Many people knew him and saluted him as they passed by: to these salutes he responded gravely, and a little dignified gesture of his hands spoke in duet with his voice: “God be with you! I pray you, do not speak to me.” Hands so beautiful might well have made him vain, but he never thought of himself. And though he lived so intensely, he was very rarely conscious of his happiness except each night when, having closed the street-door, he sought his bed with strange relief.
Venizelos Street was never beautiful, or even picturesque, till the great fire of August 1917 came like a giant and, in a few hours, twisted it to fantastic shapes. And the Dreamer loathed it, though he made himself spend many hours of each day in gazing upon its squalidness, his eyes ranging from the Place de la Liberté up to the point where the street narrows and the Arcade and the Bazaars begin. But he had one of the secrets of happiness: he could look at things and not see them: better, far better, he could see things that were not there. Stein’s steel-walled shop did not exist: Orosdi Back had never been there with his wine and pickles: Tiring was only the faint echo of a name. Salonika’s life-blood moved sluggishly in that main artery; but the slowness was a predatory slowness—the cautious movement of men and women for ever on the prowl. Sometimes his eyes would rest for a moment on the discontented rich as they sat on their little chairs outside Floca’s, drinking syrups and haggling over prices. They were nearly as unreal to him as Jesus Christ is to the Christian.
He rarely glanced towards the sea, for he was sure she would not come that way. The mountains were her home. She would come drifting like a wraith, and, leaving the mountains, place her tiny feet on the plain, flutter past Lembet and Karaissi, enter the town, and, turning to the left down Rue Egnatia, reach this ugly street that sloped to and ended in the tideless sea. Surely, crocuses and anemones would bloom on the pavement when she came, and with her would come the stirring of a breeze. It must be so: he had pictured it so often. She had radiant eyes, he knew. She had always been young, ever since the beginning of the world. Youth was hers for ever. And her hair ... his heart leapt, for it seemed to him that her hand was about his heart: his heart cupped in her hand: a hand cool and, in some curious way, conscious of itself. Her hair was in his eyes, blinding them. A great light shone about her.
When she came, she would not speak to him: but, all the same, she would know. That was what he was waiting for, living for: that she should know.
A complaining voice came from the room just above his head. Turning swiftly, he passed through the shop where a few pieces of statuary gleamed white against the walls and shelves painted black, and quickly mounted the staircase.
“God be with you, mamma!” he breathed, as he bent over a little curled-up figure that lay on a bed near the window. The paralysed woman murmured a little something he could not hear.
“I am here,” he said. “Feel me.”
And he placed a lean cheek against one of her hands.
A devastating weakness overcame her and she cried a little, but her weeping, suffocated by exhaustion, soon ceased. She lay still and seemingly asleep, and the Dreamer, kneeling by her side, felt pity rising like a fountain in his heart. Her sallow face was like his own, aristocratic, broad-brewed, patient. The eyes were still full of Jewish ardour. He worshipped her always as a devotee worships the Madonna. It was she who had quickened his love for the Beauty that lies behind beautiful things, who had taught him that all life was a Seeming, who had added glamour and twilight and witchery to his entire environment.
“Great little mamma!” he whispered.