Aleko slung his box over his shoulder and descended the hotel steps slowly. He was beginning to feel sore all over and his head ached. He decided that he would go home and have a sleep. Home meant the cellar which he shared with the other boy, Andoni, and with the older shoeblack, “the big one” who had brought them over from Megaloupolis, and for whom they worked, till such time as they should have earned enough to set up for themselves.
Bells were ringing for noon, and after that no one would be out in the sun-blaze of the streets to want boots cleaned; there would be no work again until the sales of the evening newspapers began.
He trudged rather wearily up the steep streets towards the Square of the Kolonaki, near which he lived; and as he went, he wondered once more why so many people did not know things when you asked them.
There were so many things he wanted to find out.
Who lived in the Academy with the two statues on the tall columns, which he passed two or three times a day, and what did people do inside it? What was in the red books which the foreigners held in their hands when they looked up at the old temples? What was that statue in the Zappion Gardens where a woman was putting a crown of leaves on a man’s head? And most of all, what made automobiles go without horses when the driver turned that round wheel? The whole town was one great “Why” to him.
When he reached the street behind the Kolonaki Square, and went down the steps to the cellar, he found it empty. From a shelf in one corner he took down the half of a loaf of bread, and a piece of white cheese wrapped in a sheet of paper. His mother was renowned in Megaloupolis as one of the tidiest housewives of the place, and it was from her that he had learned not to leave food about uncovered; this was also probably the reason why his face and hands were generally less grimy than those of most of the other shoeblacks.
Nearly all the boys he knew were shoeblacks, or newspaper sellers and messenger boys, or they combined the three trades; and nearly all came from Megaloupolis in the charge of an older boy of eighteen or twenty years old, “the big one,” as they called him. He paid them a yearly wage and, except what was necessary for food, all their earnings went to him. Aleko was paid one hundred and fifty drachmæ a year; next year he was to have two hundred. Later on, he would work for himself, and doubtless when he was old enough he would in his turn employ smaller boys. He had no father, and the money was required to help his mother and the two small sisters in Megaloupolis. How could they live else?
After he had eaten, he sat down and pulled out his morning’s earnings from the breast of his tunic. The copper coins and nickels amounted to one drachma and thirty-five lepta; of these, he put aside thirty lepta for his supper, and screwing up the rest in a piece of old newspaper pushed it underneath a painted wooden chest to give to “the big one” when accounts were made in the evening. Then he threw himself on his mattress, doubled his arm under his head, and slept till the loud barking of a dog on the pavement outside awoke him with a start.
He rushed up the cellar steps which led to the pavement of the narrow street, banging the door behind him, and nearly fell headlong over a fox-terrier busily occupied with the rubbish tin of the next house. The little dog yelped sharply as Aleko stumbled over him, and abandoning the rubbish tin, trotted quickly off towards the square.
“Solon!” called Aleko. “Here Solon! Why do you run away? It is only I.”