[A] The Greeks call their modern Parliament by the classical name of Boulé.
CHAPTER VII. PHOTINI NATZELHUBER.
Many years ago a German mechanic drifted, in the spirit of adventure, eastwards, and finding the conditions of life offered him in Athens sufficiently attractive for a man desirous of earning his bread in the easiest manner possible, and not contemptuously inclined towards the midday siesta, the excellent Teuton settled down in the city we may presume to be no longer under the special patronage of Wisdom. Not that Jacob Natzelhuber regretted that Athens’ reign was over. The mechanic was ignominiously indifferent to all great questions, and so long as his employers continued to pay him his weekly wages, conscientiously earned and conscientiously saved, the extravagances of the unfortunate King Otho and the virtues of Queen Amelia troubled him as little as did the glorious ruins on the Acropolis. He never went near the Acropolis. When his glance rested on the mass of broken pillars and temples that dominate every view of the town, he doubtless confused them with the eccentric shapes of the adjoining hills, and if asked his opinion of that point of classic memories, would tranquilly remove his pipe from his lips and remark that the other hill, his own special friend, Lycabettus, was higher. A good-humored, egoistic, phlegmatic workman, for the rest; fond of leisurely meditation on nothing, fond of smoking in his shirt-sleeves with the help of an occasional glass of mastia or brandy, and convinced that the world goes very well now as it did in olden days, and that the Greek is a composite of barbarian and child.
In a wife one naturally chooses what is most convenient, if one cannot obtain what is most suitable. Jacob chanced upon an enormous indolent maiden, dowered as Greek maids usually are, with a father whose house property was prophetic of better things to come. The girl was not handsome—nor as cleanly or learned in household matters as a German frau; but some half dozen years in the makeshift of Oriental domestic life had served to deaden Jacob’s fastidious sensibilities in this department, and with the prospect of a little money and a couple of houses in the neighbourhood of Lycabettus by and by, on the death of a respectable father-in-law, he was so far demoralised as to face this unsavory future with tolerable tranquillity. They married.
The slow and philosophic Teuton found his Athenian wife and their one servant—a small barefooted child, in perpetual terror of her mistress, whose reprimands generally came upon her in the shape of tin utensils, water-jugs or stiff tugs of hair and ear—rather more noisy than a simple woman and child should be, to his thinking. But he preferred a quiet smoke on the balcony to interference in the kitchen, whence the sounds of hysterical cries, very bad language indeed, and sundry breaking articles reached him.
The lady, when not in a rage, a rare enough occurrence, was an amiable woman so long as her innocent habits were not interfered with. Jacob was indisposed to interfere with any one—even with his own wife. So Kyria Photini peacefully smoked her three or four cigarettes, and drank her small glass of cognac of an evening, chattered in high Athenian tones with her neighbours, arrayed in a more or less soiled white morning jacket, and any kind of a skirt, with black hair all dishevelled, and sallow cheeks not indicative of an immoderate preference for cold water and soap. The little maid trembled and broke plates, went about with bare feet, short skirts and unkempt woolly hair, meeting her mistress’s vituperations with a wooden animal look, and lifting a protective arm to catch the threatened blow or object. Jacob was not happy, but he was philosopher enough to know that few people ever are, and that the highest wisdom consists in knowing how to make the best of even the worst. He was fond of his wife in his heavy German fashion, removed his pipe, and said, “come, come,” when the heat unstrung her nerves and sent her from her normal condition, bordering on hysterics, into positive madness; consoled himself by remembering that distinguished men in all ages have agreed that woman is incomprehensible, and hoped for some acceptable amelioration with the birth of the expected baby.
The baby came, a small dark girl, and the baby’s mother went to heaven, Jacob naturally supposed, and shed the customary tears of regret, though it can hardly have been happiness or comfort that he regretted. He engaged an Athenian woman to look after the child, and returned to his daily work and bachelor habits, deterred by recent experiences from making any other venture in the search of domestic bliss. The child was called Photini, and it was greatly to be hoped that a little of the paternal temperament would go to correct the vices of the maternal, but there are relative stages in the path of moral development, and a lazy, hysterical, soulless woman is not the worst thing in feminine nature.
Photini grew up pretty much as the animals do, without any but merely natural obligations placed upon her. She ran about like a little street arab, learned neither reading, nor writing, nor catechism, nor sewing; swore like a small trooper, was more than a match for the barefooted, unkempt-headed girl, who soon learned to tremble before her as she had formerly trembled before her mother; was even too much for her quiet father, who began to be afraid of her furious explosions, and was too indifferent to the duties of paternity to trouble himself seriously about her education. Yet a pretty and striking child she was, with large topaz eyes, that in their audacity and frankness were sufficient in themselves to arrest attention, if there were no mossy black curls making an engaging network above and around the fine boyish brow; with the absurdest and sauciest nose and a wide, pale mouth that had a way of twisting itself into every imaginable grimace without losing a certain disreputable charm of curve and expression. A face full of precocious evil, but withal exquisitely candid—what the French would call a ragged face, warning you and yet claiming a sort of indefinable admiration from its absolute courage and truthfulness. She took to the streets as kindly as if she had been born in them, rolling about in mud and dust in the full enjoyment of unfettered childhood, dealing blows, expletives, kisses and ugly names with generous indifference. With every one she quarrelled, not as children do, but as savages quarrel, fiercely and murderously; but even in this innocent age she displayed a frank preference for the male sex. Girls filled her with unlimited contempt, and she was never really happy unless surrounded by a group of noisy, quarrelling boys. Then her pretty teeth would gleam in wild laughter, and she would talk more nonsense in five minutes than any six ordinary girls in an hour.