"I don't suppose men often tell a woman the things I told her then, but it was imperative that I should clear away the difficulties between us. I had to convince her that I was not to be humbugged by her fatal inherited proclivity for a grandiose emotional rôle, a proclivity for playing up to some mysterious imaginary being which she labelled herself and strove to erect in the mind of her protagonist. It wouldn't do. There was something numbing in the spectacle of her attempt to present herself as already a painted shadow in the purlieus of a Levantine city. In the long blue dressing gown, against a lemon-tinted stone wall, the morning sun irradiating the exquisite, exotic face, she had an adult air, so to speak, an air of lovely maturity and grave virtue. I would say she looked much more like a saint than a sinner, if I could reach any satisfactory conclusions as to the nature of a saint. I talked, as they say, straight, and the culmination of my invective was a blunt statement about her intelligence.
"'You aren't clever enough to be as bad as you try to make out,' I said, and she looked down at her hands.
"'All the same,' she remarked almost to herself, 'you are taking an awful risk in talking to me like this. How do you know I shouldn't go—go to pot altogether, later on? I'm thinking of you, you know,' she added.
"'There you go again!' I exclaimed. She put up her hand as a token of surrender, and there came into her voice that unforgettably alluring timbre which, as I told you before, evoked mysterious memories and invested her with an extraordinary quality which one might almost describe as spiritual iridescence, a glamour of sybillant charm and delicious abandon."
"And there, you know," said Mr. Spenlove in a low tone, "the story ought to finish. That's where, when I recall the whole history of Captain Macedoine's daughter, I should like it to finish—on a final note of a supreme memory of that day. I would have had it forever wrapped in the gracious radiance of romance. Which, I suppose, is more than is granted to any of us. So, though it would not do for me to break the silence in which one buries the fragrant bodies of dead moments, there is something more to tell. Of M. Nikitos, for example, and the reproaches, courteously worded, of M. Kinaitsky....
"We went for what in England we would call a picnic. Pollyni came back about ten, in a fresh carriage whose driver had celebrated a day's contract by coloured ribbons on the horses' head-stalls and a dark red rose thrust over one of his own ears, in bizarre contrast to the almost incredible dilapidation of his clothes. An old woman, whose features were shrivelled to the colour and consistency of a peeled walnut, placed between our feet a basket out of which stuck the necks of wine bottles. I didn't ask where we were going, for I didn't care. I remember, however, demanding an explanation of the heavy explosions which had begun somewhere in the neighbourhood, and their telling me it was a blasting party in a quarry just behind the houses and outside the city wall. And I recall another incident, when we reached the barrier at the Great Tower, where a squad of fezzed and moustached guards debated among themselves the wisdom of permitting us to pass out. Very serious, not to say uneasy, they seemed, the heavy explosions causing them to look over their shoulders apprehensively even while they held their bayonets, long, sharp, unpleasant affairs, across the breasts of the horses. But finally they let us go, and after a half hour or so of the boulevards we came to a road leading across the plain to a town a few miles away. That is a memory, too—the wide plain of pale saffron earth, the dancing blue sea, the turquoise sky piled here and there with immense snowy billowings of autumn clouds, the girdle of grim and inaccessible peaks, and the compact little town of white houses buried in a circular plaque of foliage in the middle distance. And then at the roadside, squatting on their haunches with their rifles between their knees, very dusty and enigmatic, lines of soldiers on the march. I remember it as one remembers an unusual dream, a vague blur behind the sharper memories that intervene.
"And out of the mists of impressions came the fact that we were going to this toy town in the middle distance to visit Pollyni's uncle, a gentleman who had been to America also, and having dug trenches for drains and conduits in New York City for a year or two, had returned and bought the principal café in the village. There was a moment when the place lost the qualities of a water-colour painting and began to assume the aspects of reality, when the homogeneous colouring of the land became broken up into tobacco fields and vineyards and vegetable patches, with an occasional pony walking round a mediæval contraption which brought minute buckets of water up from a well and trickled them into a wooden sluice. And these in turn gave place to a sketchy and winding earthen road which twisted among shabby houses with forlorn sheds in which tobacco leaves hung drying on poles, and fowls pecked in a disillusioned fashion while they meditated upon the formidable problem of existence. And then we passed houses standing aloof and forbidding, shut up, apparently uninhabited, houses which had quite simply tumbled down for lack of support, houses with the front door upstairs, and houses without any doors at all as far as one could see. We passed them and our driver cracked his whip with great energy, the horses stumbled against big stones or into rain gullies, an occasional human stared woodenly at us; and suddenly we came round an intricate curve of the street and we were in the little square of the village, a square canopied by an immense tree and overhanging eaves. In the centre stood a worn old well-curb where bare-legged girls fished up dripping petroleum cans and staggered across to open doors, most of the water running unregarded through a hole in the bottom. If you could call it a square, when it had six or seven irregular sides, with the streets running into it in a furtively tangential fashion and the corners of it cool and dark even at noon-tide under that patriarchal tree which had been planted by a patriarch, no doubt, while he was digging the well. This was the end of our journey, where we got out, and the carriage rumbled away into the green gloom beyond to some convenient stable, while we were welcomed by a gentleman with a soft voice and very loud western clothing like that affected by race-track folk, who stood in front of an extremely vacant looking café. He had a watch-chain with massive gold links and an enormous obsolete gold coin depending from his coat lapel. His boots were shiny and globular of toe, and I gathered, as the day wore on, that he represented Occidental Prosperity in that simple community and was charitably excused from such glaring solecisms on that ground. They found no fault with him for having an adventurous spirit which had carried him to the Country of the Mad beyond the sea, for he had shown his ultimate wisdom by coming back to live in a civilized part of the world. In fact, by the way they drifted in during the afternoon and sat at adjacent tables while he held forth bilingually upon his experiences in a Hoboken sewer, it was evident that in addition to being a stout burgess of the township, he was a species of Sinbad to them, with preposterous but intriguing stories of subterranean cities where vast and brilliant chariots roared through interminable passages; of heaven-scaling towers where myriads fought for silks and jewels, for gold and silver, for purple and fine linen; of streets above which insane railway trains hurtled and shrieked and groaned as they carried the demented inhabitants on endless journeys to nowhere in particular for no ascertainable reasons. For mind you, they displayed no desire whatever to emulate the daring feats of those who had gone to America. They sat there for a time, smoking narghilehs or cigarettes, looking thoughtfully at the floor between their outlandish shoes, and then drifted away to attend, it is to be presumed, to various affairs. I doubt whether my confirmation of these improbabilities was of much avail in convincing them that he was not simply exercising the ancient rights of the teller of tales, and striving to terrify them with stories of genii in bottles and carpets that flew through the air. And he certainly had no intention of going back. He had 'enough mon' now,' he remarked, 'and who but a lunatic would ever venture into such a pandemonium save for the purpose of getting 'mon'.' The bare idea of living permanently in that country and exposing one's soul to the destructive action of their peculiar political ideas had never entered his head. They had called him 'a crazy mutt' because, forsooth, he had quit when his belt was sufficiently loaded with 'mon'. Now why should they do that? Why should he go on living in hell when he had the price of paradise strapped about his middle? It was a baffling problem. Yet they did it. Even now, as he spoke, out there across the world, millions of people on an island the size of Ipsilon or even smaller than Naxos, were rushing to and fro like maniacs. For of course he was under the impression that Manhattan, with the adjacent coast beyond the river, was all there was of America. For all he knew the subway ran to San Francisco and New Orleans was a mile or two below Staten Island. Listening to him, it was perfectly easy to visualize the growth of ancient tales of foreign parts. When I think of him nowadays, and observe the noise and chaffering of political people who are vociferously claiming for such as he what they call self-determination or what in those illiterate days was known as autonomy, I am constrained to a great amazement. We shall see some strange signs and portents later, if I am not in error.
"For if there is one thing more than another which one gets from this old land, it is the conviction that it will not cease to be old because a few zealots march round it blowing the trumpets of a new and incomprehensible thing called Liberty. It is an amiable but disastrous illusion on the part of the western nations that they have created a monopoly in freedom and truth and the right conduct of life. As I have adumbrated to you more than once, I am not so sure of all this. The hoarse, guttural voice of Grünbaum, whom the high priests of Liberty set against a wall the other day and shot dead, comes back to me across the years. 'An illusion, founded on a misconception.' Well, I wouldn't call that an entirely true definition of democracy as we in the west understand it. But if you took this late resident of Hoboken, now safely restored to his traditional environment, I should certainly say that your wonderful democracy was of no more use to him than some fabulously expensive and delicate scientific instrument, or the Bodleian Library at Oxford, or the Elgin marbles would be. The trouble is, you see, that so many of us in the world, inarticulate for the most part, don't want your progress, your tremendous journeys through the air, your new religions, or your improved breakfast foods. And we could endure even such a war as is going on now, if we only had peace in our hearts. For peace is not a merely negative thing, the absence of strife. It is something in itself, something you could definitely discern in the atmosphere of that forgotten village of the plain, under that patriarchal tree, audible in the clucking of the fowls under one's feet, and in the gurgle of the water the girls hauled up from the dank darkness of the old well. I recall one moment, after our meal in the late afternoon, as we sat on the little balcony above the café, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and mastic. A drowsy stillness had come over the place, as though it had been secretly enchanted. Over the way an old gentleman reposed in a chair outside his shop, asleep, a yellow cat in his arms. On the curb of the well a young girl sat swinging one leg as she peered down thoughtfully into the water. A pigeon cooed in the cot under the eaves near by. There was a low murmur of conversation from a neighbouring room where Pollyni was talking to her aunt, a large shy person, preoccupied with household cares. And gradually I seemed to lose my grip of reality altogether and passed into a kind of passionless ecstasy of existence, where everything which puzzles us in ordinary life presented a perfectly simple and amiable solution. One of the commonplaces of enchantment, I suppose. I became aware of Artemisia saying dreamily: 'That was a loud one. I shouldn't have thought we could hear them over here.' And I nodded, remembering a distant and heavy detonation. It was slowly dawning on my mind as I sat and smoked and murmured, that it was really quite impossible for the quarry-charges to be heard so far. 'But what could it be?' she asked, rousing. 'A gun perhaps. Sometimes ships come from the Bosphorus and fired shots in the Gulf. A long way off, of course. Perhaps a ship had come.' I told her what her father had said the night before, that a war might come soon. She nodded and was silent a moment before saying: 'I've heard that. Mrs. Sarafov said it might and she was sorry because nobody was ever any better off. They fight because the taxes are so heavy, and after the war the taxes are worse than ever, to pay for the war. She told me how the soldiers came home to Sofia after winning a war with the next country—I forget which—and there was a grand triumphal march through the streets, and then the soldiers discovered there was nothing for them to eat and they broke loose. Everybody locked themselves up in their houses while the shooting went on in the streets.'
"'I believe,' I said, 'your father stands to make a lot of money out of this trouble when it comes.'