With a bound Aristides was upon him, his wiry hands about Georges’ fat throat, his finger-tips disappearing as far as the first joint into the flesh of his wife’s seducer. He held on viciously, his fingers as firm and frenzied as a bulldog’s teeth. Georges rolled over on his back, his muscleless arms waving in the air like branches swayed by a breeze, and a sound, half groan, half hiss, came from him as Aristides pressed his right knee on his enemy’s chest. It lasted little more than a minute, and at length the fat man of mixed blood lay soft and limp upon the couch of marble whilst Aristides, exhausted, sat examining him eagerly....
If you wish, you can be with him for a moment. In those spacious, thick-walled Baths there is always deep silence save when customers and workers are there; but the silence is constantly broken by big drops of water that fall from roof and walls to the paved floor. As you listen, there appears to be some purpose in this sound: some elaborate scheming, maybe: some nefarious business afoot. It is the persistence of it that counts, and it is the deliberateness of it that makes you suspect conspiracies.
After violence there is always reaction, and a reaction came to Aristides very quickly as he sat dumbly looking on the dead body of his victim. He had a feeling of approaching catastrophe—a feeling that implied that what had happened was as nothing compared with what was about to happen. Disaster had been released, like a lion, from its den, and ravage must necessarily follow. He, so careful of his own life, felt himself drawn, dragged, into disaster. And the agent of disaster was himself.
He rose, gave a final frightened glance at the body, unlocked the door, and stumbled his way to the entrance of the building. He wanted to run quickly and unthwarted to his doom. So he cast off his towel-robe and began to don his outdoor clothing. And as he dressed he kept repeating to himself:
“Kalamaria! Kalamaria! I will go to Kalamaria to die.”
For beyond Kalamaria, where the little cliffs are, the sea is deep, and the water would take his body and smother it. He did not want to die, and a deep fear shook his heart as he thought of death. But he could not help himself. Something within him—the lion he had let loose—was driving and goading him on towards death: his terror of death was as nothing compared with his terror of discovery, for discovery would mean prolonged torture as well as death, and he had already been tortured to his soul’s full capacity.
What could bring him solace? Drink. Of course. The very word already soothed him, as the promise to lend money immediately soothes the eager borrower. He took a bottle of cognac from the shelf and drank deeply and agitatedly. The liquid burnt his throat and stoutened his heart. He stopped and gasped for breath, and then drank again, and again gasped. Yes: yes: the stuff was already averting disaster: the lion would, in the latter end, pass him by. For, after all, what had he done? Simply an act of justice. Nothing more. An act of bare justice, for was it not right that a seducer of women should die? He had, it is true, taken the law into his own hands. But what man wouldn’t? What man doesn’t?...
Oh, yes: he felt much happier, much stronger, now. Nearly, very nearly, he was content. The cognac fumes dizzied his brain, and as he rose to leave the Baths, he lurched and laughed insanely at himself for doing so. Turning out the lights, he opened the door and looked into Rue Egnatia twenty yards or so away. The shops were lit: there was plenty of traffic: an electric tram clattered by. The entire city, except these loathsome Baths, seemed very friendly. And he was about to issue forth into the night when the thought of the unconsumed cognac came to him. If the half-bottle he had already drunk had killed his fear, would not the remainder remove the very cause of that fear? The drink-fumes in his brain assured him it would, and he re-entered the baths, felt his way to the shelf, and carefully groped for the bottle his soul desired. He found it and drank deeply.
And then he sat down and began dully to think—a stupefied brain in an exhausted body. The bottle fell from his nerveless fingers, and the liquor, pouring out, filled the air with the thick, sickly smell of scented alcohol. Through the open door came a stray dog; it gazed round in the darkness and wandered away.
Throughout that night Aristides Kronothos slept heavily and dreamlessly—slept for an hour or two in a sitting posture until, swaying a little, he overbalanced himself and fell stupidly and without protest to the floor. It was there, Rompapas told me, that he was found next morning, still crazy with liquor, still confident that he had averted disaster.