The rue Royale—Herakleion was so cosmopolitan as to give to its principal thoroughfare a French name—was at this hour crowded with the population that, imprisoned all day behind closed shutters, sought in the evening what freshness it could find in the cobbled streets between the stucco houses. The street life of the town began between five and six, and the Davenants, father and son, were jostled as they walked slowly along the pavements, picking their way amongst the small green tables set outside the numerous cafés. At these tables sat the heterogenous elements that composed the summer population of the place, men of every nationality: old gamblers too disreputable for Monte Carlo; young Levantines, natives, drinking absinthe; Turks in their red fezzes; a few rakish South Americans. The trams screamed discordantly in their iron grooves, and the bells of the cinema tinkled unceasingly. Between the tramlines and the kerb dawdled the hired victorias, few empty at this time of day, but crowded with families of Levantines, the men in straw hats, the women for the most part in hot black, very stout, and constantly fanning their heavily powdered faces. Now and then a chasseur from some diplomatic house passed rapidly in a flaming livery.
Mr Davenant talked to his son as they made their way along.
'How terrible those parties are. I often wish I could dissociate myself altogether from that life, and God knows that I go merely to hear what people are saying. They know it, and of course they will never forgive me. Julian, in order to conciliate Herakleion, you will have to marry a Greek.'
'Alexander Christopoulos attacked me to-day,' Julian said. 'Wanted me to go to Paris with him and see the world.'
He did not note in his own mind that he refrained from saying that Madame Kato had also, so to speak, attacked him on the dangerous subject of the Islands.
They turned now, having reached the end of the rue Royale, into the platia, where the cavernous archway of the club stained the white front of the houses with a mouth of black. The houses of the platia were large, the hereditary residences of the local Greek families. The Christopoulos house stood next to the club, and next to that was the house of the Premier, His Excellency Platon Malteios, and next to that the Italian Consulate, with the arms of Italy on a painted hatchment over the door. The centre of the square was empty, cobbled in an elaborate pattern which gave the effect of a tessellated pavement; on the fourth side of the square were no houses, for here lay the wide quay which stretched right along above the sea from one end of the town to the other.
The Davenant house faced the sea, and from the balcony of his bedroom on the second floor Julian could see the Islands, yellow with little white houses on them; in the absolute stillness and limpidity of the air he could count the windows on Aphros, the biggest island, and the terraces on the slope of the hills. The first time he had arrived from school in England he had run up to his bedroom, out on to the balcony, to look across the platia with its many gaudily striped sunblinds, at the blue sea and the little yellow stains a few miles out from the shore.
At the door of the Davenant house stood two horses ready saddled in the charge of the door-keeper, fat Aristotle, an islander, who wore the short bolero and pleated fustanelle, like a kilt, of his country. The door-keepers of the other houses had gathered round him, but as Mr Davenant came up they separated respectfully and melted away to their individual charges.
The way lay along the quays and down the now abandoned ilex avenue. The horses' hoofs padded softly in the thick dust. The road gleamed palely beneath the thick shadows of the trees, and the water, seen between the ancient trunks, was almost purple. The sun was gone, and only the last bars of the sunset lingered in the sky. At the tip of the pier of Herakleion twinkled already the single light of phosphorescent green that daily, at sunset, shone out, to reflect irregularly in the water.
They passed out of the avenue into the open country, the road still skirting the sea on their left, while on their right lay the strip of flat country crowded in between Mount Mylassa and the sea, carefully cultivated by the labourers of the Davenants, where the grapes hung on the festooned branches looped from pole to pole. William Davenant observed them critically, thinking to himself, 'A good harvest.' Julian Davenant, fresh from an English county, saw as with a new eye their beauty and their luxuriance. He rode loosely in the saddle, his long legs dangling, indisputably English, though born in one of the big painted rooms overlooking the platia of Herakleion, and reared in the country until the age of ten. He had always heard the vintage discussed since he could remember. He knew that his family for three generations had been the wealthiest in the little state, wealthier than the Greek banking-houses, and he knew that no move of the local politics was entirely free from the influence of his relations. His grandfather, indeed, having been refused a concession he wanted from the government, had roused his Islands to a declaration of independence under his own presidency—a state of affairs which, preposterous as it was, had profoundly alarmed the motley band that made up the Cabinet in Herakleion. What had been done once, could be repeated.... Granted his concession, Julian's grandfather had peaceably laid down the dignity of his new office, but who could say that his sons might not repeat the experiment?