“Bah! The unfortunate one! And you carry wood for your mother’s oven, eh?”
“My mother died also on the Thursday of the Great Week.”[5]
“Bah! The poor child! Here!” he cried, as Mattina was starting off again, “stop a moment!” and from the bottom of his pocket, he pulled out a little twist of pink muslin into which were tied five or six sugared almonds.
“Take these! They are from a christening, … you can eat them on the way.”
Mattina had no pocket, but after she had thanked the sailor, she tied the almonds into one corner of her kerchief, and trudged on.
When she reached the first houses of the village, she turned away from the sea and began climbing up a steep little street, threading her way between the small houses, disturbing flocks of gray and white pigeons who fluttered up and settled on the ledges of the low terraces, between pitchers of water and pots of sweet basil. She stepped carefully over the ropes of tethered goats, passing by the open doors of the big church, and stopping for a moment to admire a length of pink and white cotton stuff which hung outside Kyr Nicola’s shop. If only, she thought, her new dress might have been made of that! But the brown dress which her mother used to wear on holidays, before her father died, was still quite good, and it would have been a sin to waste it; Kyra Sophoula had said so. Moreover she had made it too wide for Mattina, and with three tucks in it, so that it might last her for some time to come.
Before one arrived at Yoryi’s house, there was a whole street of low broad steps which Mattina descended slowly one by one, for her back was beginning to ache. When she reached the little blue-washed house she dumped down her load of sticks beside the oven in the courtyard with a great sigh of relief.
She found Zacharia whimpering before a half-eaten “koulouri”—a sort of doughnut with a hole in the middle—which someone had amused himself by tying to a nail in the wall, so that it dangled just out of reach of the child’s little arms.
“’Attina! ’Attina!” he cried as soon as he saw her; “My koulou’i! My koulou’i!”
She broke the string violently, and thrust the half-eaten koulouri into the child’s outstretched hands, then turning angrily to three big girls who were seated laughing, on the wooden steps leading to the flat roof, she cried out:—