Читать книгу In the Wilderness - Robert Hichens - Страница 7

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In the following spring, Rosamund and Dion were married, and Dion took Rosamund “to the land of the early morning.”

They arrived in Greece at the beginning of May, when the rains were over and the heats of summer were at hand. The bed of Ilissus was empty. Dust lay white in the streets of Athens and along the road to Phaleron and the sea. The low-lying tracts of country were desert-dry, and about Athens the world was arrayed in the garb of the East. Nevertheless there was still a delicate freshness in the winds that blew to the little city from the purple Aegean or from the mountains of Argolis; stirring the dust into spiral dances among the pale houses upon which Lycabettos looks down; shaking the tiny leaves of the tressy pepper trees near the Royal Palace; whispering the antique secrets of the ages into the ears of the maidens who, unwearied and happily submissive, bear up the Porch of the Erechtheion; stealing across the vast spaces and between the mighty columns of the Parthenon. The dawns and the twilights had not lost the pure savor of their almost frail vitality. The deepness of slumber still came with the nights.

Greece was, perhaps, at her loveliest. And Greece was almost deserted by travelers. They had come and gone with the spring, leaving the land to its own, and to those two who had come there to drink deep at the wells of happiness. And, a little selfish as lovers are, Rosamund and Dion took everything wonderful and beautiful as their possession.

The yellow-green pines near the convent of Daphni threw patches of shade on the warm earth because they wanted to rest there; the kingfisher rose in low and arrow-like flight from the banks of Khephissus to make a sweet diversion for them; they longed for brilliance, and the lagoons of Salamis were dyed with a wonder of emerald; they asked for twilight, and the deep and deserted glades of Academe gave it them in full measure. All these possessions, and many others, they enjoyed almost as children enjoy a meadow full of flowers when they have climbed over the gate that bars it from the high road. But the Acropolis was the stronghold of their joy. Only when their feet pressed its silvery grasses, and trod its warm marble pavements, did they hold the world within their grasp.

For some days after their arrival in Greece they almost lived among the ruins. The long-coated guardians smiled at them, at first with a sort of faint amusement, at last with a friendly pleasure. And they smiled at themselves. Each evening they said, “To-morrow we will do this—or that,” and each morning they said nothing, just looked at each other after breakfast, read in each other’s eyes the repetition of desire, and set out on the dear dusty road with which they were already so familiar.

Had there ever before been a honeymoon bounded by the precipices of the Acropolis? They sometimes discussed that important question, and always decided against the impertinent possibility. “What we are doing has never been done before.” Dion went further than this, to “What I am feeling has never been felt before.” His youth asserted itself in silent, determined statements which seemed to him to ring with authentic truth.

It was a far cry from the downs of Chilton to the summit of the Acropolis. Dion remembered the crowd assembled to hear “Elijah”; he felt the ugly heat, the press of humanity. And all that was but the prelude to this! Even the voice crying “Woe unto them!” had been the prelude to the wonderful silence of Greece. He felt marvelously changed. And Rosamund often seemed to him changed, too, because she was his own. That wonderful fact gave her new values, spread about her new mysteries. And some of these mysteries Dion did not attempt to fathom at first. Perhaps he felt that some silences of love are like certain ceremony with a friend—a mark of the delicacy which is the sign-manual of the things that endure. In the beginning of that honeymoon there was a beautiful restraint which was surely of good augury for the future. Not all the doors were set violently open, not all the rooms were ruthlessly visited.

Dion found that he was able to reverence the woman who had given herself to him more after he had received the gift than before. And this was very wonderful to him, was even, somehow, perplexing. For Rosamund had the royal way of bestowing. She was capable of refusal, but not of half-measures or of niggardliness. There was something primitive in her which spoke truth with a voice that was fearless; and yet that very primitiveness seemed closely allied with her purity. Dion only understood what that purity was when he was married to her. It was like the radiant atmosphere of Greece to him. Had not Greece led him to it, made him desire it with all that was best in his nature? Now he had brought it to Greece. Actually, day after day, he trod the Acropolis with Rosamund.

Greece had already, he believed, put out a hand and drawn them more closely together.

“Love me, love the land I love.”

Laughingly, yet half-anxiously too, Dion had said that to Rosamund when they left Brindisi and set sail for Greece. With her usual sincerity she had answered:

“I want to love it. Do you wish me to say more than that, to make promises I may not be able to keep?”

“No,” he had answered. “I only want truth from you.” And after a moment he had added, “I shall never want anything from you but your truth.”

She had looked at him rather strangely, like one moved by conflicting feelings, and after a slight hesitation she had said:

“Dion, do you realize all the meaning in those words of yours?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then if you really mean them you must be one of the most daring of human beings. But I shall try a compromise with you. I shall try to give you my best truth, never my worst. You deserve that, I think. Indeed, I know you do.”

And he had left it to her. Was he not wise to do that? Already he trusted her absolutely, as he had never thought to trust any one.

“I could face any storm with you,” he once said to Rosamund.

Rosamund had wanted to love Greece, and from the first moment of seeing the land she had loved it.

In the beginning of their stay she had scarcely been able to believe that she was really in Athens. A great name had aroused in her imagination a conception of a great city. The soft familiarity, the almost rustic simplicity and intimacy, the absolutely unpretentious brightness and homely cheerfulness of the small capital of this unique land had surprised, had almost confused her.

“Is this really Athens?” she had said, wondering, as they had driven into what seemed a village set in bright bareness, sparsely shaded here and there by small pepper-trees.

And the question had persisted in her mind, had almost trembled upon her lips, for two or three days. But then had come a mysterious change, brought about, perhaps, by affection. Quickly she had learnt to love Athens, and then she had the feeling that if it had been in any way different from what it was she could not have loved it. Its very smallness delighted her, and she would not permit its faults to be mentioned in her presence. Once, when Dion said that it was a great pity the Athenians did not plant more trees, and a greater pity they so often lopped off branches from the few trees they had, she exclaimed:

“You mustn’t run down my Athens. It likes to give itself to the sun generously. It’s grateful, as it well may be, for all the sun has done for it. Look at the color of that marble.”

And Dion looked at the honey color, and the wonderful reddish-gold, and, laughing, said:

“Athens is the one faultless city, and the dogs tell us so every night and all night long.”

“Dogs always bark when the moon is up,” she answered, with a semi-humorous gravity.

“As they bark in Athens?” he queried.

“Yes, of course.”

“If I am ever criticized,” he asked, “will you be my defender?”

“I shan’t hear you criticized.”

“How do you know that?”

“I do know it,” she said, looking at him with her honest brown eyes; “nobody will criticize you when I am there.”

He caught hold of her hand.

“And you? Don’t you often criticize me silently? I’m sure you do. Why did you marry me, Rosamund?”

They were sitting on the Acropolis when he put that question. It was a shining day. The far-off seas gleamed. There was a golden pathway to Aegina. The brilliant clearness, not European but Eastern, did not make the great view spread out beneath and around them hard. Greece lay wrapped in a mystery of sunlight, different from, yet scarcely less magical than, the mystery of shadows and the moon. Rosamund looked out on the glory. She had taken off her hat, and given her yellow hair to the sunlight. Without any head-covering she always looked more beautiful, and, to Dion, more Greek than when her hair was concealed. He saw in her then more clearly than at other times the woman of all the ages rather than the woman of an epoch subject to certain fashions. As he looked at her now, resting on a block of warm marble above the precipice which is dominated by the little temple of Athena Nike, he wondered, with the concealed humility of the great lover, how it was that she had ever chosen to give herself to him. He had sworn to marry her. He had not been weak in his wooing, had not been one of those men who will linger on indefinitely at a woman’s feet, ready to submit to unnumbered refusals. But now there rose up in the depths of him the cry, “What am I?” and the answer, “Only a man like thousands of other men, in no way remarkable, in no way more worthy than thousands of others of the gift of great happiness.”

Rosamund turned from the shining view. There was in her eyes an unusual vagueness.

“Why did you?”

“Why did I marry you, Dion?”

“Yes. When I found you with your ‘Paradise’ I don’t think you meant ever to marry me.”

“I always liked you. But at first I didn’t think of you in that way.”

“But you had known for ages before Burstal——”

“Yes, of course. I knew the day I sang at Mr. Darlington’s, at that party he gave to introduce me as a singer. I knew first from your mother. She told me.”

“My mother?”

“By the look she gave me when you introduced me to her.”

“Was it an——How d’you mean?”

“I can scarcely explain. But it was a look that asked a great many questions. And they wouldn’t have been asked if you hadn’t cared for me, and if she hadn’t known it.”

“What did you think when you knew?”

“That it was kind of you to care for me.”

“Kind?”

“Yes. I always feel that about people who like me very much.”

“And did you just go on thinking me kind until that day at Burstal?”

“I suppose so. But I felt very much at home with you.”

“I don’t know whether that’s a compliment to a man who’s still young, or not?”

“Nor do I. But that’s just how it was.”

He said nothing for a little while. When he spoke again it was with some hesitation, and his manner was almost diffident.

“Rosamund, that day at Burstal, were you at all inclined to accept me?”

“Yes; I think, perhaps, I was. Why?”

“Sometimes I have fancied there was a moment when——”

He looked at her and then, for once, his eyes fell before hers almost guiltily. They sat in silence for a moment. Behind them, on a bench set in the shadow of a mighty wall, was a guardian of the Acropolis, a thin brown man with very large ears sticking out from his head. He had been dozing, but now stirred, shuffled his feet, and suddenly cleared his throat. Then he sighed heavily.

“And if there was, why did you think it came, Dion?” said Rosamund suddenly, with an almost startling swiftness of decision.

Dion reddened.

“Why don’t you like to tell me?”

“Oh, well—things go through the mind without our wishing them to. You must know that, Rosamund. They are often like absurd little intruders. One kicks them out if one can.”

“What kind of intruder did you kick out, or try to kick out, at Burstal?”

She spoke half-laughingly, but half-challengingly.

He drew a little nearer to her.

“Sometimes I have fancied that perhaps, that day at Burstal, you suddenly realized that love might be a more powerful upholder of life than ambition ever could be.”

“Sometimes? And you thought it first on the downs, or at any rate after the concert?”

“I think I did.”

“Do you realize,” she said slowly, and as if with an effort, “that you and I have never discussed my singing in ‘Elijah’?”

“I know we never have.”

“Let us do it now,” she continued, still seeming to make a strong effort.

“But why should we?”

“I want to. Didn’t I sing well?”

“I thought you sang wonderfully well.”

“Then what was it that went wrong? I’ve never understood.”

“Why should you think anything went wrong? The critics said it was a remarkable performance. You made a great effect.”

“I believe I did. But I felt for the first time that day that I was out of sympathy with my audience. And then”—she paused, but presently added with a certain dryness—“I was never offered any engagement to sing in oratorio after Burstal.”

“I believe a good many people thought your talent would show at its best in opera.”

“I shall never go on the stage. The idea is hateful to me, and always has been. Would you like me to sing on the stage?”

“No.”

“Dion, why don’t you tell me what happened that day at Burstal?”

“I scarcely could.”

“I wish you would try.”

“Well—I think it was a mistake for you to begin your public career in oratorio by singing ‘Woe unto them.’”

“Why?”

“It’s an unsympathetic thing. It’s a cruel sort of thing.”

“Cruel? But it’s one of the best-known things in oratorio.”

“You made it quite new.”

“How?”

“It sounded fanatical when you sang it. I never heard it sound like that before.”

“Fanatical?” she said, and her voice was rather cold.

“Rosamund,” he said, quickly and anxiously, “you asked me to tell you exactly what I meant, what I felt, that is——”

“Yes, I know. Go on, Dion. Well? It sounded fanatical——”

“To me. I’m only telling you my impression. When I’ve heard ‘Woe unto them’ before it has always sounded sad, piteous if you like, a sort of wailing. When you sang it, somehow it was like a curse, a tremendous summoning of vengeance.”

“Why not? Are not the words ‘Destruction shall fall upon them’?”

“I know. But you made it sound—to me, I mean—almost as if you were rejoicing personally at the thought of the destruction, as if you were longing almost eagerly for it to overwhelm the faithless.”

“I see. That is what you meant by fanatical?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

After a long pause she said:

“Nobody has told me that till now.”

“Perhaps others didn’t feel it as I did.”

“I don’t know. What does one know about other people? Not even my guardian said anything. I never could understand——”

She broke off, then continued steadily:

“So you think I repelled people that day?”

“It seems impossible that you—”

But she interrupted him.

“No, Dion, it isn’t at all impossible. I think if we are absolutely sincere we repel people very often.”

“But you are the most sincere person I have ever seen, and you must know how beloved you are, how popular you are wherever you go.”

“When I’m being sincere with the part of me that’s feeling kind or affectionate. Let us go to the Parthenon.”

She got up, opened her white sun-umbrella and turned round, keeping her hat in her left hand. As she stood there in that setting of marble, with the sun caught in her hair, and the mighty view below and beyond her, she looked wonderfully beautiful, Dion thought, but almost stern. He feared perhaps he had hurt her. But was it his fault? She had told him to speak.

Rosamund did not return to the subject of her debut at Burstal, but in the late afternoon of that day she spoke of her singing, and of the place it might have in their married life. Dion believed she did this because of their conversation near the Temple of Nike.

They had spent most of the day on the Acropolis. Both had brought books: she, Mahaffy’s “History of Greek Literature”; he, a volume of poems written by a young diplomat who loved Greece and knew her well. Neither of them had read many pages, but as the strong radiance began to soften about them on the height, and the breeze from the Saronic Gulf came to them with a more feathery warmth and freshness over the smiling bareness of the Attic Plain, Dion, who had been half-dreamily turning the leaves of his little book, said:

“Rosamund.”

“Yes?”

“Look at the sea and the mountains of Trigania, those far-off mountains”—he pointed—“and the outpost of Hydra.”

She looked and said nothing. Then he read to her these lines of the young diplomat-poet:

“A crescent sail upon the sea,

So calm and fair and ripple free

You wonder storms can ever be;

A shore with deep indented bays,

And o’er the gleaming water-ways

A glimpse of Islands in the haze;

A face bronzed dark to red and gold,

With mountain eyes that seem to hold

The freshness of the world of old;

A shepherd’s crook, a coat of fleece,

A grazing flock;—the sense of peace,

The long sweet silence,—this is Greece!”

Rosamund gazed before her at Greece in the evening light.

“‘The freshness of the world of old,’” she repeated, and her voice had a thrill in it. “‘The sense of peace, the long sweet silence,—this is Greece.’ If there was music with the music of those words I should love to sing them.”

“And how you could sing them. Like no other.”

“At any rate my heart would be in them. ‘The freshness of the world of old—the sense of peace, the long sweet silence.’”

She was standing now near the edge of the sacred rock, looking out over the tawny plain flanked by gray Hymettos, and away to the sea. There were no voices rising from below. There was no sound of traffic on the white road which wound away down the slope to the hidden city. Her contralto voice lingered on the words; her lips drew them out softly, lengthening the sounds they loved.

“Freshness, that which belonged to the early world, long sweet silence, peace. Oh, Dion, if you know how something in me cares for freshness and for peace!”

Her glad energies were strangely stilled; yet there was a kind of force in her stillness, the force that is in all deep truths of whatever nature they may be. He felt that he was near to perhaps the most essential part of her, to that which was perhaps more truly her than even the radiant and buoyant humanity by means of which she drew people to her.

“Could you live always out of the world?” he asked her.

“But it wouldn’t be out of the world.”

“Away from people—with me?”

“With you?”

She looked at him for a moment almost as if startled. Then there came into her brown eyes a scrutiny that seemed half-inward, as if it were partially applied to herself.

“It’s difficult to be certain what one could do. I suppose one has several sides.”

“Ah! And your singing side?”

“I want to speak about that.”

Her voice was suddenly more practical, and her whole look and manner changed, losing in romance and strangeness, gaining in directness and energy.

“We’ve never discussed it.”

She sat down on a slab of rock at the edge of the precipice, and went on:

“You don’t mind your wife being a public singer, do you, Dion?”

“Suppose I do?”

“Do you?”

“You’re so energetic I doubt if you could be happy in idleness.”

“I couldn’t in England.”

“And in Greece? But we are only here for such a short time.”

He took her hand in his.

“Learning the lessons of happiness.”

“Good lessons for us!” she said, smiling.

“The best there are. I believe in the education of joy. It opens the heart, calls up all the generous things. But your singing; can I bear your traveling about perpetually all over England?”

“If I get engagements.”

“You will. You had a good many for concerts last winter. You’ve got several for June and July. You’ll get many more. But who’s to go with you on your travels?”

“Beattie, of course. Why do you look at me like that?”

“How do we know Beatrice won’t marry?”

Rosamund looked grave.

“Why shouldn’t she?” asked Dion.

“She may, of course.”

“D’you think she’ll remain your apanage now?” he asked, with a hint of smiling sarcasm that could not hurt her.

“My apanage?”

“Hasn’t she been something like that?”

“Perhaps she has. But Beattie always sinks herself in others. She wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t do that. Of course, your friend Guy Daventry’s in love with Beattie.”

“Deeply.”

“But I’m not at all sure that Beattie—”

She paused abruptly. After a moment she continued:

“You asked me to-day why I married you. I didn’t answer you and I’m not going to answer you now—entirely. But you’re not like other men, most other men.”

“In what way?”

“A way that means very much to me,” she answered, with a delicious purity and directness. “Women feel such things very soon when they know men. I could easily have never married, but I could never, never have married a man who had lived, as I believe most men have lived.”

“I think I always knew that from the first moment I saw you.”

“Did you? I’m glad. I care tremendously for that in you, Dion—more than you will ever know.”

“That’s my great, too great reward,” he said soberly, almost with a touch of deep awe. Then, reddening and looking away, he added, “You were the very first.”

“Was I?”

“Yes, but—but you mustn’t think that it was a religious feeling, anything of that kind, which kept me back from—from certain things. It was more the desire to be strong, healthy, to have the sane mind in the sane body, I think. I was mad about athletics, all that sort of thing. Anyhow, you know now. You were the first. You will be the only one in my life.”

There was a long silence between them. Then Rosamund said, with a change of manner to practical briskness:

“If Beattie ever should marry, I could take a maid about with me.”

“Yes. An hotel in Liverpool with a maid! In Blackpool, in Huddersfield, in Wolverhampton, in Glasgow, when there’s a heavy thaw on, with a maid! Oh, how delightful it will be! Manchester on a wet day in early spring with a—”

“Hush!” she put one hand on his lips gently, and looked at him with a sort of smiling challenge in her eyes. “Do you mean to forbid me?”

“I don’t think I could ever forbid you to do anything.”

“We shall see in England.”

“But, Rosamund”—there was no one in sight, and he slipped one arm round her—“if something came to fill your life, both our lives, to the brim?”

“Ah, then,”—a very remote expression came into her eyes,—“then it would all be different.”

“All?”

“Yes. Everything would be quite different then.”

“Not our relation to each other?”

“Yes, even that. Perhaps that most of all.”

“I—I hardly like to hear you say that,” he said, struggling against a perhaps stupid, or even hateful, feeling of depression mingled with something else.

“But wouldn’t it? Think!”

“I don’t want that to change. I should hate any change in that.”

“What we want, and what we hate, doesn’t affect what has to be. And I expect at the end we shall be thankful for that. But, Dion, yes, if what you say, I could give it all up. Public singing! What would it matter then? I’m a woman, not a singer. But perhaps it will never come.”

“Who knows?” he said.

And he sighed.

She turned towards him, leaned one hand on the stone and looked at him almost anxiously.

“What is the matter, Dion?”

“Why? There is nothing the matter.”

“Would you rather we never had that in our lives?”

“A child?”

“Yes, a child.”

“I thought I longed for that,” he answered.

“Do you meant that you have changed and don’t long any more?”

“I suppose it’s like this. When a man’s very happy, perfectly happy, he doesn’t—perhaps he can’t—want any change to come. If you’re perfectly happy instinctively you almost fear any change. Till to-day, till this very minute perhaps, I thought I wanted to have a child—some day. Perhaps I still do really, or perhaps I shall. But—you must forgive me, I can’t help it!—this evening, sitting here, I don’t want anything to come between us. It seems to me that even a child of ours would take some of you away from me. Don’t you see that?”

She shook her head.

“That’s a man’s feeling. I can’t share it.”

“But think—all the attention you would have to give to a child, all the thoughts you would fasten on it, all the anxieties you’d have about it!”

“Well?”

“One only has a certain amount of time. You’d have to take away a good deal, a great deal, of the time you can now give to me. Oh, it sounds too beastly, I know! Perhaps I scarcely mean it! But surely you can see how a man who loves a woman very much might, without being the least bit unnatural, think, ‘I’d like to keep every bit of her for myself. I’d like to have her all to myself!’ I dare say this feeling will pass. Remember, Rose, we’re only just married, and we’re in Greece, right away from every one. Don’t think me morbidly jealous, or a beast. I’m not. I expect lots of men have felt as I do, perhaps even till the first child came.”

“Ah, then it would be all right,” she said. “The natural things, the things nature intends, are always all right.”

“How blessedly sane and central you are!”

“If we had a child—Dion, you must believe me!—we should be drawn ever so much nearer together by it. If we ever do have one, we shall look back on this time—you will—and think ‘We were much farther apart then than we are now.’”

“I don’t like to hear you say that,” he said gravely, almost with pain.

Could a woman like Rosamund be driven by an instinct blindly? She was such a perfect type of womanhood. It would be almost a tragedy if she—such a woman—died childless. Perhaps instinct had obscurely warned her of that, had taught her where to look for a mate. He, Dion, had always lived purely. That day she had acknowledged that she had divined it. Was that, perhaps, her real, her instinctive reason for marrying him? But a man wants to be married for one thing only, because the woman longs for him. And Dion was just an ordinary man with very strong feelings.

“Let’s take one more stroll before we go down,” he said.

“Yes, to the maidens,” she answered.

Her voice sounded relieved. She pushed her arm gently through his as they moved away, and he felt all his body thrill. The mystery of love was almost painful to him at that moment. He realized that a great love might grow to have an affinity with a disease. “I must be careful. I must take great care with this love of mine,” he thought.

They went slowly over the slabs of marble and the gray rocks and passed before the west front of the Parthenon. Dion felt slight resistance in Rosamund’s arm, and stopped. In the changing light the marble was full of warm color, was in places mysterious and translucent almost as amber. The immense power, the gigantic calm of the temple, a sort of still breathing of Eternity upon Time, confronted a glory which was beginning to change in the face of its changelessness. Soon the seas that held their dream under the precipices of Sunion, and along the shores of Aegina, where the tall shepherd boys in their fleeces of white lead home the flocks in the twilight, would lose the wonder of their shining, and the skies the rapture of their diffused light. In the quietly austere Attic Plain, through the whispering groves of Academe, and along the sacred way to Eleusis, a very delicate vagueness was beginning to travel, like a wanderer setting forth to greet the coming of the night. The ranges of hills and mountains, Hymettos and Pentelicus, Parnes stretching to the far distance, Mount Corydallus, the peak of Salamis, the exquisitely long mountains of Trigania—“the greyhounds of their tribe,” Rosamund loved to call them—were changing almost from moment to moment, becoming a little softer, a little more tender, putting off their distinct hues of the day for the colors of sleep and forgetting. But the great Doric columns fronting them, the core of the heart of this evening splendor, seemed not to defy, but to ignore, all the processes of change. In its ruin the Parthenon seemed to say, “I have not changed.” And it was true. For the same soul which had confronted Pericles confronted the two lovers who now stood at the foot of the temple.

“I wonder how many thousands of people of all nations have learnt the same lesson here,” Rosamund said at last.

“The Doric lesson, you mean?”

“Yes, of strength, simplicity, endurance, calmness.”

“And I wonder how many thousands have forgotten the lesson.”

“Why do you say that, Dion?”

“I don’t know. Great art is a moral teacher, I’m sure of that. But men are very light-minded as a rule, I think. If they lived before these columns they might learn a great deal, they might even develop in a splendid direction, I believe. But an hour, even a few hours, is that enough? Impressions fade very quickly in most people.”

“Not in you. You never forget the Parthenon, and I shall never forget it.”

She stood for some minutes quite still gazing steadily up at the temple, gaining—it seemed to her—her own stillness from its tremendous immobility.

“The greatest strength is in silence,” she thought. “The greatest power is in motionlessness.”

She thought of the raging of the great sea. But no! There was more of the essence of strength, of the stern inwardness of power, in that which confronted life and Time in absolute stillness; in a mountain, in this temple. And the temple spoke to something far down within her; to something which desired long silences and deep retirement, to something mystic which she did not understand. The temple was Pagan and she knew that. But that in her to which it spoke was not Pagan. Before she left Athens she meant to realize that the soul of man, when it speaks through mighty and pure effort, of whatever kind, always speaks to the same Listener, to but one, though man may not know it.

“Doric!” she said at last. “I have always known that for me that would be the greatest. The simplest thing is the most sublime thing. That temple is like the Sermon on the Mount to me. Didn’t you bring me here because it meant so much to you?”

“Not entirely. No, Rosamund, I think I brought you here because I felt that you belonged here.”

“This satisfies me.”

She sighed deeply, still gazing at the temple.

“You aren’t only in Greece, you are of Greece. Come to the maidens.”

As they went on slowly the acid voices of the little birds which fly perpetually among the columns of the Parthenon followed them, bidding them good night.

They descended over the uneven ground and came to the famous Porch of the Caryatides, jutting out from the little Ionic temple which is the handmaid of the Parthenon. Not far from the Porch, and immediately before it, was a wooden bench. Already Rosamund and Dion had spent many hours here, sometimes sitting on the bench, more often resting on the warm ground in the sunshine, among the fragments of ruin and the speary, silver-green grasses. Now Rosamund sat down and Dion stood by her side.

“Rosamund, those maidens are my ideal of womanhood shown in marble,” he said.

“They are almost miraculously beautiful. And one scarcely knows why. But I know that every time I see them the mystery of their beauty seems more ineffable to me, and the meaning of it seems more profound. How did men get so much meaning into marble?”

“By caring so much for what is beautiful in womanhood, I suppose.”

He sat down close beside her.

“I sometimes wonder whether women have any idea what some men, many men, I believe, seek in women.”

“What do they seek?”

“What do those maidens that hold up the Porch suggest to you?”

“All that’s calm without a touch of coldness, and strong without a touch of hardness, and noble without a touch of pride, and obedient without a touch of servility.”

“Brave sweetness, too, and protectiveness. They are wonderful, and so are some women. When I saw you in the omnibus at Milan I thought of these maidens immediately.”

“How strange!”

“Why strange?”

“Isn’t it?” she said, gazing at the six maidens in their flowering draperies of marble, who, upon their uncovered heads, bore tranquillity up the marble architrave. “How wonderfully simple and unpretending they are!”

“Are not you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe I think about it.”

“I do. Rosamund, sometimes I feel that I am an unique man—just think of a fellow in a firm on the Stock Exchange being unique!—because I have had an ideal, and I have attainted to it. When I was here alone, I conceived for the first time an ideal of woman. I said to myself, ‘In the days of ancient Greece there must have been such women in the flesh as these maidens in marble. If I could have lived and loved then!’ And I came away from Greece carrying a sort of romantic dream with me. And now I sit here with you; I can’t think why I, a quite ordinary man, should be picked out for perfect happiness.”

“Is it really perfect?” she asked, turning to him.

“I think so. In such a place with you!”

As the evening drew on, a little wind came and went over the rocky height, but it had no breath of cold in it. Two Greek soldiers passed by slowly behind them—short young men with skins almost as dark as the skins of Arabs of the South, black eyes and faces full of active mentality. They were talking eagerly, but stopped for a moment to look at the English, and beyond them at the six maidens on their platform of marble. Then they went on talking again, but presently hesitated, came back, and stood not far off, gazing at the Porch with a mixture of reverence and quiet wistfulness. Dion drew Rosamund’s attention to them.

“They feel the beauty,” he said.

“Yes, I like that.”

She looked at the two young men with a smile. One of them noticed it, and smiled back at her almost boyishly, and with a sort of confidential simplicity.

The light began to fail. The six maidens were less clearly seen, but the deep meaning of them did not lessen. In the gathering darkness they and their sweet effort became more touching, more lovable. Their persistence was exquisite now that they confronted with serenity the night.

“They are beautiful by day, but at night they are adorable,” said Rosamund.

“Don’t you know why I thought of them when I met you?” he whispered.

She got up slowly. The Greek soldiers moved, turned, and went down the slope towards the Propylae. Their quick voices were heard again. Then there was the sound of a bell.

“Time to go,” said Rosamund.

As they followed the soldiers she again put her arm through her young husband’s.

“Dion,” she said, “I think I’m a little afraid of your ideals. I understand them. I have ideals too. But I think perhaps mine are less in danger of ever being shattered than yours are.”

“Why? But I know mine are not in danger.”

“How can you say that?”

“It’s no use trying to frighten me. But what about your ideals? What is the nature of the difference between yours and mine, which makes yours so much less vulnerable than mine?”

But she only said:

“I don’t believe I could explain it. But I feel it, and I shall go on feeling it.”

They went down the steep marble steps, gave the guardian at the foot of them good night, and walked almost in silence to Athens.