For his part, badgered and astonished, he took refuge in a taciturnity which only tantalised his pursuers into a more zealous aggression. His opinions were unknown in the club where the men set upon him from the first moment of his appearance. He would sit with his legs thrown over the arm of a leather arm-chair, loose-limbed and gray-flannelled, his mournful eyes staring out of the nearest window, while Greek, diplomat, or foreigner argued at him with gesture and emphasis. They seemed to him, had they but known, surprisingly unreal for all their clamour, pompous and yet insignificant.
His father was aware of the attacks delivered on his son, but, saying nothing, allowed the natural and varied system of education to take its course. He saw him standing, grave and immovable, in the surging crowd of philosophies and nationalities, discarding the charlatan by some premature wisdom, and assimilating the rare crumbs of true worldly experience. He himself was ignorant of the thoughts passing in the boy's head. He had forgotten the visionary tumult of nineteen, when the storm of life flows first over the pleasant, easy meadows of youth. Himself now a sober man, he had forgotten, so completely that he had ceased to believe in, the facile succession of convictions, the uprooting of beliefs, the fanatical acceptance of newly proffered creeds. He scarcely considered, or he might perhaps not so readily have risked, the possible effect of the queer systems of diverse ideals picked up, unconsciously, and put together from the conversation of the mountebank administrators of that tiny state, the melodramatic champions of the oppressed poor, and the professional cynicism of dago adventurers. If, sometimes, he wondered what Julian made of the talk that had become a jargon, he dismissed his uneasiness with a re-affirmation of confidence in his impenetrability.
'Broaden his mind,' he would say. 'It won't hurt him. It doesn't go deep. Foam breaking upon a rock.'
So might Sir Henry have spoken, to whom the swags of fruit were but the vintage of a particular year, put into a labelled bottle.
Julian had gone more than once out of a boyish curiosity to hear the wrangle of the parties in the Chamber. Sitting up in the gallery, and leaning his arms horizontally on the top of the brass railing, he had looked down on the long tables covered with red baize, whereon reposed, startlingly white, a square sheet of paper before the seat of each deputy, and a pencil, carefully sharpened, alongside. He had seen the deputies assemble, correctly frock-coated, punctiliously shaking hands with one another, although they had probably spent the morning in one another's company at the club—the club was the natural meeting-place of the Greeks and the diplomats, while the foreigners, a doubtful lot, congregated either in the gambling-rooms or in the jardin anglais of the casino. He had watched them taking their places with a good deal of coughing, throat-clearing, and a certain amount of expectoration. He had seen the Premier come in amid a general hushing of voices, and take his seat in the magisterial arm-chair in the centre of the room, behind an enormous ink-pot, pulling up the knees of his trousers and smoothing his beard away from his rosy lips with the tips of his fingers as he did so. Julian's attention had strayed from the formalities attendant upon the opening of the session, and his eyes had wandered to the pictures hanging on the walls: Aristidi Patros, the first Premier, after the secession from Greece, b. 1760, d. 1831, Premier of the Republic of Herakleion from 1826 to 1830; Pericli Anghelis, general, 1774-1847; Constantine Stavridis, Premier from 1830 to 1835, and again from 1841 to 1846, when he died assassinated. The portraits of the other Premiers hung immediately below the gallery where Julian could not see them. At the end of the room, above the doors, hung a long and ambitious painting executed in 1840 and impregnated with the romanticism of that age, representing the Declaration of Independence in the platia of Herakleion on the 16th September—kept as an ever memorable and turbulent anniversary—1826. The Premier, Patros, occupied the foreground, declaiming from a scroll of parchment, and portrayed as a frock-coated young man of godlike beauty; behind him stood serried ranks of deputies, and in the left-hand corner a group of peasants, like an operatic chorus, tossed flowers from baskets on to the ground at his feet. The heads of women clustered at the windows of the familiar houses of the platia, beneath the fluttering flags with the colours of the new Republic, orange and green.
Julian always thought that a portrait of his grandfather, for twelve months President of the collective archipelago of Hagios Zacharie, should have been included among the notables.
He had tried to listen to the debates which followed upon the formal preliminaries; to the wrangle of opponents; to the clap-trap patriotism which so thinly veiled the desire of personal advancement; to the rodomontade of Panaïoannou, Commander-in-Chief of the army of four hundred men, whose sky-blue uniform and white breeches shone among all the black coats with a resplendency that gratified his histrionic vanity; to the bombastic eloquence which rolled out from the luxuriance of the Premier's beard, with a startling and deceptive dignity in the trappings of the ancient and classic tongue. Malteios used such long, such high-sounding words, and struck his fist upon the red baize table with such emphatic energy, that it was hard not to believe in the authenticity of his persuasion. Julian welcomed most the moments when, after a debate of an hour or more, tempers grew heated, and dignity—that is to say, the pretence of the sobriety of the gathering—was cast aside in childish petulance.
'The fur flew,' said Julian, who had enjoyed himself. 'Christopoulos called Panaïoannou a fire-eater, and Panaïoannou called Christopoulos a money-grubber. "Where would you be without my money?" "Where would you be without my army?" "Army! can the valiant general inform the Chamber how many of his troops collapsed from exhaustion on the platia last Independence Day, and had to be removed to the hospital?" And so on and so forth. They became so personal that I expected the general at any moment to ask Christopoulos how many unmarried daughters he had at home.'
Malteios himself, president of the little republic, most plausible and empiric of politicians, was not above the discussion of current affairs with the heir of the Davenants towards whom, it was suspected, the thoughts of the islanders were already turning. The President was among those who adopted the attitude of total discouragement. The interference of a headstrong and no doubt Quixotic schoolboy would be troublesome; might become disastrous. Having dined informally with the Davenant brothers at their country house, he crossed the drawing-room after dinner, genial, a long cigar protruding from his mouth, to the piano in the corner where Eve and Julian were turning over some sheets of music.
'May an old man,' he said with his deliberate but nevertheless charming suavity, 'intrude for a moment upon the young?'