When last I heard of him he was in the Citadel—a mild, gentle figure, pathetically happy, and with a keen and soul-comforting remembrance of his last encounter with George Georges.
THE DREAMER
To
Edith Heald
EVERY few years, gathering his small savings together, he left intolerable Salonika and went to Athens where he dreamed away a month of spring on the Acropolis, in the great weed-overgrown cemetery where remnants of ancient beauty lie broken and marred, and in the Temple of Jupiter in which he imagined he could hear faint music, and where, of a surety, he witnessed dim processional rites unseen by others. And always a few days were spent in Eleusis—fever-stricken Eleusis, so foul to-day, so fair yesterday: Eleusis that still holds its Mysteries known only to the gods: Eleusis where, each morning at dawn, he issued from the muddy, sordid inn and, slipping off his white tunic, bathed in the Ægean, singing to himself and gazing long and long into the clear waters.
Athens to him was a White Paradise, and he would have left Salonika years since to make his home there had not his bedridden mother clung with increasing fretfulness to the gaudy city where her forefathers had lived ever since the great exodus of Jews from Spain, centuries ago. To her son, Salonika was hateful, for it was ever in conflict with his dreams, and dreams were his life. They kept his soul winging. Whereas Athens threw him into a quiet ecstasy. The present slipped into nothingness, and the past lived....
There was a certain marble figure in the museum which seemed to him to hold all Ancient Greece in its limbs and face.... A green lizard clinging, sun-smitten, to a white wall seemed to belong to a remote age; and a valley full of white butterflies—butterflies so thickly clustered that they looked like dancing snow—was even now haunted by Pan. And at night the moon on the marble of the Parthenon made him giddy with the piercing realness of life....
But this evening he was at home, standing at his shop-door at the corner of the Place de la Liberté. He gazed with shy eagerness up Venizelos Street, that ill-paved gutter of a street where Birmingham and Hamburg jewelry compete with one another for Jewish gold. Here, every evening, he was to be seen, and, when no customer was in his shop bargaining for a cast of Venus or for some piece of ivory carved by the Dreamer’s sensitive hands, he would stand there in the daytime also, his rather tired eyes full of hunger. For—but it was not likely—she might come by day, though a years-old intuition insisted that the time of her arrival would be some evening between sunset and dark.