From here he had scarcely stirred. The people who watched him, benevolent and amused, thought him very young. They saw that he relieved the intensity of his vigil with absurd and childlike games that he played by himself, hiding and springing out at the sailors, and laughing immoderately when he had succeeded in startling them—he fraternised with the sailors, though with no one else—or when he saw somebody trip over a ring in the deck. His humour, like his body, seemed to be built on large and simple lines.... In the mornings he ran round and round the decks in rubber-soled shoes. Then again he flung himself down and continued with unseeing eyes to stare at the curve of the horizon.
Not wholly by design, he had remained absent from Herakleion for nearly two years. The standards and systems of life on that remote and beautiful seaboard had not faded for him, this time, with their usual astonishing rapidity; he had rather laid them aside carefully and deliberately, classified against the hour when he should take them from their wrappings; he postponed the consideration of the mission which had presented itself to him, and crushed down the recollection of what had been, perhaps, the most intoxicating of all moments—more intoxicating even, because more unexpected, than the insidious flattery of Eve—the moment when Paul had said to him beneath the fragmentary frescoes of the life of Saint Benedict, in a surprised voice, forced into admission,—
'You have the quality of leadership. You have it. You have the secret. The people will fawn to the hand that chastens.'
Paul, his tutor and preceptor, from whom he had first learnt, so imperceptibly that he scarcely recognised the teaching as a lesson, of the Islands and their problems both human and political, Paul had spoken these words to him, renouncing the authority of the master, stepping aside to admit the accession of the pupil. From the position of a regent, he had abased himself to that of a Prime Minister. Julian had accepted the acknowledgement with a momentary dizziness. In later moments of doubt, the words had flamed for him, bright with reassurance. And then he had banished them with the rest. That world of romance had been replaced by the world of healthy and prosaic things. The letters he periodically received from Eve irritated him because of their reminder of an existence he preferred to regard, for the moment, as in abeyance.
'And so you are gone: veni, vidi, vici. You were well started on your career of devastation! You hadn't done badly, all things considered. Herakleion has heaved an "Ouf!" of relief. You, unimpressionable? Allons donc! You, apathetic? You, placid, unemotional, unawakened? Tu te payes ma tête!
'Ah, the limitless ambition I have for you!
'I want you to rule, conquer, shatter, demolish.
'Haul down the simpering gods, the pampered gods, and put yourself in their place. It is in your power.
'Why not? You have le feu sacré. Stagnation is death, death. Burn their temples with fire, and trample their altars to dust.'
This letter, scrawled in pencil on a sheet of torn foolscap, followed him to England immediately after his departure. Then a silence of six months. Then he read, written on spacious yellow writing-paper, with the monogram E.D. embossed in a triangle of mother-of-pearl, vivid and extravagant as Eve herself—
They are trying to catch me, Julian! I come quite near, quite near, and they hold very quiet their hand with the crumbs in it. I see the other hand stealing round to close upon me—then there's a flutter—un battement d'ailes—l'oiseau s'est de nouveau dérobé! They remain gazing after me, with their mouths wide open. They look so silly. And they haven't robbed me of one plume—not a single plume.
'Julian! Why this mania for capture? this wanting to take from me my most treasured possession—liberty? When I want to give, I'll give freely—largesse with both hands, showers of gold and flowers and precious stones—(don't say I'm not conceited!) but I'll never give my liberty, and I'll never allow it to be forced away from me. I should feel a traitor. I couldn't walk through a forest and hear the wind in the trees. I couldn't listen to music. (Ah, Julian! This afternoon I steeped myself in music; Grieg, elf-like, mischievous, imaginative, romantic, so Latin sometimes in spite of his Northern blood. You would love Grieg, Julian. In the fairyland of music, Grieg plays gnome to Debussy's magician.... Then "Khovantchina," of all music the most sublime, the most perverse, the most bariolé, the most abandoned, and the most desolate.) I could have no comradeship with a free and inspired company. I should have betrayed their secrets, bartered away their mysteries....'
He had wondered then whether she were happy. He had visualised her, turbulent, defiant; courting danger and then childishly frightened when danger overtook her; deliciously forthcoming, inventive, enthusiastic, but always at heart withdrawn; she expressed herself truly when she said that the bird fluttered away from the hand that would have closed over it. He knew that she lived constantly, from choice, in a storm of trouble and excitement. Yet he read between the lines of her letters a certain dissatisfaction, a straining after something as yet unattained. He knew that her heart was not in what she described as 'my little round of complacent amourettes.'
The phrase had awoken him with a smile of amusement to the fact that she was no longer a child. He felt some curiosity to see her again under the altered and advanced conditions of her life, yet, lazy and diffident, he shrank from the storm of adventure and responsibility which he knew would at once assail him. The indolence he felt sprang largely from the certainty that he could, at any moment of his choice, stretch out his hand to gather up again the threads that he had relinquished. He had surveyed Herakleion, that other world, from the distance and security of England. He had the conviction that it awaited him, and this conviction bore with it a strangely proprietary sense in which Eve was included. He had listened with amusement and tolerance to the accounts of her exploits, his sleepy eyes bent upon his informant with a quiet patience, as a man who listens to a familiar recital. He had dwelt very often upon the possibility of his return to Herakleion, but, without a full or even a partial knowledge of his motives, postponed it. Yet all the while his life was a service, a dedication.
Then the letters which he received began to mention the forthcoming elections; a faint stir of excitement pervaded his correspondence; Eve, detesting politics, made no reference, but his father's rare notes betrayed an impatient and irritable anxiety; the indications grew, culminating in a darkly allusive letter which, although anonymous, he took to be from Grbits, and finally in a document which was a triumph of illiterate dignity, signed by Kato, Tsigaridis, Zapantiotis, and a double column of names that broke like a flight of exotic birds into the mellow enclosure of the Cathedral garden where it found him.