The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (6 page)

‘Do you want me to ask Chrysis to let you go about the island by day?’ he asked.

‘If she doesn’t want it, we mustn’t change her. Chrysis knows best.’ She turned away from him and said in a lower voice, dreamy and embittered: ‘But what can become of me? Am I always to stay locked up? I am fifteen already. The world is full of wonderful things and people that I might never know about. I know it was wrong of me to break my promise; but to live for years without ever knowing new people, – to hear them passing the door all day, and to see them a long ways off. Do you think I did very wrong?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know anyone. I don’t know anyone.’

‘Well . . . well, you’ll come to know my sister. That will be a beginning,’ he said, taking her fingertips thoughtfully and wonderingly in his.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Everything is beginning over again. I’m your friend. Then my sister. Soon you will have a great many. You’ll see.’

‘But where will I be five years from now and ten years from now,’ she cried, staring about her wildly. ‘I don’t know. I’m afraid. I’m unhappy. Everyone in the world is happy except me.’

The caress of the hands in first love, and never so simply again, seems to be a sharing of courage, an alliance of two courages against a confusing world. As his hand passed from her hair to her shoulder, she turned to him with parted lips and hesitant eyes, then suddenly bound both her arms about his neck. Into his ears her lips wildly and all but meaninglessly repeated: ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. I can’t stay there forever. I should never know anyone. I should never see anybody.’

‘She will let you come to see me,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Glycerium. ‘But I’ll come by myself. I mustn’t ask her. She would not let me come. She always knows best. And the boys can throw their stones. I don’t mind if you’re here. What . . . what is your name?’

‘My name is Pamphilus, Glycerium.’

‘Can . . . can I call you by it?’

It was not at this meeting, nor at their next, but at the third, beneath the dwarfed olive-trees, that those caresses that seemed to be for courage, for pity and for admiration, were turned by Nature to her own uses.

These conversations took place in the early Spring. One afternoon in the late Summer Chrysis slipped out of her house and climbed the hill behind it. She was filled with a great desire to be alone and to think. She looked out over the glittering sea. The winds were moderate on that afternoon and before them the innumerable neat waves hurried toward the shore, running up the sands with a long whisper, or discreetly lifting against the rocks a scarf of foam. In the distance a school of dolphins engaged at their eternal games led the long procession of curving backs. The water was marbled at intervals with the strange fields and roadways of a lighter blue; and behind all she beheld with love the violet profile of Andros. For a time she strayed about upon the crest of the hill, making sure that no one was watching or following her, then descending the further side she sought out her favourite retreats, a point of rock that projected into the sea and a sheltered cove beside it. As she drew near the place, she stumbled forward, almost running, and as she went she murmured soothingly to herself: ‘We are almost there. Look, we are almost there now.’ At last, climbing over the boulders she let herself down into an amphitheatre of hot dry sand. She started unbinding her hair, but stopped herself abruptly: ‘No, no. I must think. I should fall asleep here. I must think first. I shall come back soon,’ she muttered to the amphitheatre, and continuing her journey she reached the furthermost heap of stones and sat down. She rested her chin upon her hand and fixing her eyes upon the horizon she waited for the thoughts to come.

The first thing to think about was her new illness. Several times she had been awakened by a wild fluttering in her left side that continued, deepening, until it seemed to her as though a great stake were being driven into her heart. And all the day the sensation would remain with her as of a heavy object burdening the place where this trouble lay. ‘Probably . . . very likely,’ she said to herself, ‘the next time I shall die of it.’ At the thought a wave of anticipation passed over her. ‘I shall probably die of it,’ she repeated cheerfully and became interested in some crayfish in the pool at her feet. She plucked some grasses behind her and started dragging them before the eyes of the indignant animals. ‘Nothing in life could make me abandon my sheep, but if I die they will have to fall back on Circumstance as I did. Glycerium, what will become of you? Apraxine, Mysis . . .? There are times when we cannot see one step ahead of us, but five years later we are eating and sleeping somewhere.’ (It was humorous, pretending that one’s heart was as hard as that.) ‘Yes,’ she said aloud, to the pain that trembled within her, ‘only come quickly.’ She leaned forward still dragging the stems before the shellfish: ‘I have lived thirty-five years. I have lived enough.
Stranger, near this spot lies Chrysis, daughter o f Arches o f Andros: the ewe that has strayed from the flock lives many years in one day and dies at a great age when the sun sets.’
She laughed at the deceptive comforts of self pity and taking off a sandal put her foot into the water. She drew herself up for a moment, asking herself what there was left in the house for the colony’s supper; then recollecting some fish and some salad on the shelf, she returned to her thoughts. She repeated her epitaph, making it a song and emphasising, for self-mockery, its false sentiment. ‘O Andros, O Poseidon, how happy I am. I have no right to be happy like this. . . .’

And she knew as she gazed at the frieze of dolphins still playing in the distance that her mind was avoiding another problem that awaited her. ‘I am happy because I love this Pamphilus, – Pamphilus the anxious, Pamphilus the stupid. Why cannot someone tell him that it is not necessary to suffer so about living.’ And the low exasperated sigh escaped her, the protest we make at the preposterous, the incorrigible beloved. ‘He thinks he is failing. He thinks he is inadequate to life at every turn. Let him rest some day, O ye Olympians, from pitying those who suffer. Let him learn to look the other way. This is something new in the world, this concern for the unfit and the broken. Once he begins that, there’s no end to it, only madness. It leads nowhere. That is some god’s business.’ Whereupon she discovered that she was weeping; but when she had dried her eyes she was still thinking about him. ‘Oh, such people are unconscious of their goodness. They strike their foreheads with their hands because of their failure, and yet the rest of us are made glad when we remember their faces. Pamphilus, you are another herald from the future. Some day men will be like you. Do not frown so. . . .’

But these thoughts were very fatiguing. She arose and, returning to the amphitheatre, laid herself down upon the sand. She murmured some fragments from the Euripidean choruses and fell asleep. She had always been an islander and this hot and impersonal sun playing upon a cold and impersonal sea was not unfriendly to her. And now for two hours the monotony of sun and sea played about her and wove itself into the mood of her sleeping mind. As once the gray-eyed Athena stood guarding Ulysses – she leaning upon her spear, her great heart full of concern and of those long divine thoughts that are her property – even so, now, the hour and the place all but gathered itself into a presence and shed its influence upon her. When her eyes finally opened she listened for a time to the calm in her heart. ‘Some day,’ she said, ‘we shall understand why we suffer. I shall be among the shades underground and some wonderful hand, some Alcestis, will touch me and will show me the meaning of all these things; and I shall laugh softly for hours as I do now . . . as I do now.’

She arose and binding up her hair prepared to ascend the slope. But just as she turned to leave the place, there visited her the desire to do something ceremonial, to mark the hour. She stood up straightly and held out her arms to the setting sun: ‘If you still hear prayers from the lips of mortals, if our longings touch you at all, hear me now. Give to this Pamphilus some assurance – even some assurance such as you have given to me, unstable though I am – that he is right. And oh! (but I do not say this from vanity or pride, O Apollo, – but perhaps this is weak, this is childish of me, perhaps this renders the whole prayer powerless!) if it is possible, let the thought of me or of something I have said be comforting to him some day. And . . . and . . .’

But her arms fell to her side. The world seemed empty. The sun went down. The sea and sky became suddenly remote and she was left with only the tears in her eyes and the longing in her heart. She closed her lips and turned her head aside. ‘I suppose there is no god,’ she whispered. ‘We must do these things ourselves. We must drag ourselves through life as best we can.’

Chrysis had made the mistake of accustoming the members of her household to her invariable presence and now while she slept they became increasingly indignant at the length of her absence. In twos and threes they hovered about the door peering to the right and to the left with mingled scorn and alarm.

‘When she comes in, see that no one says a word to her,’ directed Apraxine, a tall lame woman whom Chrysis had found beaten and left for dead at the edge of the desert below the terraces of Alexandria.

‘Pretend you don’t see her.’

‘. . . to go sallying off a whole day without a word to a soul.’

‘I’m sure I don’t wish to stay in a house where I count for nothing.’

‘. . . less than nothing, it seems.’

Presently however something happened that distracted their minds from their resentment. A new sheep arrived at the fold.

Simo’s frank had carried to Andros the money that Chrysis intended for the support of the stricken sea-captain. But Philocles’s guardians had long since tired of their charge and become discontented with the intermittent payments. They decided to take advantage of this sum of money to ship him off to Brynos. It was necessary for this purpose to wait for a lucid interval in the patient’s condition. Such a moment finally arrived; they hurriedly made up his bundle, brushed his hair, and led him down to the waterfront, where they found the captain of a boat sailing between the Cyclades who was willing to undertake the commission. And thus it was that on the afternoon of Chrysis’s retreat to solitude Philocles arrived on Brynos. A boy who attended at one of the wine-shops in the town was directed to escort him to her house, and suddenly the childlike sea-captain was thrust into the courtyard among the conspiring pensioners.

Ten years before Philocles had been the greatest navigator on the Mediterranean, first in skill and experience and first in fame. He had been many times to Sicily and to Carthage; he had passed through the Gates of Hercules and visited the Tyrian mines in Britain. He had sailed westward for months across the great shelf of water, seeking new islands, and had been forced to turn back by the visible anger of the gods. In the present age men were captains or merchants or farmers, but in the great age men had been first Athenians or Greeks, and the islanders regarded Philocles as of that order, a belated giant. He was already in middle life when Chrysis first knew him – she had been a passenger on one of his trips to Egypt – and it astonished her to find someone laconic in a chattering world and with quiet hands in a gesturing civilisation. He was blackened and cured by all weathers. He stood in the squares of the various ports of call, his feet apart as though they were forever planted on a shifting deck. He seemed to be too large for daily life; his very eyes were strange – unaccustomed to the shorter range, too used to seizing the appearances of a constellation between a cloud and a cloud, and the outlines of a headland in rain. Wind, salt and starvation had moulded his head, and his mind had been rendered, not buoyant, but rich and concentrated by the enforced asceticisms of a prolonged duty and of long sea voyages. He had been one of the persons whom Chrysis had most loved in all her life and it was she who had discovered his secret, the secret that it was neither adventure nor gain that drove him along his adventurous life. He was passing the time and filling the hours in anticipation of release from a life that had lost its savour with the death of his daughter. These two saw in one another’s eyes the thing they had in common, the fact that they had both died to themselves. They lived at one remove from that self that supports the generality of men, the self that is a bundle of self-assertions, of greeds, of vanities and of easily offended pride. Three years before, Philocles had been forced to captain some ships of a city at war. He had been captured and mutilated and what was left of so kingly a person was a timorous child.

The sheep examined the newcomer who had been thrust so abruptly into their midst. They questioned him and amused themselves with his answers. Then they gave him a bench in the sunlight where he might whisper to his heart’s content.

The sun set and soon after Chrysis came stumbling through the door, laughing apologetically and pushing back her hair. ‘Forgive me, O my dear friends, forgive me. I fell asleep on the sand and I’m very sorry I’m so late.’ (The men and women raised their eyebrows cynically and went on with their work.) ‘Apraxine, has anything happened?’ (Apraxine cleared her throat with Alexandrian hauteur and became absorbed in looking for a thread on the ground.) ‘Now we must find something particularly rare for supper.’

The sheep exchanged pitying glances over all this tawdry artifice and when Chrysis passed into the house they burst into laughter. The laughter was condescending, but the soul had returned to the community. Finally at a signal from Apraxine, Glycerium went to the door and announced to Chrysis that Philocles had arrived from Andros. He had seen her pass and some twinge of memory had set him trembling. He rose and walked unsteadily to the middle of the court. She saw him standing before her, haggard, with hollow puzzled eyes and with untrimmed beard.

She went forward repeating, ‘My dear friend, my friend!’ but as she embraced him a loud voice within her seemed to say: ‘Something is going to happen. The threads of my life are drawing together.’