Читать книгу In the Wilderness - Robert Hichens - Страница 13

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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——”

She looked at him with a sort of smiling reproach:

“You wouldn’t be allowed to stay.”

“Why not?”

“You committed a crime this morning. Nature’s taken possession of Olympia, and you struck at her.”

“D’you know why I did that?”

“No.”

But she did not again ask him why, and he never told her. When the heat had lessened a little, they wandered once more through that garden of ruins, where scarcely a column is standing, where convulsions of nature have helped the hands of man to overthrow man’s work, and where nature has healed every wound, and made every scar tender and beautiful. And presently Rosamund said:

“I want to know exactly where Hermes was found.”

“Come, and I’ll show you.”

He led her on among the wild flowers and the grasses, till they came to the clearly marked base of the Heraeon, the most ancient known temple of Greece. Two of its columns were standing, tremendously massive Doric columns of a warm golden-brown color.

“The Hermes was found in this temple. It stood between two of the columns, but I believe it was lying down when it was found.”

“It’s difficult to imagine him between such columns as these.”

“Yet you love Doric.”

“Yes, but I don’t know——”

She looked at the columns, even put her hands on them as if trying to clasp them.

“It must have been right. The Greeks knew. Strength and grace, power and delicacy, that’s the bodily ideal. So the Hermes stood actually here.”

She looked all round, she listened to the distant sheep-bells, she drew into her nostrils the green scents of the valley.

“And left his influence here for ever,” she added. “His quiet influence.”

“Let me come to see him with you on the way home.”

And this time she said, “Yes.”

At a little after four they left the sweet valley, and, passing over the river ascended the hill to the Museum. The door was open, and the guardian was sitting profoundly asleep in the vestibule of the Emperors.

“You see, that’s the picture-frame,” Rosamund whispered, when they were inside, pointing to the doorway. “The branch came just there in my picture.”

She had lifted her hand. He took her by the wrist and gently pulled her hand down.

“You mustn’t show me that.”

“Don’t let us wake him.”

A fly buzzed outside on the sunny threshold of the door, making a sleepy sound like the winding of a rustic horn in the golden stillness, as they went forward on tiptoe between the dull red walls of the hall of the Victory, and came into the room beyond, where the Hermes stood alone but for the little Dionysos on his arm.

There a greater silence seemed to reign—the silence of the harmony which lies beyond music, as a blue background of the atmosphere lies beyond the verges of the vastest stretch of land that man’s eyes have power to see; he sees the blue, but almost as if with his soul, and in like manner hears the harmony. Both Rosamund and Dion felt the difference in the silence directly they entered that sacred room.