Challenge

by V. Sackville-West

'A woman?'

'Anastasia Kato,' the overseer had replied, reverent towards the brain that had contrived thus craftily for the cause, but familiar towards the great singer—of whom distinguished European audiences spoke with distant respect—as towards a woman of his own people. He probably, Julian had reflected, did not know of her as a singer at all.

Beneath the grapes rifles were concealed, preserved from the fruit by careful sheets of coarse linen; rifles, gleaming, modern rifles, laid out in rows; a hundred, two hundred, three hundred; Julian had no means of estimating.

He had dismounted and walked over to them; the young men were still shovelling back the fruit, reckless of its plenty, bringing more weapons and still more to light. He had bent down to examine more closely.

'Italian,' he had said then, briefly, and had met Tsigaridis' eye, had seen the slow, contented smile which spread on the old man's face, and which he had discreetly turned aside to conceal.

Then Julian, with a glimpse of all those months of preparation, had ridden down from the hills, the string of mules following his mule in single file, the shining barrels bristling out of the panniers, and in the market-place he had assisted, from the height of his saddle, at the distribution of the arms. Two hundred and fifty, and five hundred rounds of ammunition to each.... He thought of the nights of smuggling represented there, of the catch of fish—the 'quick, shining harvest of the sea'—beneath which lay the deadlier catch that evaded the eyes of the customs-house clerks. He remembered the robbery at the casino, and was illuminated. Money had not been lacking.

These were not the only pictures he retained of that day; the affairs to which he was expected to attend seemed to be innumerable; he had sat for hours in the village assembly-room, while the islanders came and went, surprisingly capable, but at the same time utterly reliant upon him. Throughout the day no sign came from Herakleion. Julian grew weary, and could barely restrain his thoughts from wandering to Eve. He would have gone to her room before leaving the house in the morning, but she had refused to see him. Consequently the thought of her had haunted him all day. One of the messages which reached him as he sat in the assembly-room had been from her: Would he send a boat to Herakleion for Nana?

He had smiled, and had complied, very much doubting whether the boat would ever be allowed to return. The message had brought him, as it were, a touch from her, a breath of her personality which clung about the room long after. She was near at hand, waiting for him, so familiar, yet so unfamiliar, so undiscovered. He felt that after a year with her much would still remain to be discovered; that there was, in fact, no end to her interest and her mystery. She was of no ordinary calibre, she who could be, turn by turn, a delicious or plaintive child, a woman of ripe seduction, and—in fits and starts—a poet in whose turbulent and undeveloped talent he divined startling possibilities! When she wrote poetry she smothered herself in ink, as he knew; so mingled in her were the fallible and the infallible. He refused to analyse his present relation to her; a sense, not of hypocrisy, but of decency, held him back; he remembered all too vividly the day he had carried her in his arms; his brotherliness had been shocked, offended, but since then the remembrance had persisted and had grown, and now he found himself, with all that brotherliness of years still ingrained in him, full of thoughts and on the brink of an adventure far from brotherly. He tried not to think these thoughts. He honestly considered them degrading, incestuous. But his mood was ripe for adventure; the air was full of adventure; the circumstances were unparalleled; his excitement glowed—he left the assembly-room, walked rapidly up the street, and entered the Davenant house, shutting the door behind him.

The sounds of the street were shut out, and the water plashed coolly in the open courtyard; two pigeons walked prinking round the flat edge of the marble basin, the male cooing and bowing absurdly, throwing out his white chest, ruffling his tail, and putting down his spindly feet with fussy precision. When Julian appeared, they fluttered away to the other side of the court to resume their convention of love-making. Evening was falling, warm and suave, and overhead in the still blue sky floated tiny rosy clouds. In the cloisters round the court the frescoes of the life of Saint Benedict looked palely at Julian, they so faded, so washed-out, he so young and so full of strength. Their pallor taught him that he had never before felt so young, so reckless, or so vigorous.

He was astonished to find Eve with the son of Zapantiotis, learning from him to play the flute in the long, low room which once had been the refectory and which ran the full length of the cloisters. Deeply recessed windows, with heavy iron gratings, looked down over the roofs of the village to the sea. In one of these windows Eve leaned against the wall holding the flute to her lips, and young Zapantiotis, eager, handsome, showed her how to place her fingers upon the holes. She looked defiantly at Julian.