First of all he was taken into the long cool dining room to be introduced to the mother of the Four, who had been arranging fruit in glass dishes, and who hurried forward to greet his uncle. Then, with a big bunch of grapes thrust into his bewildered hands by Andromache, who declared that “Mother has plenty more in the basket,” they started to see everything.
III
And what was Pavlo not shown on that first wonderful day?
Everyone knows how one’s nice things feel nicer when they are shown to a stranger for the first time, and how even old things of which one has tired regain something of their first charm. The Four were very proud and very fond, each in his or her different way, of their house, and their hill and their sea; so it seemed as though they would never tire of showing little things to Pavlo.
First of all he was taken up to the big pine, the oldest tree on the hill. Under this were benches and a round table where, as they told him, they had their lessons out of doors when the governess was in a particularly good mood. For there was a temporary summer governess somewhere in the house, but as it was holiday time, she was not allowed to make herself too much of a nuisance except for an hour or so every morning. From the big pine, one could see all the hills around, and the Monastery Road, and the open sea, and the Naval School, and the Narrow Beach, on which as Pavlo was told, one could see the sailors drilling.
Behind the big pine was the wood of small pines, all over anemones in the spring and cyclamen in the autumn. It was softly and greenly dark in this little wood; the ground was strewn with pine needles, so many of them that they made a thick carpet, and there were shady corners where, as Chryseis told Pavlo, you could lie on the pine needles and read, and read, and read, for ages before you were discovered. Higher still was an open clearing and, at the end of it, the little hill-gate through which one passed from the hill of the Red House on to the other hills, and if one turned to the left, one got down to the big Beach of the little Pines.
He was raced down to the bath cabin on the shore, and shown all the extraordinary drawings which decorated the inside of it, to which all the members of the family had contributed, but more especially Chryseis and Iason the eldest boy. Pavlo, in fact, admired the funny faces drawn by the latter so whole-heartedly as to make the artist flush with pride.
“To-morrow you will bathe with us,” announced Andromache. For that day the bath was already over; besides, the grown-ups had some sort of an idiotic notion that one must let a day pass after a journey, before beginning sea-baths.
Then up they raced again among the pines, scrambling through the lentisk and thyme bushes, to show Pavlo the little house which they had built themselves of stones and branches. One could really get into this if one took care to stoop properly; and it was a splendid place for the hoarding of biscuits and raisins, and for amateur cooking of all sorts. By this time, it was getting too hot even for the Four, so that they got under the wide-spreading shadow of the big pine and sat around on the benches and talked, while the warm pine smell filled their nostrils, and the tettix[13] chirped loudly on all sides. Andromache, who was of an uncanny cleverness in catching them, swarmed up a pine tree and brought one down enclosed in her two hands turned into an impromptu cage, through the fingers of which, Pavlo peeped at the whirring prisoner. The black poodle, Kerberos, threw himself panting loudly on the ground; Deko, the little dog, sat on his haunches beside Chryseis, cocked his little pointed ears and looked about him; while Philos, the fox terrier, dug vigorously at the roots of the nearest lentisk bush. He scratched his face, he stopped repeatedly to shake his head violently and to sneeze, then he would begin again, snuffing and digging as if the work were very important indeed, and there were no time to lose.