"I think our conversation ended there. I remember we were passing up a rather narrow and smelly street where donkeys, with immense panniers of vegetables, were continually fouling each other, and then pausing with infuriating composure while their fezzed proprietors wrenched them apart. And I remember Mr. Tonderbeg insinuating himself past them in a manner perfectly decorous and suitable in a foreigner among natives, yet accompanied by an expression on his blond features which seemed to betray a regretfully low estimate of a population deficient in the ability to improve themselves and cultivate fine ideas. I say I remember this because the next time I looked at him his expression had changed. He had flushed to a dark terra-cotta, his eyes were cast down, and his mouth was curled into an extraordinary and complex sneer and grin. 'Des women!' he said, hoarsely. 'They won't let you alone. Impudent pieces!' And he stopped at a fish stall. I was going to ask him what he was talking about when I saw what had outraged his modesty. It was Pollyni Sarafov, a big basket in her hand, standing in front of a booth on the further side of the market and waving to attract my attention. I gave Mr. Tonderbeg a glance as I left him, abandoned him. He did not see me. He was still standing at the fish stall examining a number of loathsome cuttle fish who were regarding him with a fixed and terrible stare from among their many arms. I went straight over to the girl.
"Mind, I don't blame Mr. Tonderbeg very much. There was something about that girl which would give a man like him all sorts of alarming thoughts. She would not elevate him. She was the negation of respectability. Her shining bronze hair was tied up in a scarf of blue silk, her cotton dress was shockingly short, and her feet were shod with a pair of old Turkish slippers. And her basket contained a miscellaneous assortment of esoteric comestibles which would later appear in an astonishingly appetizing form at the table. She greeted me with a naïve delight, a tacit confidence that I shared her view of the situation, and had managed to meet her by some tremendous tour-de-force of romantic intuition.
"'And who's that man?' she demanded, nodding toward the respectable Tonderbeg. I looked at him. He was sidling along the booths, followed by an impassive seaman with a neatly rolled sack under his arm, and he was glancing stealthily in our direction, his features almost dark with shame.
"'That's our steward,' I told her. 'He doesn't think much of you. He thought you were giving him the glad eye, I'm afraid.'
"'Him!' she queried, and regarded him for a moment. And then she changed the subject. She wished to know if I was going up to see Artemisia. And when I hinted at the early hour, she declared that it was a good time. She would be so glad, she thought. And when she said she was ready, having bought all she needed, and that a carriage was waiting for her up the hill near the Via Egnatia, I took her basket and we moved on. And we left Mr. Tonderbeg behind, left him full of the inward rage which boils up when envy and decorum are run together in our hearts. There was nothing the matter with him, understand. I mean, there was nothing one could do for him. He was one of those bland human organisms who simply fly right off the handle when they encounter a foreign morality. It's an ethnical problem, I suppose. Why do I tell you of this Tonderbeg? Irrelevant? Well, but he wouldn't have been, if I had carried out the momentous scheme I had in mind. I thought you would have grasped that. And I sometimes wonder whether his respectable mind had not elucidated some inkling of this from a word perhaps overheard as he passed the captain's door, on the voyage home, and nursed a grievance against fate for depriving him of that piquant experience which I had had in store for him!
"And when we had climbed into the grubby little hired hack, a very different vehicle from Mr. Kinaitsky's patrician affair, and the die seemed definitely cast, I found myself recalling again and again a remark which old Jack Evans had made his own. 'A man's a damn fool to bother with a gel at all, unless he's going to marry her!' The ripe fruit of his experience in the world! I had agreed with him, too. I recalled his short, stout, unromantic figure standing in an authoritative attitude with his hand on the rail, looking across the blue glitter of the Mediterranean, seeing nothing of it, dreaming of that semi-detached affair in Threxford which contained the angel child and her desiccated mother. It is easy enough and indicative of wisdom to agree in such cases. But I would remind you that I had no such dream of the future in my head as I sat beside this foreign girl and drove along the Via Egnatia to meet Captain Macedoine's daughter once more. With more experience of the world of sentiment I might possibly have gone so far as to envisage the probable outcome of the adventure. But the point is that for all my thirty-five years, I had no such experience at all. And women are quick as lightning to perceive this. You can bring them nothing which they prize with such tender solicitude as a mature and inexperienced heart. Neither callow adolescence nor a smart worldly knowledge of their own weaknesses is any match for it. And why? Well, I imagine it is because they feel safe without losing any of the perilous glamour of love. It gives the fundamental maternal instinct in their bosoms full scope without embarrassing them with either a puling infant or a doddery prodigal. It may even play up to a rudimentary desire to be not merely the agent of an instinct but the inspiration of an individual. Cleverness in a woman is very often only the objective aspect of fidelity to an ideal.
"You may imagine I said nothing of this to the girl beside me. Instead I asked her when she was going to get married, and she said 'By and by.' When he came, not before. It was obvious that she awaited her destiny without misgiving and that she was at that stage when women really love vicariously or not at all. For she suddenly demanded if I was going to take Artemisia away to England when my ship sailed. We had turned out of the noisy Via Egnatia and were climbing a steep, narrow street leading toward the citadel, a street of an extraordinary variety of architecture, whose houses lunged out over the roadway in coloured balconies and bellying iron grilles. And the whole barbaric vista led the eye inexorably upward till it caught the culminating point of a lofty and slender minaret springing from a clump of cypresses and glittering white in the morning sun. The street itself was still in cool shadow, and at the doors, kneeling upon the fantastic little pavés of mosaic, or rubbing pieces of polished brass, were bare-footed women with picturesque dresses and formidable ankles.
"Yes, she wanted to know, but I discovered just then that a man may work himself up to a certain high resolution without feeling either proud or happy. One seems to go into great affairs in a kind of preoccupied daze. It is possible the Latin, the Celt, and the Slav have the power to visualize themselves objectively when they assume an heroic character. We are singularly deficient in this respect, I observe. No Englishman is a hero to himself. And a merciless analyst might go so far as to say that my entire behaviour was no more estimable than M. Kinaitsky's, that I had but one selfish motive, which was to protect myself from a woman's contempt. Viewed at a distance, I believe there was more in me than that. There is a radiant glow about it all, for me, which convinces that for once I had laid hold of the real thing. A magnificent memory! It is something, I submit, to cherish in one's heart even a solitary episode untarnished by any ignoble shame.
"'You shall see, my dear,' I said, enigmatically, and then the carriage stopped with a jerk and she appeared in a suddenly opened doorway, bursting out, as it were, holding herself back with her hands on the posts and devouring me with a look of extraordinary questing delight. It was as though she wished to divine the very roots of my emotions. I sat there, a tongue-tied fool, until Pollyni pushed me gently. Why didn't I get out? So I got out and stood before her.
"She was changed. I suppose I ought to have had the wit to expect that, but the fact remains that my first feeling was astonishment. She stood a foot or so above me on the doorstep, and this vantage, together with a species of gravity in her demeanour, conveyed an impression of tall aloofness. As she stood there, composed and curious, in a loose blue gown and her hair spread around her shoulders, the fine pale olive of her forearms emerging and her fingers lightly laced, one thought of vestal virgins, priestesses of obscure cults, and of the women who figure in the fantastic stories of the Middle Ages. She was changed, and the difficult element in the case was that she seemed to have changed for the better. And suddenly the old familiar derisive smile broke, the white teeth drew in the red lower lip, and she put her hand on my shoulder. 'Come in,' she said in a low voice. 'I never really believed you would come at all! And, Polly dear,' she added to the girl in the carriage, 'won't you come up later and we'll go out—you know——' and she waved her hand upward.