“‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll come. My name’s Malory. What are you going to do at Ephesus?’
“He replied, ‘Excavate.’
“That will tell you what MacPherson was like; an eccentric, laconic sort of fellow; he never argued, he just made proposals, and, whether they were accepted or declined, nodded briefly in acquiescence without further discussion. For a long time I thought that I should never get any further with him, then gradually I began to find him out: a grim, sardonic soul, with only one passion in life, if I can give the name of passion to a determination so cold and unshakable; I mean his passion for excavation. I have seen him labouring for hours under the sun, dusty and indistinguishable from the ruins among which he worked, apparently tireless and thirstless; I have seen him labour like a man under the domination of a great inspiration, of a force such as drives fanatics to cut their own heads and cover their own backs with wales from the rod, but I have never heard an expression of delight or enthusiasm, or even of satisfaction, escape his lips at the result of his labours. Scientists and archæologists came to him with respect, invited his opinion, paid him compliments evidently sincere; he listened in total indifference, neither disclaiming nor acknowledging, only waiting for them to have done that he might get back to his work.
“Such was the man with whom I now lived, and you may imagine that I was often puzzled to know what had prompted his original invitation to me. I could, of course, have asked him, but I didn’t. He took my presence absolutely as a matter of course, made use of me,—at times I had to work like a navvy,—never gave me his confidence, never expected mine. It was a queer association. We lived in a native house not far from the site of the temple on the hill above the ramshackle Turkish village of Ayasalouk, and one servant, an Albanian, did our housework for us, washed our clothes, and prepared our meals. We shared a sitting-room, but our bedrooms were separate; it was a four-roomed house. Occasionally, about once a month, MacPherson would go down into Smyrna and return next day with provisions, cigarettes, and a stock of tools and clothes, and sometimes an English paper.
“He let me off on Sundays, ungraciously, grudgingly, if silence can be grudging. I insisted upon it. At Pennistans’ I had had a half-holiday on Sunday, and at Ephesus I would have it too. But here my hours of freedom were spent in loneliness. Lonely I would tramp off to the banks of the Cayster, and, standing among tall bulrushes and brilliant iris, would fish dreamily for mullet, till the kingfishers swept back, reassured, to the stream and joined me in my fishing.
Jam varias pelagi volucres, et quæ Asia circum
Dulcibus in stagnis rimantur prata Caystri.
You will admit, I think, that the quotation is singularly apposite. Or, as with Ruth I had climbed the hills above the Weald, I would climb alone the heights of Mount Coressus, where the golden angelica surged about me, or the heights of Prion, which showed me, across the plain of Ephesus, the flatter plain of deep blue sea, broken by the summits of Samos—the very sea, the very Samos, where Polycrates flung forth his ring in defiance of the gods.
“A certain number of travellers came to Ephesus, whom MacPherson regarded with a patient disdain, but whom I welcomed as messengers of the outside world. I wanted to question them, but they were always so eager to question me, making me into a sort of guide, and inveigling me into doing them the honours of the place. This used to annoy MacPherson, though he never said anything; I think he felt it as a sort of desecration. I could see him watching me with disapproval, standing there among the columns in his dust-coloured shirt and trousers and sombrero hat, leaning his hands on the handle of his pick-axe, a hard, muscular man, thin and wiry as an Australian bush-settler. The tourists questioned me about him and about our life, but I noticed they rarely approached him, or, if they did so once, they did not do so twice. After talking to me, they would move away, decide—thankfully—among themselves that I could not be offered a tip, and finally would stroll off in the direction of our little house. Here I had dug a little garden in imitation of the Kentish cottages I knew so well; just a few narrow beds in front of the house, where I had collected the many wild flowers that grew on the neighbouring hills. MacPherson took an odd, unexpected interest in my garden. He brought me contributions, rare orchids and cyclamen which my eyes had missed, brought them to me gravely, carrying them cupped in his hands with as much tenderness as a child carries a nest full of eggs. He stood by me silently watching when I put them in with my trowel in the cool of the evening. Of course we got terribly burnt up in the summer, but in the spring my garden was always merry, and, if it added to my homesickness, it also helped to palliate it.