It was not that he did not appreciate the offer of his friend. The crowd alluded to were well enough no doubt—clerks and subordinate officials who had gradually formed a sort of international coterie who met in a wing of one of the consulates. Indeed, one of them lived in a house not far from himself on the hillside at Bairakli. But he was in a mood just now which made him reluctant to mix with those highly sophisticated beings. He wanted to go home. As he steered his launch through the entrance of the tiny harbour and made straight across the Gulf towards the eastern end, he was thinking that for the first time in his life he had a home. And she had done it! With a cool indomitable will she had set about it. He knew he could never have achieved this felicity by himself. She had held out her hand for money and he had handed it over to her. If she had not watched he would not have had nearly so much, she told him, and he believed her. That was the key to his mood. He crouched in the stern of his boat and kept his eyes upon the house, a white spot against the steep brown slope of the mountain. That house, rented from a poverty-stricken Greek who had left most of the furniture, and an old woman, who had lived all her life in the village, as servant, represented for Mr. Spokesly his entire visible and comprehensible future. This was another key to his mood. It was as though he had suddenly cashed in on all his available resources of happiness, hypothecating them for the immediate and attainable yet romantic present. By some fluke of fortune he could see that he actually held within his grasp all that men toil and struggle for in this world, all that they desire in youth, all that they remember in age. But he had no certainty of the permanence of all this, and he lived in a kind of anxious ecstasy, watching Evanthia each day with eager hungry eyes, waiting with a sort of incredulous astonishment for the first shadow to cross the dark mirror of their lives.
As it must, he told himself. This could not last for ever. And sometimes he found himself trying to imagine how it would end. To-night he was preoccupied with the discovery that each day, as the end approached, he was dreading it more and more. He had tried to explain this to her as they walked in the garden under the cypresses and looked across the dark waters of the Gulf, and she had smiled and said: "Ah, yes!" She was still a mystery to him, and that was another grief, since he did not yet suspect that the mystery of a woman is simply a screen with nothing behind it. She smiled in her alluring inscrutable way and he held her desperately to him, wondering in what form the fate of their separation would appear.
And when he saw that she had not come down to the jetty to meet him, as she had done on previous nights, he instantly accepted her absence as a signal of change. Yet at the back of his mind there burned a thin bright flame of intelligence that told him the truth. Evanthia had that supreme virtue of the courageous—her dissimulation was neither clumsy nor cruel. It was as much a part of her as was her skin, her hair, her amber eyes. He knew in his heart this was so and made of it a rack on which he tortured himself with thoughts of her fidelity. Each day the difference between this experience and the shallow clap-trap intrigues he had known became more marked to him. The thought of her out there, hidden away from other men, with her delicious graces of body and lucidity of mind, for him alone, was almost too poignant for him. As he came alongside the little staging, and made fast, he returned again to the foreboding thought of the day. There would come an end. And beyond the end of this he could see nothing but darkness, nothing save an aching void.
Nevertheless, as he came up from the jetty and stood for a moment in the road which followed the curve of the shore, and listened to the sounds of the village that nestled in the valley like a few grains of light in a great bowl of darkness, he was conscious of something which he could not successfully analyze or separate from his tumultuous emotions. He put it to himself, crudely enough, when he muttered: "I shall have to take a hand." He was discovering himself in the act of submitting once more to outside authority. Looking back over his life, he saw that as his hitherto invincible habit of mind. He saw himself turning round to call the captain. And now he was the captain. And Evanthia's enigmatic gaze was perhaps the expression of her curiosity. She was above all things in the world, stimulating. He found himself invigorated to an extraordinary degree by his intimacy with that resourceful, courageous, and lovable being, who would never speak of the future, waving it away with a flick of her adorable hand and looking at him for an instant with an intent, unfathomable stare. And as he started to climb the hillside, setting the loose stones rolling in the gullies and rousing a dog to give forth a series of deep ringing notes like a distant gong, he saw that the initiative rested with himself. He would have to take a hand. It would not do for him to imagine they could remain like this in almost idyllic felicity. The ship would be unloaded in a week or so and nothing would remain but to let the water into her after-hold and sink her, according to the commandant's orders, in the fair way. But he could not let himself sink back into a slothful obscurity. He had no interior resources beyond his almost desperate passion for this girl who seemed to accept him as an inevitable yet transient factor in her destiny, a girl who conveyed to him in subtle nuances a chaotic impression of sturdy fidelity and bizarre adventurousness. That was one of the secrets of her personality—the maintenance of their relations upon a plane above the filth and languor of the flesh, yet unsupported by the conventional props of tradition and honour. For she had so just a knowledge of the functions and possibilities of love in human life that he could never presume upon the absence of those props. It amazed him beyond his available powers of expression, that in giving him herself she gave more than he had ever imagined. She had given him an enormously expanded comprehension of character, an insight into the secrets of his own heart. And it was, perhaps, this new knowledge of what he himself might do, that was impelling him to "take a hand." When he reached the gate set in the wall of the garden, he had decided to take a hand at once. He had a plan.
And it would have been a valuable experience for him, advancing him some distance in spiritual development, had he been able to see clearly and understandingly into her alert and shrewdly logical mind when he told her his plan. For she saw through it in a flash. It was romantic, it was risky, it was for himself. It might easily be for her ultimate good, yet she saw he was not thinking of that at all. And because he was romantic, because he visualized their departure as a flight into a fresh paradise, they two alone, she turned to him with one of her ineffably gracious gestures and loved him perhaps more sincerely than ever before. It was this romantic streak in the dull fabric of his personality which had attracted her, even if she had not perceived the emotional repose that same dullness afforded her. It was like being in a calm harbour at anchor compared with that other adventure, which had been a voyage through storms and whirlpools, a voyage that would inevitably end in shipwreck and stranding for her anyhow.
"I could do it," he was saying. "They don't know about it, but that boat is the fastest they've got in the harbour and, with luck, it would be easy to get away."
"To where?" she whispered, looking out into the fragrant gloom of the high-walled garden below them.
"Anywhere," he exclaimed. "Once outside, we'd be picked up. Or we could go to Phyros, and get home from there."
"Home?"
"Yes, home. England. I want you to come with me, stay with me, for good. I can't—I can't do without you. I've been thinking every day, every night. There's nobody else now."