For there was a point in that period in the white stone house on the mountain side, high above the village in the quiet valley, when Evanthia herself wondered what was going to happen. She trembled for a while upon the verge of acceptance and surrender. They would go, she submitting to his command, and take that chance together which he was for ever picturing in his mind as a rush for freedom and ultimate happiness. Almost she lost that poise of spirit which enabled her to mystify and subjugate him. Almost she succumbed to the genius and beauty of the place, to the intensity of his emotions and the romantic possibilities of the future he desired to evoke. For one brief moment, so swiftly obliterated that he was hardly aware of it before it was gone, she saw herself united to him, thinking his thoughts, breathing his hopes, facing with her own high courage the terrors of life in an unknown land, for ever. He remembered it (and so did she) for many years, that one ineffable flash of supreme happiness when their spirits joined.
They had been down the steep hillside and across the Cordelio road to the shore where there stood a blue bath house built out over the water. As they had scrambled and slid among the shingle and loose boulders, the upper reaches of the mountains touched to glowing bronze by the setting sun while they were in a kind of golden twilight, there came a call from the next house and they saw a white figure at the heavy iron gate in the garden wall. And by the time they were among the houses of the village and stared at by the shy, silent housewives who were gathered about the great stone troughs of the wash house, they were joined by Esther, Evanthia's friend. And together the three of them, with towels and bathing suits, went down to the blue bath-house as the sparse lights of the city began to sparkle across the water.
Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She traversed every one of his preconceived notions of a Jewess and of a Russian, yet she was both. She had come down from Pera with her Armenian husband, a tall, thin, dark man with a resounding and cavernous nose, who held a position in what he called the Public Debt. He had come over with her one evening and paid an extremely formal call, presenting his card, which bore the words "Public Debt" in one corner below his polysyllabic name. Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She was a vigorous, well-knit woman of thirty, with an animated good-humoured face and capable limbs. He liked her broken English, which was uttered in a hoarse sensible voice. He liked her because she was a strong advocate of his. He heard her muttering away to Evanthia in a husky undertone and he was perfectly well aware that she was taking his part and proving to Evanthia that she would be a fool if she did not stay by him. She would talk to him alone, too, and repeat what she had said.
"You take her away," she urged. "Soon as you can. Me and my 'usban', we go to Buenos Aires soon as we can. This place no good."
"I want her to," he said. "She says yes, too."
"She say yes? She say anything. She like to fool you. I know. I tell her—you stay wis your 'usban'. Englishmen good 'usban's, eh?"
"Esther, tell me something. You think, when I say, Come, she'll come with me? You think so?"
For an instant Esther's firmly modelled and sensible features assumed an expression inexplicable to the serious man watching them. For an instant she was on the verge of telling him the truth. But Esther was empirically aware of the importance of moods in the development of truth; and she said with great heartiness: "I am tellin' you, yes! She come. I make her! But how you get away from here? You gotta wait till the war finish. And where go? Germany?"
"What for?" he had demanded with tremendous astonishment.
Esther looked at him then with some curiosity. She had all the news from Constantinople, and in the light of that news it seemed incredible to her that any one should doubt the triumph of the Central Powers. There would be nowhere else to go, in her opinion, unless one fled to America.