept shut down. She had never slept in a tent before, and was resolved to look out and see the stars from her pillow.
“And my olive tree,” she added.
Obediently, as soon as she was in her camp-bed, Dion lifted the flap. A candle was still burning, set on a chair between the two beds. As the moonlight came in, Rosamund lifted herself on one arm, leaned over and blew it out.
“How horrible moonlight makes candlelight,” she said.
Dion, in his pyjamas, was outside fastening back the flap, his bare feet on the short dry grass.
“I can see the Pleiades!” she added earnestly.
“There!” said Dion.
He looked up at the sky.
“The Pleiades, the Great Bear, Mars.”
“Oh!” she drew in her breath. “A shooting star!”
She pressed her lips together and half-shut her eyes. By her contracted forehead Dion saw that she was wishing almost fiercely. He believed he read her wish. He had not seen the traveling star, and did not try to wish with her, lest he should cross the path of the Fates and throw his shadow on her desire.
He came softly into the tent which was full of the whiteness of the moon. Sleeping thus with Rosamund in the bosom of nature was very wonderful to him. It was like a sort of re-marriage. The moon and the stars looking in made his relation to her quite new and more beautiful.
“I shall never forget Olympia,” he whispered, leaning over her.
He kissed her very gently, not with any passion. He had the feeling that she would almost resent passion just then.
He got into his bed and lay with his arm crooked, his cheek in his hand. Part of the Milky Way was visible to him, that dust of little stars powdering the deep of the sky. If he, too, should see a falling star to-night, dropping down towards the hidden sea, vanishing below the line of the hill! Would he echo her wish?
“Are you sleepy, Rosamund?” he asked presently.
“No I don’t want to sleep. It would make me miss all the stars.”
“And if you’re tired to-morrow?”
“I shan’t be. I shan’t be tired while we are in camp. I should like never to go to bed in a room again. I should like always to dwell in the wilderness.”
He longed for the addition of just two words. They did not come. But of course they were to be understood. There is no need to state things known. The fact that she had let him bring her to the wilderness was enough. The last words he heard Rosamund say that night were these, almost whispered slowly to herself and to the stars:
“The wilderness—and—the solitary places.”
Very early in the morning she awoke while Dion was sleeping. She slipped softly out of the little camp-bed, wrapped a cloak around her, and went out to gaze at the dawn.
When they sat at breakfast she said:
“And now are you going to tell me the secret?”
“No. I’m going to let you find it out for yourself.”
“But if I can’t?”
“You will.”
They set off, about ten, down the hill on foot. The morning was very still and already very hot. As they descended towards the basin in which lies Olympia, heat ascended to meet them and to give them a welcome—a soft and almost enticing heat like a breath from some green fastness where strange marvels were secluded.
“Elis even smells remote,” Rosamund said.
“Are you sorry to leave the hill-top?” he asked.
“I was, but already I’m beginning to feel drawn on. There’s something here—what is it?”
She looked at him.
“Something for you.”
“Specially for me?”
“Specially for you.”
“Hidden in the folds of the green. Where are we going first?”
“To the ruins.”
He was carrying their lunch in a straw pannier slung over his shoulder.
“We’ll lunch in the house of Nero, and rest there.”
“That sounds rather dreadful, Dion.”
“Wait till you see it.”
“I can’t imagine that monster in Elis.”
“He was a very artistic monster, you remember.”
“Like some of the decadents in London. Why is it that those who hate moral beauty so often worship all the other beauties?”
“D’you think in their hearts they actually hate moral beauty?”
“Well, despise it, laugh at it, try to tarnish it.”
“Paganism!”
“Good heavens, no!”
And they both laughed as they went down the narrow path to the soft green valley that awaited them, hushed in the breathless morning, withdrawn among the hills, holding its memories of the athletic triumphs of past ages. Near the Museum they stopped for a moment to look down on the valley.
“Is the Hermes in there?” Rosamund asked, glancing at the closed and deserted building.
“Yes.”
“What a strange and delicious home for him.”
“You shall visit him presently. There are jackals in this valley.”
“I didn’t hear any last night.”
She looked again at the closed door of the Museum.
“When do they open it?”
“Probably the guardian’s in there. That’s where he lives.”
He pointed to a small dwelling close to the museum. Just then a tiny murmur of some far-away wind stirred the umbrella pines which stood sentinel over the valley.
“Oh, Dion, what an exquisite sound!” she said.
She held up one hand like a listening child. There was awe in her eyes.
“This is a shrine,” she said, when the murmur failed. “Dion, I know you planned to go first to the ruins.”
“Yes. They’re just below us. Look—by the river!”
“Let me see the Hermes first, just for a moment.”
Their eyes met. He thought she was reading his mind, though he tried to keep it closed against her just then.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” he asked.
“I feel I must see it,” she answered, with a sort of sweet obstinacy.
He hesitated.
“Well, then—I’ll see if I can find the guardian.”
In a moment he came back with a smiling Greek who was holding a key. As the man went to open the door, Dion said:
“Rose, will you follow my directions?”
“When?”
“Now, when you go into the Museum.”
“But aren’t you coming too?”
“Not now. I will when we’ve seen the ruins. When you go into the Museum go straight through the vestibule where the Roman Emperors are. Don’t turn to the right. In front of you you’ll see a hall with a wooden roof and red walls. The ‘Victory’ is there. But don’t stay there. Go into the small room beyond, the last room, and you mustn’t let the guardian go with you.”
From behind came the sound of the big door being opened.
“Then that is the secret, and I knew about it all the time!”
“Knew about it—yes.”
She looked down on the green cup surrounded by hills, with its little river where now two half-naked men were dragging with a hand-net for fish. Again the tiny breath from the far-away wind stirred in the pine trees, evoking soft sounds of Eternity. She turned away and went into the Museum.
Left alone, Dion lifted the lunch-pannier from his shoulder and laid it down on the ground. Then he sat down under one of the pine trees. A wild olive grew very near it. He thought of the crown of wild olive which the victors received in days when the valley resounded with voices and the trampling of the feet of horses. He took off his hat and laid it beside him on the ground by the lunch-pannier. One of the men in the river cried out to his companion. Sheep-bells sounded softly down the valley. Some peasants went by with a small train of donkeys on a path which wound away at the foot of the hill of Kronos.
Dion was being unselfish. In staying where he was, beyond the outer door of the house of Hermes, he was taking the first firm step on a path which might lead him on very far. He had slept in the dawn when Rosamund slipped out of the tent, but till the stars waned he had been awake, and in the white light of the moon he had seen the beginning of the path. Men were said to be selfish. People, especially women, often talked as if selfishness were bred in the very fiber of men, as if it were ineradicable, and must be accepted by women. He meant to prove to one woman that even a man could be unselfish, moved by something greater than himself. Up there on Drouva he had definitely dedicated himself to Rosamund. His acute pain when, coming back to the place where he had left her by the tent before sunset, he had not found her, his sense almost of smoldering anger, had startled him. In the night he had thought things over, and then he had come to the beginning of the path. A really great love, if it is to be worthy to carry the torch, must tread in the way of unselfishness. He would conform to the needs, doubtless imperious, of Rosamund’s nature, even when they conflicted with his.
So now he sat outside under the pine tree, and she was within alone. A first step was taken on the path.
Would she presently come through the hall of the Victory to call him in?
He heard the guardian cough in the vestibule of the Emperors; the cough was that of a man securely alone with his bodily manifestations. The train of peasants had vanished. Still the sheep-bells sounded, but the chime seemed to come to him now from a greater distance.
The morning was wearing on. When would she come back to him from the secret of Olympia?
He heard again above his head the eternities whispering in the pine branches. The calmness and heat of the valley mingled together, and rose to him, and wanted to take him to themselves. But he was detached from them, terribly detached by his virtue—his virtue, which involved him in a struggle, pushed them off.
Surely an hour had passed, perhaps even more. He began to tingle with impatience. The sound of the sheep-bells had died away beyond the colonnade of the echoes. A living silence was now about him.
At last he put on his hat and got up. The Hermes was proving his power too mercilessly, was stealing the hours like a thief at work in the dark. The knowledge that Rosamund was his own for life did not help Dion at all at this moment. He had planned out this day as if they were never to have another. Their time in Greece was nearly over, and they could not linger for very long anywhere. Anyhow, just this day, once gone, could never be recaptured.
He looked towards the doorway of the Museum, hesitating. He was devoured by impatience. Nevertheless he did not wish to step out of that path, the beginning of which he had seen in the night. Determined not to seek Rosamund, yet driven by restlessness, he did one of those meaningless things which, bringing hurt to nature, are expected by man to bring him at least a momentary solace. His eyes happened to rest on the olive tree which stood not far from the Museum. One branch of it was stretched out beyond the others. He walked up to the tree, pulled at the branch, and finally snapped it off, stripped it of its leaves and threw it on the ground.
As he finished this stupid and useless act, Rosamund came out of the Museum, looking almost angry.
“Oh, Dion, was it you?” she asked. “What could make you do such a thing?”
“But—what do you mean?” he asked.
She looked down at the massacred branch at his feet.
“A branch of wild olive! If you only knew how it hurt me.”
“Oh—that! But how could you know?”
She still looked at him with a sort of shining of anger in her eyes.
“I saw from the room of the Hermes. The doorway of the Museum is the frame for such a picture of Elis! It’s almost, in its way, as dream-like and lovely as the distant country one sees through the temple door in Raphael’s ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ in Milan. And hanging partly across it was that branch of wild olive. I was looking at it and loving it in the room of the Hermes when a man’s arm, your arm, was thrust into the picture, and the poor branch was torn away.”
She had spoken quite excitedly, still evidently under the impulse of something like anger. Now she suddenly pulled herself up with a little forced laugh.
“Of course you didn’t know; you couldn’t. I suppose I was dreaming, and it—it looked like a sort of murder. But still I don’t see why you should tear the branch off, and all the leaves too.”
“I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, Rosamund. It was idiotic. Of course I hadn’t an idea what you were doing, I mean, that you were looking at it. One does senseless little things sometimes.”
“It looked so angry.”
“What did?”
“Your hand, your arm. You can have no idea how——”
She broke off again.
“Let me come in with you. Let’s go to the Hermes.”
“Oh no, not now.”
She spoke with almost brusk decision.
“Very well, then, I’ll just pay the man something, and we’ll be off to the ruins.”
“Yes.”
Dion went to pay the guardian, whom he found standing up among the Roman Emperors in a dignified and receptive attitude. When he came back he picked up the lunch-basket, slung it over his shoulder, and they walked down the small hill and towards the ruins in silence. He felt involved in a tragedy, pained and discomforted. Yet it was all rather absurd, too. He did not know what to say, how to take it, and he looked straight ahead, seeking instinctively for some diversion. When they were on the river bank he found it in the fishermen who were wading in the shallows with their nets.
“I wonder what they catch here,” he said. “There’s not much water.”
Rosamund took up the remark with her usual readiness and sympathetic cordiality, and soon they were chattering again much as usual.
The great heat of the hour after noontide found them lunching among the ruins of Nero’s house. By this time the spell of the place had fast hold of them both. Nature had long since taken the ruins to her gentle breast; she took Rosamund and Dion with them. In her green lap she sheltered them; with her green hills and her groves of pine trees she wrapped them round; with her tall grasses, her bushes, her wild flowers and her leaves she caught at and caressed them. A jackal whined in its lair near the huge limestone blocks of the temple of Zeus. Green lizards basked on the pavements which still showed the little ruts constructed to save the feet of contending athletes from slipping. All along the green valley the birds flew and sang; blackberry bushes climbed over the broken walls of the mansion of Nero, and red and white daisies and silvery grasses grew in every cranny where the kindly earth found a foothold.
“Look at those butterflies, Dion!” Rosamund said.
Two snow-white butterflies, wandering among the ruins, had found their way to the house of Nero, and seemed inclined to make it their home. Keeping close together, as if guided by some sweet and whimsical purpose, they flew from stone to stone, from daisy to daisy, often alighting, as if bent on a thorough investigation of this ancient precinct, then fluttering forward again, with quivering wings, not quite satisfied, in an airy search for the thing or place desired. Several times they seemed about to abandon the ruins of Nero’s house, but, though they fluttered away, they always returned. And at last they alighted side by side on a piece of uneven wall, and rested, as if asleep in the sun, with folded wings.
“That’s the finishing touch,” said Rosamund. “White butterflies asleep in the house of Nero.”
She looked round over the ruins, poetic and beautiful in their prostration, as if they had fallen to kiss the vale which, in return, had folded them in an eternal embrace.
“Don’t take me to Delphi this time, Dion; don’t take me anywhere else,” she said.
“I was thinking only to-day that our time’s very short now. We lingered so long in Athens.”
“We’ll say our good-by to Greece from the Acropolis. That’s—of course! The grandeur and wonder are there. But the dream of Greece—that’s here. This is a shrine.”
“For Pan?”
“Oh no, not for Pan, though I dare say he often comes here.”
From the Kronos Hill, covered with little pines, came the mystical voice of the breeze, speaking to them in long and remote murmurs.
“That’s the most exquisite sound in the world,” Rosamund continued. “But it has nothing to do with Pan. You remember that day we went into the Russian church in Athens, Dion?”
“Yes.”
“There was the same sort of sound in those Russian voices when they were singing very softly. It could never come from a Pagan world.”
“You find belief behind it?”
“No—knowledge.”
He did not ask her to define exactly what she meant. It was not an hour for definition, but for dreaming, and he was happy again; the cloud of the morning had passed away; he had his love with untroubled eyes among the ruins. Thinking of that, realizing that with a sudden intensity, he took her warm hand from the warm stone on which it was resting, and held it closely in his.
“Oh, Rosamund, shall I ever have another hour as happy as this?” he said.
A little way off, in that long meadow in the breast of which the Stadium lay hidden, the sheep-bells sounded almost pathetically; a flock was there happily at pasture.
“It’s as if all the green doors were closing upon us to keep us in Elis forever, isn’t it?” she said. “But——”