Читать книгу Daughters of Men - Hannah Lynch - Страница 7

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Among the many curious customs of the modern Athenians—at least those unprovided with permanent tents—is their habit of changing residence every first of September. When they go into each new house, they have at last found their earthly paradise, which they at once begin to maltreat in every possible way, until, by summer-time there is hardly a clean spot left on any of the walls, a door left with a handle, a cupboard with a lock, or a window with a fastening entire in its panes. Then the earthly paradise, is described in terms as exaggeratedly expressive of the reverse of comfort; the family look around for the next September move, and a new home or flat is found with the same fate awaiting it. The only rational way of accounting for this startling custom, which would greatly disturb any reasonable person compelled to follow it, is by supposing that the natives find something exciting and morally or mentally beneficial in their annual migrations.

In compliance with the law, Andromache’s mother, the previous September, had moved from a flat on the second floor in Solon Stettore, a ground floor flat with plenty of underground accommodation, in one of the many yet unnamed streets that break from the foot of Lycabettus like concentric rays to drop into the straight line of Solon Street, and proceed on a wider and recognised course down among the larger thoroughfares. These baby passages are rarely traversed by any but those who enjoy the qualified happiness of living in them. There is always a river of flowing water edging their entrance like a barrier, which a lady with dainty boots would doubtless view with disapprobation if she were asked to ford it upon an afternoon call. Children by the hundred play about these streets—variously coloured children, ragged, ugly, showing every condition but that of cleanliness and beauty, with little twisted mouths and sharp black eyes that always seem to be measuring in the spectator a possible foe; with coarse matted hair, or shaven heads looking like nothing more than the skin of a mouse worn as a skull cap, or dirty straw, bleached nearly white, hanging about them in unapproachable wisps and understood to be fair hair. As well as the householders, the infants, and running water, the streets offer, as further attraction, the cries of the itinerant merchants, who draw their carts up the dusty, unpaved little hills, and yell out the contents of their store in a way only to be heard in burning cities, where yelling, public and domestic, becomes an art, cultivated with zeal, and heard with joy—by all but the nervous traveller. All day long these vendors come and go, and the aforementioned happy householders need only appear on their thresholds to buy stuffs, soap, candles, sponges, carpets, etc.

In the sweet spot Kyria Karapolos had pitched her tent with her family, consisting of two sons, the eldest a dashing captain of the Artillery, known in town as Captain Miltiades, understood to have no relations, and to sleep on horseback, dine on gallantry and the recital of his own prowess, and enjoy relaxation from equine exercise in the ball-room. The second son, Themistocles, a dapper little fellow, had a position in the Corinthian Bank, not very remunerative, but enabling him to dress with what he considered Parisian taste, and walk Stadion Street with two or three other fashionable youths, all equally gloved, caned—and killing. He had a violin too, and disliking his family, when constrained to remain at home, spent the time in his own room, which looked out upon the sloping gardens of the French School, and tortured the silence by irritating this poor instrument, deluded into a fond belief that he was playing Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and Schubert’s “Serenade.”

He cherished a hopeless passion for a young lady in the next street who had no fortune; neither had he, nor, what is worse in an aspiring husband, any prospect of making one.

A girl came next, Julia, of abnormal plainness of feature, considerably heightened by a pimpled, sallow complexion and a furtive, untrustworthy expression. Unlike the rest of her family, she had no special qualification, but while the others enjoyed every kind of discomfort, her fortune was pleasantly counted into the Corinthian Bank, to be taken out the day a husband should present himself for her and for it, especially for it. In this land of dowered maidens young gentlemen of expensive tastes and empty purses find it feasible and honourable to incur debts on the understanding that they will be paid out of somebody’s dowry by and by. Personal looks or qualities are secondary questions, so the absence of attractions in Julia did not weigh in the eyes of her brother and mother in their anxiety to marry her.

The youngest was Andromache, as pretty as Julia was plain, resembling her brother, the redoubtable Captain Miltiades; a sweet girl, too, if suggestive of the unvarying sweetness which is another word for feebleness of character—fond of music, and showing some ability in that direction, never taking part in the family quarrels which were always raging at the table and elsewhere between the rest. But she had the tastes of the woman of warm latitudes. In the house she was rarely fit to be seen,—and she had a passion for powder, unguents and strong perfumes. She was a tolerably efficient housekeeper, and generally spent her mornings in the kitchen, superintending and helping Maria, the maid of all work, who had enough in all conscience to do to keep Captain Miltiades in clean shirts.

Captain Miltiades was not only the hero of his domestic circle, but the hero of all Greece—or so he believed, which comes to the same thing; the boldest soldier, the mightiest captain, the best horseman and dancer, and, crown in romantic imaginations, the most impecunious ornament of Athenian society. His fierce and military moustache and bronzed cheek awed beholders, and his noble brow merging into a bald crown gently fringed with short black hair, which made a thin line above his black military coat and crimson velvet collar, seemed to hold the concentrated wisdom of ages. But gallant and youthful was the spirit of Captain Miltiades—amatory, too, as behoves a son of Mars. “One may be bald and not old for that,” said his flashing dark-blue eye whenever a maiden’s thoughtful glance rested on the discrowned region. His French left much to be desired, and of other European languages he knew nothing. But then scientific was his knowledge of the gay cotillon, entrancing his movement in the waltz and mazurka; at least the young ladies of Athens thought so. However, be it known to all who care to learn noteworthy facts, Captain Miltiades was an authority on these important subjects; a kind of dancing Master of Ceremonies at the Palace, where he danced with royal partners and was amazingly in demand. But, sad to relate, nobody dreamed of falling in love with him, in spite of his military prowess and carpet-pirouetting. The ladies regarded him as a kind of amiable harlequin, and his presence and warm declarations only excited a smile on the lips of the weakest. Of course he sighed and dangled after every dot, but sighed in vain, for neither his fierce moustache nor his dark blue eyes have brought him somebody’s one figure and countless noughts of francs.

It was twelve o’clock, and Captain Miltiades might be heard galloping up the unpaved street, looking as if nothing short of a miracle could bring horse or rider to stop before they reached the overhanging point of Lycabettus. The miracle was accomplished without flinging the gallant Captain headforemost into the dust or into the nearest flowing stream, and the Captain’s military servant, Theodore, emerged from the side entrance to carry off the panting war-horse, and refresh its foaming flanks with the stable brush, while the warrior, with stern brow and dissatisfied lips under the nodding red plumes of his cap—this modern Achilles always appeared in a white heat of suppressed anger in the domestic circle—rapped at the glass door which Julia opened.

“Where is Maria?” asked Captain Miltiades.

“In the kitchen, of course, cooking the breakfast.”

“Maria! Maria!”

“Yes, sir,” cried the unfortunate servant, rushing from the steaming pilaf she was preparing, and showing a spacious bosom hardly restrained within the compass of the strained and long since colourless cloth that untidily covered it, and a ragged skirt, and fuzzy black hair that she found as much difficulty in keeping out of the soup as out of her own coal-black eyes—only far greater effort was made to accomplish the latter feat.

“Maria, the balls are commencing, and I shall be going out regularly; you must have two clean shirts for me every day. Do you hear?”

“And how on earth do you think, Captain, I am to get through my work? Two shirts a day indeed! And the same for Mr. Themistocles, I suppose. Four bedrooms to see to, cooking, washing for five persons: and one poor girl to do it all for twenty-five francs a month. You may look for another servant.”

“Get away, or I’ll wring your ear, Maria. You have Theodore to help you in the kitchen, and you know that both my mother and Andromache help you in the housework.”

“Wonderful, indeed! It only wants every one in the house to sit down and do nothing, and the young ladies to ask me to starch them two white petticoats apiece every day. Ah, animals, pigs, the whole of you,” she added as she retired to the kitchen, and the gallant Captain to his chamber.

Another masculine entrance, and this time the thin piping voice of little Themistocles was heard, calling on the unhappy maid of all work.

“What does this fool want now?” roared the infuriated Maria, appearing in the corridor with a large spoon which she brandished menacingly.

“I am going out this evening, Maria, and I want a second clean shirt,” said Themistocles, thrusting his head out of his room.

“A second clean shirt! Oh, of course. What else? Don’t you think, sir, you might find something more for me to do? I have so very little to do that it would really be a kindness to keep an idle girl in work. Clean shirts for Miltiades, clean shirts for Themistocles. ’Pon my word, it is poor Maria herself who wants clean shirts—and she has not even time to wash her face!”

“Really, it is absurd the trouble you men give in a house,” cried Julia over her embroidery in the hall. “You seem to think there are no limits to what a servant is to be asked to do.”

“Hold your tongue, Julia, and speak more respectfully of your brothers,” retorted little Themistocles.

“What do you mean by quarrelling with your sister, you whipper-snapper?” cried Miltiades, combing his moustache, as he came out of his room to join in the fray. “Another impertinent word to Julia, and it would not take much to make me kick you out into the street.”

One word from the head of the house, as Captain Miltiades was called, full twenty years his senior, was enough to silence Themistocles, who retired into his room, and proceeded to make a careful study of the libretto of “La Princesse des Canaries.”

The third tap that morning at the glass door of the street, announcing the return of Andromache and her mother, was the cheerful herald of breakfast. Everybody was seated at table, wearing a more or less bellicose air, while Theodore, looking as correct and rigid as an ill-fitting military undress would permit, served out the pilaf when Andromache and Kyria Karapolos entered the dining-room.

Andromache took her seat in silence beside Julia, and slowly unfolded her napkin with an absent air, and her mother at the head of the table began to puff and pant and violently fan herself.

“Pooh! pooh! pooh! what a woman! I thought she would eat poor Andromache.”

“The music-woman,” remarked Captain Miltiades, indistinctly, through a mouthful of pilaf.

“A savage, Miltiades. She has a servant just like herself, who received us as if we were beggars, and told us to go upstairs and look for the Natzelhuber ourselves. And when we went up, there was a nice-looking young gentleman with her, a foreigner, fair, I should say an Englishman or a Russian—what country do you think he comes from, Andromache?”

“Who, mamma?” asked Andromache, coming down from the clouds.

“That fair young man we saw at Natzelhuber’s.”

“I don’t know, I did not pay much attention to him,” Andromache replied; and turned her eyes to the dish of roast meat Theodore was placing on the table.

“Well, this young man, as I said, was with her, and when we entered the room, I assure you she all but ordered us out again.”

“And why did you not go away?” demanded the Captain, hotly. “You are always getting yourself insulted for want of proper spirit.”

“You are just like your father, ever ready to fly into a rage for nothing,” protested Kyria Karapolos, sulkily. “If one followed your advice, there would be nothing but quarrelling in the world. By acting civilly I have been able to beat down the Natzelhuber’s terms very much below my expectations. When I asked her what she charged a lesson, I nearly fainted at her answer. Thirty francs! However, when I expressed our position, and how absolutely impossible it would be for us to pay more than ten, she consented to receive Andromache as a pupil on those terms. But whenever I spoke she snubbed me in the most violent manner,—called me an old fool.”

“Perhaps you gave her cause,” sneered Themistocles, who felt bitter towards his mother, regarding her as his natural enemy since she had warned the mother of the young lady in the next street of his pennilessness, a warning which served to close the doors of that paradise forever to him.

“How dare you, sir, speak in such a way to your mother?” thundered the irate Captain, always ready to pounce on the small bank-clerk, whom he despised very cordially. “I told you to-day that it would not take much to make me kick you into the street. Another offensive word, and see!”

This ebullition quenched all further family expansion round the breakfast-table. The girls hurried through the meal in silence, keeping their eyes resolutely fixed on their plate. One man glowered, and the other sulked in offended dignity, rising hurriedly the instant Theodore appeared with two small cups of Turkish coffee for Kyria Karapolos and the Captain. In another instant the street door was heard to bang behind Themistocles, who, with his slim cane, his yellow gloves, and minute waist, had gone down to indulge in a clerkly saunter as far as Constitution Place, and unbosom his harassed and manly soul to two other minute confidants previous to turning into the Corinthian Bank.

After his coffee, the Captain went back to his barracks beyond the Palace, and Andromache sat down to practice her scales on a cracked piano in the little salon, with a view of the rugged steepness of Lycabettus and the trellised gardens of the French School through the long window. It was a pretty little room, with some excellent specimens of Greek art and Byzantine embroidery, foolish Byzantine saints, in gilt frames, with an artificial vacuity of gaze, the artistic achievements of the rival Athenian photographers, Romaïdes and Moraïtes, views of the Parthenon and the Temple of Jupiter, a bomb that had exploded at the very feet of Captain Miltiades in the late outbreak at Larissa, upon which memorable occasion he had gallantly mangled the bodies of five thousand Turks and scattered their armies in shame. This valuable piece of historic information I insert for the special benefit of those who may presume to question the direct succession of this mighty Captain from the much admired warriors of Homer. In olden days Captain Miltiades’ glory would have quite outshone that of his puny namesake; as a complete hero, upon his own description, he would have occupied the niche of fame with Hercules and Theseus.

Necessarily there was the sofa, the Greek seat of honour, upon which all distinguished visitors are at once installed, this law, like that of the Medes and Persians, knowing no change. Also sundry tables decorated with albums and the school prizes of the young ladies, the bank-clerk, and the Captain of the Artillery. All the chairs were covered with white dimity, and the floor was polished with bees’ wax, which gave the room an aspect of chill neatness.

Andromache was interrupted in a conscientious study of scales by the entrance of her mother and Julia, and the former’s irrelevant question:

“Don’t you think that young man was English, Andromache?”

“I don’t know, mother, possibly,” was Andromache’s impatient answer, for, though it grieves me to unveil the secret workings of a maiden’s mind, I must perforce confess that the student was thinking just then of Rudolph’s kind and sympathetic glance.

“Can’t you stop that horrible noise and describe him?” said Julia. “You know I always want to hear about foreigners.”

“He was fair and tall and handsome, with very kind blue eyes, light, not dark like those of Miltiades—there, that’s all I can say about him,” said Andromache, rising, and standing at the window to stare across at the gardens of the French School.