The Leithen Stories (46 page)

At luncheon we talked stiltedly of the Nantleys and hunting. but no sooner was coffee served than she came to business.

‘Theodore has told you about me? You see the kind of fence I'm up against. What I want to know is just exactly how high and thick it is, and that no one can tell me. I liked your looks the first time I saw you, and everyone says you are clever. Now, understand one thing about me. I'm not going to show the white feather. Whatever it is, I'm going to stick it out. Have you that clear in your head?'

As I looked at the firm little chin I believed her.

‘Well, can you enlighten me about the fence? You've heard all that Theodore has to say, and you know the cheerful sort of family I belong to. Did you find anything in the papers?'

‘You've read them yourself?' I asked.

‘I tried to, but I'm not clever, you see. I thought my grandfather's journal great nonsense. I had never heard of most of the names. But you're good at these things. Did you make nothing of them?'

‘Nothing.' I ran over the items in the bundle, not mentioning the Greek manuscript, which seemed to me to have nothing to do with the subject. ‘But there must be other papers.'

She flushed slightly. ‘There were many others, but I burned them. Perhaps you can guess why.'

‘Miss Arabin,' I said, ‘I want to help you, but I don't think we need bother about the papers. Let's go back to the beginning. I suppose it's no use my urging you to get out of Plakos, settle in England and wipe all the past out of your memory?'

‘Not the slightest.'

‘I wonder why. After all it's only common sense.'

‘Common cowardice,' she retorted, with a toss of her head. ‘I have known Theodore all my life and I have forbidden him to raise that question. I have known you about a month and I forbid
you
.'

There was something so flat-footed and final about her that I laughed. She stared at me haughtily for a moment, and then laughed also.

‘Go on with what you were saying,' she said. ‘I stay at Plakos, and you must make your book for that. Now then.'

‘Your family was unpopular – I understand, justly unpopular. All sorts of wild beliefs grew up about them among the peasants and they have been transferred to you. The people are half savages, and half starved, and their mood is dangerous. They are coming to see in you the cause of their misfortunes. You go there alone and unprotected and you have no friends in the island. The danger is that, after a winter of brooding, they may try in some horrible way to wreak their vengeance on you. That is what I learned from Mr Ertzberger.'

The summary, as I made it, sounded unpleasant enough, but the girl did not seem to feel it so. She nodded briskly. ‘That, at any rate, is what Theodore says. He thinks they may make me a sacrifice. Stuff and nonsense,
I
say.'

The word ‘sacrifice' disquieted me. It reminded me of the Greek which Vernon had translated.

‘Some risk there must be,' I went on, ‘but what I cannot tell is the exact amount of it. Even among a savage people unpopularity need not involve tragedy. You were in Plakos last spring. Tell me what happened.'

She fitted a cigarette into a long amber holder, and blew a cloud of smoke which she watched till it disappeared.

‘Nothing much. I was left entirely to myself. There was only one servant in the house, old Mitri the steward, and I had also my maid. The whole establishment was sent to Coventry. We had to get our food from the mainland, for we could buy nothing, except now and then a little milk through Mitri's married daughter. It wasn't pleasant, I can tell you. But the worst was when I went for a walk. If I met a man he would make the sign of the evil eye and spit. If I spoke to a child its mother would snatch it up and race indoors with it. The girls and women all wore blue beads as a charm against me and
carried garlic. I could smell it wherever I went. Sometimes I wanted to cry and sometimes I wanted to swear, but you can do nothing with a silent boycott. I could have shaken the fools.'

‘What had they against you? Did you ever find out?'

‘Oh, Mitri used to tell us gossip that he had heard through his daughter, but Mitri isn't too popular himself, and he is old and can go about very little. It seemed they called me Basilissa. That means Queen and sounds friendly enough, but I think the word they really used was
diabolissa
, which means a she-devil. The better disposed ones thought I was a Nereid – that's what they call fairies – but some said I was a
strigla
– that's a horrible kind of harpy, and some thought I was a
vrykolakas
, which is a vampire. They used to light little fires in the graveyards to keep me away. Oh, I got very sick of my reputation. It was a hideous bore not to be able to go anywhere without seeing scared people dodging up by-ways, and making the sign of the cross and screaming for their children – simply damnable.'

‘It must have been damnable. I should have thought it rather terrifying too.'

‘Don't imagine that they frightened me. I was really more sorry than angry. They were only foolish people scared half out of their minds, and, after all, my family has done a good deal to scare them. It is folly – nothing but folly, and the only way to beat folly is to live it down. I don't blame the poor devils, but I'm going to bring them to a better mind. I refuse to run away because of a pack of fairy tales.'

‘There were no hostile acts?' I asked.

She seemed to reflect. ‘No,' she answered. ‘One morning we found a splash of blood on the house door, which sent old Mitri to his prayers. But that was only a silly joke.'

‘Mr Ertzberger hinted that there might be trouble this year from the people in the hills?'

Her face hardened.

‘I wish to Heaven I knew that for certain. It would be the best news I ever got. Those hillmen are not my people, and if they interfere I will have them whipped off the place. I will not have any protection against my own peasantry – Theodore is always pressing me, but I won't have it – it would spoil everything – it wouldn't be the game. But if those filthy mountaineers come within a mile of Plakos I will hire a regiment to shoot them down. Pray God they come. We of
the coast have always hated the mountains, and I believe I could rally my people.'

‘But I thought you owned the whole island?'

‘No one owns the hills. My grandfather obtained the seigneury of Plakos, but he never claimed more than the good land by the sea. The hills have always been a no-man's-land full of bandits. We paid them dues – I still pay them – and we did not quarrel, but there was no coming and going between us. They are a different race from our pure Greek stock – mongrels of Slav and Turk, I believe.'

The spirit of the girl comforted me. If Ertzberger's news was true, it might save the situation, and bring the problem out of the realm of groping mystery to a straightforward defence of property … But after all the hills were distant, and the scared tenants were at the house door. We must face the nearer peril.

‘Is there no one in the village,' I said, ‘whom you can have it out with? No big farmer? What about the priests?'

She shook her head. ‘No one. The priests do not love my family, for they call themselves Christians, while we are Catholics.'

Twenty years spent in examining witnesses has given me an acute instinct about candour. There was that in the girl's eyes and voice as she spoke which told me that she was keeping something back, something which made her uneasy.

‘Tell me everything,' I said. ‘Has no priest talked to you?'

‘Yes, there was one. I will tell you. He is an old man, and very timid. He came to me at night, after swearing Mitri to tell no one. He urged me to go away for ever.'

Her eyes were troubled now, and had that abstracted look which I had noted before.

‘What was his reason?'

‘Oh, care for his precious church. He was alarmed about what had happened at Easter.'

She stopped suddenly.

‘Have you ever been in Greece at Easter – during the Great Week? No? Then you cannot imagine how queer it is. The people have been starved all Lent, living only on cuttle-fish soup and bread and water. Everyone is pale and thin and illtempered. It is like a nightmare.'

Then in rapid staccato sentences she sketched the ritual. She described the night of Good Friday, when the bier with the figure of the crucified Christ on it stands below the chancel
step, and the priests chant their solemn hymn, and the women kiss the dead face, and the body is borne out to burial. With torches and candles flickering in the night wind, it is carried through the village streets, while dirges are sung, and the tense crowd breaks now and then into a moan or a sigh. Next day there is no work done, but the people wander about miserably, waiting on something which may be either death or deliverance. That night the church is again crowded, and at midnight the curtains which screen the chancel are opened, and the bier is revealed – empty, but for a shroud. ‘Christ is risen,' the priest cries, as a second curtain is drawn back, and in the sanctuary in an ineffable radiance stands the figure of the risen Lord. The people go mad with joy, they light their tapers at the priest's candle, and like a procession of Bacchanals stream out, shouting ‘He is risen indeed'. Then to the accompaniment of the firing of guns and the waving of torches the famished peasants, maddened by the miracle they have witnessed, feast till morning on wine and lamb's flesh in the joy of their redemption.

She drew the picture for me so that I saw it as if with my own eyes, and my imagination quickened under the spell of her emotion. For here was no longer the cool matter-of-fact young woman of the world, with no more than tolerance for the folly of superstition. It was someone who could enter into that very mood, and feel its quivering nerves and alternate despair and exultation.

‘What had the priest to complain of?' I asked.

‘He said that the people were becoming careless of the Easter holiness. He said that last year the attendance at the rite was poor. He feared that they were beginning to think of something else.'

‘Something else!' Two of the most commonplace words in the language. She spoke them in an even voice in an ordinary London dining-room, with outside the wholesome bustle of London and the tonic freshness of an English winter day. She was about to go off to a conventional English week-end party at a prosaic country house. But the words affected me strangely, for they seemed to suggest a peril far more deadly than any turbulence of wild men from the hills – a peril, too, of which she was aware.

For she was conscious of it – that was now perfectly clear to me – acutely conscious. She had magnificent self-command,
but fear showed out from behind it, like light through the crack of a shutter. Her courage was assuredly not the valour of ignorance. She was terrified, and still resolute to go on.

It was not my business to add to that terror. Suddenly I had come to feel an immense pity and reverence for this girl. Ertzberger was right. Her hardness, her lack of delicacy and repose, her loud frivolity, were only on the surface – a protective sheathing for a tormented soul. Out of a miserable childhood and a ramshackle education she had made for herself a code of honour as fine and as hard as steel. It was wildly foolish, of course, but so perhaps to our dull eyes the innocent and the heroic must always be.

Perhaps she guessed my thoughts. For when she spoke again it was gently, almost hesitatingly.

‘I scarcely hoped that you could tell me anything about Plakos. But I rather hoped you would say I am right in what I am doing. Theodore has been so discouraging … I rather hoped from your face that you would take a different view. You wouldn't advise me to run away from my job—?'

‘God forbid that I should advise you at all,' I said. ‘I see your argument, and, if you will let me say so, I profoundly respect it. But I think you are trying yourself – and your friends also – too high. You must agree to some protection.'

‘Only if the hill folk give trouble. Don't you see, protection would ruin everything if I accepted it against my own people? I must trust myself to them – and – and stick it out myself. It is a sort of atonement.'

Then she got up briskly and held out her hand. ‘Thank you very much, Sir Edward. It has done me good to talk to you. I must be off now or I'll miss my train. I'll give your love to Mollie and Tom.'

‘We shall meet again. When do you leave England?'

‘Not till March. Of course we'll meet again. Let me know if you have any bright idea … Elise, Elise! Where's that fool woman?'

Her maid appeared.

‘Get a taxi at once,' she ordered. ‘We haven't any time to waste, for I promised to pick up Lord Cheviot at his flat.'

I asked one question as I left. ‘Have you ever heard of a place called Kynaetho?'

‘Rather. It's the big village in Plakos close to the house.'

I ONCE READ in some book about Cleopatra that that astonishing lady owed her charm to the fact that she was the last of an ancient and disreputable race. The writer cited other cases – Mary of Scots, I think, was one. It seemed, he said, that the quality of high-coloured ancestors flowered in the ultimate child of the race into something like witchcraft. Whether they were good or evil, they laid a spell on men's hearts. Their position, fragile and forlorn, without the wardenship of male kinsfolk, set them on a romantic pinnacle. They were more feminine and capricious than other women, but they seemed, like Viola, to be all the brothers as well as all the daughters of their father's house, for their soft grace covered steel and fire. They were the true sorceresses of history, said my author, and sober men, not knowing why, followed blindly in their service.

Perhaps Koré Arabin was of this sisterhood. At any rate one sober man was beginning to admit her compelling power. I could not get the girl from my thoughts. For one thing I had awakened to a comprehension of her beauty. Her face was rarely out of my mind, with its arrogant innocence, its sudden brilliancies and its as sudden languors. Her movements delighted me, her darting grace, the insolent assurance of her carriage, and then, without warning, the relapse into the child or the hoyden. Even her bad manners soon ceased to annoy me, for in my eyes they had lost all vulgarity. They were the harshnesses of a creature staving off tragedy. Indeed it was her very extravagances that allured, for they made me see her as a solitary little figure set in a patch of light on a great stage among shadows, defying of her own choice the terrors of the unknown.

What made my capture complete was the way she treated me. She seemed to have chosen me as her friend, and to find comfort and security in being with me. To others she might be rude and petulant, but never to me. Whenever she saw me she
would make straight for me, like a docile child waiting for orders. She would dance or sit out with me till her retinue of youth was goaded to fury. She seemed to guess at the points in her behaviour which I did not like and to strive to amend them. We had become the closest friends, and friendship with Koré Arabin was a dangerous pastime.

The result was that I was in a fair way of making a fool of myself. No … I don't think I was in love with her. I had never been in love in my life, so I was not an expert on the subject, but I fancied that love took people in a different way. But I was within measurable distance of asking her to be my wife. My feeling was a mixture of affection and pity and anxiety. She had appealed to me, and I had become her champion. I wanted to protect her, but how was a middle-aged lawyer to protect a determined girl from far-away perils which he did not comprehend? The desperate expedient of marriage occurred to me, but I did not believe she would accept me, and, if she did, would not the mating of age and youth be an outrage and a folly? Nevertheless I was in a mood to venture even on that.

I must have presented a strange spectacle to my friends. There were other men of forty in London at the time who behaved as if they were twenty-five – one buxom Cabinet Minister was to be seen at every dance – but none, I am certain, cut an odder figure than I. The dancing Cabinet Minister sought the ball-room for exercise, because he preferred dancing to golf. I had no such excuse, for I danced comparatively little; my object was patently the society of one particular lady. In Koré's train I found myself in strange haunts. I followed her into the Bohemian
coulisses
to which Shelley Arabin's daughter had an entrée – queer studio parties in Chelsea where the women were shorn and the men left shaggy: the feverish literary and artistic salons of the emancipated and rather derelict middle-class: dances given at extra-vagant restaurants by the English and foreign new-rich, where I did not know or wish to know one single soul. Also we appeared together at houses which I had frequented all my life, and there my friends saw me. Of course they talked. I fancy that for about two months I was the prime subject of London gossip. I didn't care a hang, for I was in a queer obstinate excitable mood. We hunted together, too, and there is no such nursery of scandal as the hunting-field. With a great deal of work on hand I found this new life a considerable strain, and I
was perfectly conscious that I was playing the fool. But, though I don't think I was in love with her, I simply could not let the girl out of my sight.

Now and then my conscience awoke and I realised with a shock that the time was slipping past, and that the real problem was still unsolved. I knew that I could not shake Koré in her resolution, and I suppose I hoped blindly that something would occur to prevent her acting on it. That something could only be a love affair. I was perfectly certain that she was not in love with me, but she might accept me, and at the back of my head I had the intention of putting it to the test. Ertzberger had divined what was going on and seemed to approve. ‘A boy is no use to her,' he said more than once. ‘Besides she wouldn't look at one. She must marry a grown man.' He implied that I filled the bill, and the man's assumption gave me an absurd pleasure. If anyone had told me that I would one day go out of my way to cultivate a little Jew financier, I would have given him the lie, yet the truth is that, when I was not with Koré, I hungered for Ertzberger's company. He alone understood what was in my mind, and shared my anxieties. ‘She must not go back,' he kept declaring; ‘at all costs she must be kept away from Plakos – at any rate during this spring. I get disquieting reports. There is mischief brewing in the hills, and the people of the coast have had a bitter winter of famine. There has been a lot of sickness too, and in the village at the house gates the mortality among the children has been heavy.'

‘You mean Kynaetho?' I asked.

‘Kynaetho.' He looked at me curiously. ‘You seem to have been getting up the subject … Well, I don't like it. If she goes there in April there may be a disaster. Upon my soul, we should be justified in having her kidnapped and shut up in some safe place till the summer. So far as I can learn, the danger is only in the spring. Once let the people see the crops springing and the caiques bringing in fish, and they will forget their grievances.'

Early in March I was dining with the Nantleys, and after dinner Mollie took me aside for a talk. As I have told you, she is one of my oldest friends, for when I was a grubby little private schoolboy and she was a girl of thirteen we used to scamper about together. I had had her son Hugo in my chambers, before he went into Parliament, and Wirlesdon has always
been a sort of home to me. Mollie was entitled to say anything she liked, but when she spoke it was rather timidly.

‘I hear a good deal of talk about you,' she said, ‘and I can't help noticing too. Do you think it is quite fair, Ned?'

‘Fair to whom?' I asked.

‘To Koré Arabin. You're different from the boys who run after her. You're a distinguished man with a great reputation. Is it fair to her to turn her head?'

‘Is that very likely? What if she has turned mine?'

‘Do you really mean that?' she cried. ‘I never thought of it in that way. Do you honestly want to marry her?'

‘I don't know … I don't know what I want except that I must stand by her. She's in an appallingly difficult position, and badly needs a friend.'

‘Yes. But there's only one way in which a man can protect a young woman. Do you mean to marry her?'

‘She wouldn't accept me.'

‘But you mean to ask her?'

‘It may come to that,' I said.

‘But, Ned dear, can't you see it wouldn't do? Koré is not the right sort of wife for you. She's–she's too— Well, you've a career before you. Is she the woman to share it with you?'

‘It's not many months since at Wirlesdon you implored my charity for Miss Arabin.'

‘Oh, I don't want to say a word against her, and if you were really desperately in love I would say nothing and wish you luck. But I don't believe you are. I believe it's what you say – charity, and that's a most rotten foundation to build on.'

Mollie in such affairs is an incurable romantic.

‘I promise never to ask her to marry me unless I am in love,' I said.

‘Well, that means you are not quite in love yet. Hadn't you better draw back before it is too late? I can't bear to see you making a bad blunder, and Koré, dear child, would be a bad blunder for you. She's adorably pretty, and she has wonderful qualities, but she is a little savage, and very young, and quite unformed. Really, really it wouldn't do.'

‘I admit the difficulties, my dear Mollie. But never mind me, and think of Miss Arabin. You said yourself that she was English at heart and would be very happy settled in England.'

‘But not with you.'

‘She wouldn't accept me, and I may never propose. But if I did, and she accepted me, why not with me?'

‘Because you're you – because you're too good for a rash experiment.'

‘I'm not good enough for her, for I'm too old, as you've just told me. But anyhow your argument thinks principally of me, not of Miss Arabin. It is she who matters.'

Mollie rose with a gesture of impatience. ‘You are hopeless, Ned. I'm sick of you hard, unsusceptible, ambitious people. You never fall in love in your youth, but wait till after forty and then make idiots of yourselves.'

I had a different kind of remonstrance from Vernon. We saw little of each other in these days beyond a chance word in the street or a casual wave of the hand in the club smoking-room. When I thought of him it was with a sense of shame that I had let him slip so hopelessly out of my life. Time had been when he was my closest friend, and when his problem was also my problem. Now the whole story of his dream seemed a childish fancy.

One night in March I found him waiting for me in my rooms.

‘I came round to say good-bye,' he said. ‘I shall probably leave London very soon.'

It shows how completely I had forgotten his affairs that I did not remember that his particular crisis was drawing near, that, as he believed, the last door in his dream-world would soon be opened.

Then, before I could ask about his plans, he suddenly broke out:

‘Look here, I hope there's no truth in what people tell me.'

His tone had the roughness of one very little at his ease, and it annoyed me. I asked coldly what he meant.

‘You know what I mean – that you're in love with Miss What's-her-name – the girl I met at Wirlesdon.'

‘I don't know that you've any right to ask the question, and I'm certainly not going to answer it.'

‘That means that you are in love,' he cried. ‘Good God, man, don't tell me that you want to marry that – that tawdry girl!'

I must have reddened, for he saw that he had gone too far.

‘I don't mean that – I apologise. I have no reason to say anything against her.'

Then his tone changed.

‘Ned, old man, we have been friends for a long time and you must forgive me if I take liberties. We have never had any secrets from each other. My own affairs give me a good deal to think about just now, but I can't go away with an easy mind till I know the truth about you. For God's sake, old fellow, don't do anything rash. Promise me you won't propose to her till I come back in April.'

His change of manner had softened me, and as I saw the trouble in his honest eyes I felt a return of the old affection.

‘Why are you anxious on my account?'

‘Because,' he said solemnly, ‘I know that if you married that girl our friendship would be over. I feel it in my bones. She would always come between us.'

‘I can't make any promises of that kind. But one thing I can promise – that no woman will ever break our friendship.'

‘You don't understand. Some women wouldn't, but that girl—! Well, I can say no more. Good-bye, Ned. I'll hunt you up when I come back.'

He left me with a feeling of mingled regret and irritation. I hated to go against Vernon's wishes, but his manner when he had spoken of Koré, the look in his eyes, the inflection of his voice, conveyed an utter distaste which made me angry. I pictured him at Severns nursing his unreasoning dislike of the poor child. Vernon, as my nephew Charles had said, was a prig, and his narrow world had room only for blameless and vapid virginity. The promise he had asked of me was an outrage.

Yet I kept a promise which I had never made. For suddenly Cinderella disappeared from the ball. After a country-house dance I drove her back to town in my car, and left her at the door of her flat. During the long drive she had talked more seriously than I had ever known her to talk before, had spoken of herself and her affairs with a kind of valiant simplicity. The only sophisticated thing about her was her complexion. All day afterwards my conviction was growing that she was the woman for me, that I could make her not only secure but happy. We were by way of dining with the Lamanchas, and I think if we had met that night I should have asked her to marry me … But we did not meet, for by the evening she was gone.

I looked for her in vain in the Lamanchas' drawing-room and my hostess guessed what I sought. ‘I'm so sorry about
Koré Arabin,' she whispered to me. ‘She was coming tonight, but she telephoned this afternoon that she was unexpectedly called out of town.' I did not enjoy my dinner, and as soon as I could decently leave I hurried off to her flat. It was shut up, and from the porter on the ground floor I learned that she and her maid had left with a quantity of luggage to catch the night boat to France. He was positive that she had gone abroad, for he had seen the foreign labels, and Miss Arabin had told him she would not be back for months. The keys of the flat had been sent to her solicitors.

With a very uneasy mind I drove to the Ertzbergers' house in Belgrave Square. Ertzberger had just come in from a City dinner, and his wife seemed to be giving some kind of musical party, for the hall was full of coats and hats and extra footmen, and the jigging of fiddles drifted down the staircase. He took me to his study at the back of the house, and when he heard my news his face grew as solemn as my own. There was nothing to be done that night, for the Continental mail had long since gone, so I went back to my chambers with a pretty anxious mind. I felt that I had let something rare and precious slip out of my hand, but far more that this preciousness was in instant danger. Honestly I don't think that I was much concerned about myself. I wanted Koré Arabin saved – for me – for everyone – for the world. If I was in love with her it was with an affection more impersonal than usually goes by that name. It was as if an adored child had gone missing.