The house in Solon Street was not an interesting house to live in one bit. It was tall and narrow, jammed in between another tall narrow house on one side, and a green grocer’s shop on the other, and one could only see the Acropolis,[5] and Phalerum and the sea if one got up to the terrace on the roof, where they hung out the clothes to dry; and even from there it looked very far off. There was not a scrap of garden, only a small paved courtyard at the back, generally littered with empty cases which had come from abroad with new instruments and new books for the doctor. Pavlo sometimes attempted to play house or shop in the biggest of these, but Marina, the cook, used to get very cross if he brought in damp straw on his shoes over her freshly scrubbed kitchen, and the other maid, Aphrodite, would screw up her ugly brown face, and bring her thick black eyebrows together, and threaten that the next time he got another big tear in his clothes from those great long packing nails for her to mend, if she did not tell his uncle, they need never call her “Aphrodite” again! His uncle heard her once, and said laughingly that they need never have called her “Aphrodite” at all, but Pavlo got his scolding all the same, for causing unnecessary work, so that the packing cases had to be abandoned.
In winter it was better. After his preparation for next day’s school was over, and before the long delayed supper, he would stay in the little dining room, and lying flat on the floor in the warmth of the big white Viennese stove, he would colour the pictures in the odd numbers of an English illustrated medical journal, which his uncle had given to be thrown away. There were very rarely what Pavlo considered real pictures in them, and he got rather tired of colouring “thoracic aortas” in bright orange, and “abdominal aortas” in pale green, and “tracheæ” in stripes of purple and yellow; but now and then he would come across some funny groups of little insects, and once there was a picture of an operation in a hospital, where there were any amount of doctors and nurses to be coloured, each one differently. That picture lasted him three whole evenings, and would have been even more successful than it was, if only the very best and softest of his chalks, the crimson one, had not somehow got broken inside the wood, so that it all came away in little pieces when he tried to sharpen it, till at last there was nothing left but a little stump of chalk without any wood, and anyone who has tried, knows how hard it is to colour a whole dress with a little bit of chalk that one cannot hold properly.
But when the days grew longer and warmer the dining room was too hot for comfort; the study, even when the doctor was out, was always kept locked, and Pavlo’s own bedroom on the third floor was even hotter than the dining room. So he would end by taking his books or his chalks into the hall, where at least there was a little coolness to be had from the chink under the front door. There he would sit on the stairs, or lie flat on the floor, kicking up his heels as he read or painted, till he knew every stringy part of the long strip of gray, red-edged carpet that crossed the middle of the passage, and every place where the paint, which had peeled off the once-painted floor, had left curiously shaped patches, which only needed the touch of a pencil here and there to turn into all sorts of faces. The yellow walls, imitating veined marble, offered terrible temptation of the same kind, but it was too dangerous; pencil marks on the walls would have been seen at once. There was one spot, indeed, where the criss-cross of veins made such an exact head of Hermes,[6] winged cap and all, with only the back of the head and one ear missing, that Pavlo absolutely could not resist touching it up, one long hot afternoon. He rubbed all the pencil marks very carefully off afterwards, with his piece of india rubber, but this had got so mixed up in his pocket with odds and ends of chalk and with half a “loucoumi” that the rubbing-away marks were very red and sticky and showed worse than the pencil ones. So Pavlo had been rather frightened, till he discovered that by pushing the hat stand a little nearer the study door, the place was quite hidden. However, he dared not make any more attempts on the wall, and the afternoon dragged wearily.
Of course, no playing in the street was ever allowed, but sometimes when Marina the cook slipped out late to buy a bowl of “yaourti”[7] for supper, or some chicory for salad, she would take him with her, and he would stand about while she bargained, envying the blue-pinafored boys of the neighborhood tearing and whooping down the street or gathered together over their marbles on the edge of the pavement. Pavlo played marbles at his school near the National Library, when he managed to get there ten minutes before lessons began; but the class-bell always rang in the middle of the most interesting game, and the ten minutes between each lesson were of no good because no play was allowed then, at that school. Only the bigger classes could do as they liked, the little boys were marshaled in order of size by one of the overlookers and marched round and round the big courtyard, so that, as Pavlo heard the director explaining to his uncle one day, “the little pupils should have all the benefit of fresh air and exercise during this short interval, without any danger of their minds being distracted from the lesson they had just been taught!” But the “little pupils’ ” minds were as a rule more occupied with the secret exchange of pen nibs, the recognized school currency, than in pondering over the last lesson.
And then, when June had passed into July, when summer in town was at its hottest and dustiest, when the examinations were just over, and there was not even school to break the monotony of the long empty days, a wonderful change came into Pavlo’s life.
It happened like this.
One afternoon he had just got up from the enforced lying down with a book, which he hated—especially as the book was not a new one, but only Louki Laras[8] which he had read already four times, so that even if one skipped the descriptions, the exciting parts were too familiar—and was wandering about the house, a piece of bread in one hand and a piece of chocolate in the other, when he came across Aphrodite packing his uncle’s valise. He was going away, she told Pavlo, for some days. There was nothing extraordinary in that. People were always sending for the doctor from one part and another of the provinces, to come and cure them, and Pavlo was quite accustomed to being alone in the house with the two maids, and having his dinner and supper served on a tray at one end of the dining room table. The only advantage of this was that Marina let him choose his dinners, and that he could have pilaf or even “halva”[9] two days running, and need never touch soup or boiled meat all the time his uncle was away.
But the extraordinary thing happened a few moments later, when his uncle let himself into the house, and walked right up into the room where the packing was going on.
“Is the valise full?” he inquired.
Aphrodite straightened herself up.