Under Greek Skies

by Ioulia D. Dragoume

“I thank you, Capetan Thanassi. For the good that you have done me, may you find it from God; but I cannot wait. I will go along the shore, and reach the house and the little one long before you have finished your work.”

“Go then, my girl! Go!” and Mattina ran up the slope of the hill leading to the Beach of the Little Pines, and did not stop to take breath until she reached the top.

There she stood still, waist-high in a tangle of bushes. The thyme was all dried up of course, but the heather was in bloom and the lentisk bushes were laden with thick clusters of red berries.

She dropped on her knees, with a little cry of joy, beside a big bush on which the bright crimson berries seemed thicker than the tiny leaves. “Fairy-cherries,” the children of the Red House on the hill, called them. Mattina had never heard this, but she loved the little tight bunches of red berries because they were so pretty and because she had never seen them but in Poros. In a moment she got up and began the descent of the hill.

The glorious curve of the Beach of the Little Pines seemed almost entirely deserted. The morning sea in lines of deep golden green near the pines of the shore, and of deep blue beyond, blue as the sky, blue as the flag, bore not a single fisher boat on its surface. Only far away in the distance under the big round fig tree Mattina could distinguish a flock of sheep, and still farther away the figure of a man coming down the next hill, but whether it was the shepherd or not she could not tell. Down she came through the tall white spikes of the dog-onions waving all over the hill side, till she stood at last on a flat gray rock on the very edge of the sea. The perfectly smooth water showed the shining yellow and green and gray pebbles lying below, as though a sheet of glass had been placed over them. In and out between the stones swam tiny black-striped fishes, and now and then a ripple trembled over the surface and broke softly against the rock. And it was clear and beautiful, and her very own sea, and she lifted her face to its breath, and she fell on her knees and stretched out her bare brown arms that the water might flow and ripple over them!

In the water close to the shore, every tiny green branch, and every vein of the gray rocks, and every clump of red earth, was reflected line for line, and tint for tint, and through these reflections ran long straight lines of bright, bright blue. Suddenly Mattina remembered Antigone, the serving maid of the next house, who had said to her, “You! with your trees, and your rocks, and your sea!” And she thought, “She has never seen them, the poor one! If she were only here now!”

But she did not know that Antigone was of those people who would never see some things, even if she were to touch them with her hand. She would find that the rocks hurt her feet and spoiled her Sunday shoes.

The morning light would never bring a light into her eyes, and certainly a little cool soft breeze blowing in her face could never have made her feel so entirely and unreasonably joyful.

Mattina could never have explained, nor did she understand as other children might, who had read books, or who had lived with people who had read books, that it was just the beauty of everything around her that made her feel so happy, that for some moments wiped all her troubles off her mind as though by a magic sponge. She had never heard that her ancestors were of the race which above all other had always worshipped beautiful things.

However, in a few moments she stood up, wiped her arms on her frock, and walked along the shore more soberly. She must get on, she felt; she must see the child—Zacharia. How he would laugh when he saw her! “’Attina! My ’Attina!” he would cry. Kyra Sophoula would say a good word to her also; but the others, her uncle Yoryi, and her aunt Kanella, what would they say? They would ask why she had returned. They would ask so many things; and what could she say? She had come back not much richer than she went; and now what could she do? She thought for a moment of the mayor and the doctor. Each of them kept a little maid. If only one of them would take her! How good that would be! She was stronger now, and had learned much in the town. But she knew it was not likely that either of them would be requiring a new serving maid just then. People here did not change their servants like shirts as they did in Athens. In Poros, one took a little girl, one did not even call her a servant, but a “soul-child”; one taught her, one fed her, one dressed her, and in due time one prepared her dowry for her. The doctor, she knew, had got Panouria, the widow’s daughter, as a “soul-child.” No, it was not at all likely; and Mattina heaved a big sigh as she filled her hands with cyclamen for Zacharia. Poros had its troubles too.