Читать книгу In the Wilderness - Robert Hichens - Страница 12

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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.